May Showers

Daddy Shortbread and I were clumsily fitting together the metal framework of our above-ground pool, when the girls appeared hopefully in bathing suits.

"There is NO WAY you'll be swimming today," I told them, "We're nowhere near finished, and don't you remember that the pool takes twelve hours to fill?" I didn't bother mentioning that the pool water is about the same temperature as a barely-melted glacier when we first fill it. It takes a week or two of sitting under the solar cover to warm up despite Bug trying to convince me on a daily basis that "it's pretty warm now" when the thermometer clearly says 50 degrees Farenheit.

Undaunted, they decided to squirt each other with the hose, while Daddy Shortbread and I tried to locate all the twiddly little bolts and fasteners that we'd no doubt stored in a Very Safe Place at the end of last summer. So safe, in fact, that he wound up trekking to the hardware store to purchase new ones.

I sat on the porch with a Diet Vanilla Pepsi and watched the girls soak each other, running and squealing.

Then it began to do this:

I was enjoying the cool drops on my bare legs, when the swim-suited, already soaking girls came running across the yard, squealing, "It's raining! It's raining!" You know, to stand under the porch awning. So they wouldn't get wet.

"You get that you were just spraying each other with the hose, right? And that rain...you might want to sit down for this...is also water?" I asked them. They had clearly not considered this. It put a different spin on things.

Bear plopped herself onto the glider to enjoy the drops, still inexplicably wrapped in a towel.

Bug, never one to be outdone, carefully swaddled herself in both a towel AND a picnic cloth before sitting out in the rain.

Logic doesn't always enter into the equation with these two. But they do have fun. Our Pond in a Pot seemed to enjoy the rain, too. We've added water hyacinth, some duckweed, and glazed ceramic floaters. We're still waiting on the nighttime temperatures before we add goldfish. I've already decided that we (*cough* Daddy Shortbread *cough*) should dig a real pond next year. I think I'll wait until the memory of setting up the pool has faded before I mention this to Daddy Shortbread.