What a Day!

Okay so we all remember the wonderful photos and moments from Saturday. Lazing the day away in our brand spankin new NEON orange baby pool, that William bought. Oh those were the days, right? Well here is THAT pool today.
If you look closely you can see that my three ring pool is really a two ring pool. The top ring busted after only two, count them, two uses! Yep. I was sorely dissapointed in it.

So what is any good mommy to do? Go buy another, sturdier, Bigger, better, pool right? Right! This time I went ahead and spent a little more money on a pool that we all could fit in and that looked like it would hold up for more than two uses. In fact, my mom once had a pool exactly like this in her backyard that lasted us an entire summer.

Okay, so here is why I am just now posting for the day and it is 7:19pm. I spent the entire, THE ENTIRE, day putting this pool together. When I got home from Walmart I handed the quite heavy box to William and instructed him to go blow the thing up with his air compressy thing. My plan was to have him blow it up and then after he left for work at 11am I could fill it up with water and it would bake in the hot sun all day. Then the water would be the perfect temperature for two babies and one mommy this afternoon.

Well after like two minutes William comes back inside and says the compressor thingy won't fit the holes on the side of the pool and he had to get ready for work and I would have to just wait till tomorrow when I could go back to Walmart and buy an air pump for it, unless I wanted to try to blow the thing up by mouth? He was in a less than friendly mood because he was running behind in getting ready for work and it was really hot outside. I got the quick impression that he just wasn't really in the mood to help me with my BIG dilema for the day!

So after I helped him finish getting ready for work and kissed him goodbye, I put the girls down for their morning nap and headed outside to survey the damage. The first thing I noticed was that their were four holes! Two large ones about the size of cap on a coke bottle and two small normal ones with the plug thingy, you know just like the regular things you blow something up with. So I brought out his air compressor. Hooked it up to the extention cord and sat on the ground ready to figure this all out. The sun was beating down hard. It was hot and my eyes felt like they were cooking. The whole pool was layed out neatly (I had done that before he left for work) I found three coke bottle looking caps and figured that those must be needed to plug the big holes to use the little holes. I figured William hadn't see the little holes because they were sort of hiding. This must be why he said our compressor wouldn't work, right? SO, I put the caps on the big holes, there were three caps, one for a spare I guessed? I put the compressor valve in the first little hole, plugged the second hole and went inside.

I checked on the thing off an on for the next THREE hours and it still wasn't blowing up correctly. So I sat back down in the grass and pulled apart the layers to see what was going on. When I did this I saw a third coke bottle hole and third small hole. Duh! No wonder the thing wouldn't blow up. It was leaking all the air I was putting in out of the third big whole. Maybe by now in my LONG story I have lost you. Here is a picture I took after I finally got it blown up. You can see the six holes here:

So I after I plugged this hole, I went back inside and waited a while longer. Brigitta and her sister Linnea showed up to visit the girls and I went back outside to see what was up with the pool. Mind you it was now 3pm. I went out the back door and there sat my uninflated huge swimming pool. The compressor was humming and pumping but it made no difference, for whatever reason the stupid thing was NOT blowing it up. I guess William had been right after all and this pool was going to require a different kind of air pump. WHY hadn't I just listened to him to begin with? I asked Brigitta if she would watch the girls for a little while while I ran to my mom's house to borrow her air pump that she uses when camping. She said sure, so off I went.

When I got back, I plugged up my mom's pump and stuck it in the hole and viola the whole stupid pool puffed up with air in like two minutes flat. The WHOLE POOL WAS INFLATED IN TWO MINUTES WITH MY MOM'S PUMP! TWO MINUTES! TWO! I had spent FOUR hours trying to do it with William's pump and it took TWO MINUTES with her pump! I was kicking myself for not having gone over there to get it to begin with.

Okay so this is only HALF of my story. Time is 330pm. If you will remember I wanted to put water in the pool in the morning so that the water could heat up over the course of the day. Yesterday Maddy and I got in the orange pool and she turned blue because the water was freezing from the spicket. Now it was 3:30pm and the sun had already gone over the spot of the pool and the shade had set in. Being that we had spent so much time working on this stupid pool AND that I was wringing wet from being outside in the heat I was determined that Maddy and Morgan and I would get in the pool THIS afternoon. Since I couldn't count on the sun to warm the water I had to improvise.

I called William at work and asked him how to syphon warm water from the tub to the pool out back. He said it would be easier to use the kitchen sink and go out the back door and down into the pool. I being clever like I am didn't listen to the part about going out the back door. So instead we stuck one end of the hose in the kitchen sink and the other out the kitchen window and into the pool. Brigitta and Linnea helped me. Brigitta went outside to suck on the end of the hose and Linnea stayed at the sink holding the hose under. We tried and we tried and no matter what we really did, nothing worked long enough to fill up the pool. I called William back after about an hour of trying dilligently to get the water from sink to pool. His first question was "Do you have it going out the back door?" "No" I said "it's going out the window" "You have to use gravity to syphon water Mandy" he said "OH" I said. I informed the girls in our change of plans. We switched the hose around and ran it out the back door and voila it worked! The water started running from sink to pool ... ever so slowly.


Let's just say that TODAY was an adventure. I learned a valuable lesson: Sometimes William is smarter than me and I should listen to him. Sometimes it is okay to not be so stubborn and try to do everything MY way! By the time we got the water in the pool to a usable level, the wind was blowing and it was just too cold to get in the pool and play. I wasn't hot anymore but I was extremely tired from the whole ordeal. What a waste of time. I could have just filled the pool up with the hose the regular way, waited till tomorrow for the sun to heat up the water and avoided all that extra work.

Oh well, we had fun laughing at Brigitta's blue lips from sucking on the end of the hose. We had fun laughing at ourselves trying to figure it all out. In the end it all worked out just fine, but lets just say that if this pool busts tomorrow the girls will NOT be getting a new pool anytime soon :)

Here is a picture of our new oasis! Lovely isn't it? Can't wait to get in it ... tomorrow :)