"Kids, we use napkins to clean up messes. Not our toes."
And thus the morning passed.
I had 4, and then Julian popped by and dropped off Alley (who turned 5 today, Happy birthday to her). Then Julian popped back out and said he had to paint! (they're selling and getting ready for an open house tomorrow).
So. 5 kids, a pool. One adult.
Cloudy and cool? What a great day to plan to have the kids outside in the cool new inflatable pool with a slide.
Thankfully, I had no concerns about sunburn. I slathered on the sunscreen in vain hope... but nothing beats a day that won't get over 73 degrees and stays overcast.
I made 20 trips from the basement bathroom faucet with buckets of *hot* water for the pools. I shouldn't have bothered. The kids were still freezing.
So I had an idea. A bad one. Knew it at the time... Oh, well.
I should say, the biggest problem was simply that I had about 6-10 seconds each trip inside to get something, because Liam and the kids were in a pool and I didn't want to leave them.
Back to the idea. I grabbed the hose, darted inside, scraped my way through the storage room and hooked it to the hot water heater's bottom drain. Cool idea! Errr, Hot!
The hot water started flowing, but it didn't last long. Short hot water heater lesson for everyone. Cold water comes in the top, then travels down the dip tube to the bottom. This keeps cold at bottom, hot on top, so the hot goes out the *other* top pipe to the house. Warm. Yay!
But... cold water at the bottom, means, well, cool water coming out the drain. Great. Next idea... turn off the cold water refill.... oops, now I have a hot water gas burner roaring but no water refilling. That sounds dangerous.
Kids freezing, kids freezing... Kids snacking... Kids freezing, kids freezing...
Okay, fine, turn off the cold water inlet, let the tank gravity drain, and turn the burner down to "idle" so it wouldn't go on.
Perfect!... Until one of the kids started taking the hose and squirting Liam with it. Hot water... DOH!!!
Finally, there was a warm pool, happy children, and during all of this we managed to make some ice cream outside by rolling a special ice cream ball around the yard, followed by more play time. And phew....
Lunchtime! Hot dogs, chips, juice, yelling, screaming.
How am I writing this, then? Liam went down for a nap--got cranky after the (I must say) delicious homemade ice cream--and the other 4 are yelling their lungs out downstairs and pretending to eat lunch.
Oh! Hamburger's done, see all y'all later!
p.s. Wow. Pan-fried hamburger and stale bun. Really shit.
Posted by BilFish at August 18, 2006 11:58 AM