A full house, Pennies in the pool

We had a full house the other day. Fortunately for Mama I was off. There were seven kids in the house to be watched plus our son and a friend he had over. It was busy. I think the hardest part was coordinating nap times, so I ended staying with baby Victoria while Mama and the others went to the pool. It worked for me. I don’t need that much pool time. Besides I needed to catch up on my reading and other studies.
After naptime and before the earlier pickups, we had a second time at the pool. This time I got to go. Since we take plenty of toys, tubes and dive rings to the pool there is always something for everyone to play with. But like we see every Christmas, the containers the toys come in are the most entertaining of the items for play. A good portion of our toys are carried in a bucket and that became the item of focus for the youngest member of our crew, an almost two-year-old, with his swim trunks tightly fitted over his special swim diaper. Of course to play with the bucket, all the contents had to be dumped into the kiddy pool from where there were scavenged by other participants and strewn around the pool.
He was having a ball transporting water from one section of the pool to another across a set of dividers that provide a walkway between the deeper part of the pool and the very shallow part where we were trying to contain him. His older brother was wearing a swim vest and kept running from the shallow part to the deeper part, but on one return trip to the shallows he screamed, “Mama Kim, poop in the pool!”
My wife jumped from where she was and hurried to see what he was seeing, already nauseated at the idea of the cleanup that would be needed. She almost fell over laughing as soon as she got there. “Papa Tim, you have to come see this!” It turned out that part of the contents of the bucket was a collection of pennies that we use for Jake and others to dive after when we toss them in the pool. These pennies just happened to fall in a shape in the shallow water that looked to the three-year-old like poop.
As we laughed and picked them up, he cringed at the process still not believing we knew what we were doing.
Life is rough for Chase. After returning from a month in Costa Rica, he and his friend set up the X-box in the theater room at the apartment complex. Playing Halo on an eight foot screen – now that’s tough.