Just add water!

I love summer! It's so hot, but I love playing outside and getting all sweaty and dirty, playing with water, splashing in the pool, and all of that good stuff.  Another thing I love about summer is that when the kids are going crazy inside, we can just go outside and they'll entertain themselves with the hose for an hour without (usually) fighting. ;-)  

Here are some pictures of Oliver and Buttercup playing outside last night with their makeshift water slide. :-) 

Water . . . er, mud table

Last week, the sweet baby boy had his second ear infection (9 days after the first one!). This time, his ear was so infected that it was draining out of his eye. :-( When he woke up on Friday morning, his eye was so swollen that he could barely open it, poor baby. But he was still mostly happy (although he didn't want to be too far away from his mommy!).

By the afternoon, he was feeling a little bit better, and his eye wasn't nearly as swollen. He was the happiest outside, so I pushed him in the swing for a long time, and since it was a warm afternoon, I set up the water table for the big kids to play.

After a while, Theodore wanted to get down (but putting him down on the grass leads to him eating grass, which leads to me fishing grass out of his mouth, which leads to baby tantrums), so he and I went in the sunroom to play while the older ones stayed at the water table.

Then I heard lots of whooping and (happy) yelling coming from the back yard, and I looked out to find that this:

. . . had turned into this:

Ha ha. Why do they always make mud? Never mind, I know. Because mud is fun. :-)

Not quite what I had in mind

Last week, I bought this slide/pool combo for the kids:


It's pretty neat. You attach the hose to the slide part, and water sprays on the slide to make it easier to slide down, and then you splash into the water!

Sounds like the kids would want to spend hours playing with it, right? Or, one hour, at least.

Well, no.

They played on it for maybe 25 minutes, then spent the rest of their outside time scooping water out of the pool reservoir and mixing it with dirt and rocks.

Buttercup made mud pies:


While Oliver smeared mud all over the patio:


and himself:


Oh well. Maybe we'll try it again tomorrow. :-)