Several times in the past few weeks, feeling nostalgic, I attempted to lay down on the futon with Kate in my arms. We used to sleep on said futon mattress, and it is still located in her room, directly beside her bed. But she would have none of it. Even tired and sleepy from nursing, content with her paci in her mouth, she still immediately flips over and pushes to her knees and then her feet, rushing off in a very toddler excitement, not really sure what she is doing or why. So frustrating. That’s why I finally had to move her to her crib, this inability to lay still and settle. I don’t really know when it happened, sometime between 8 months and 11 months. I remember (too vividly) when it just became too much for me, when she would attempt to crawl on top of me for an hour straight in the middle of the night, me struggling to remain calm and patient, repeatedly laying her back down, and then sobbing with frustration. Now I just put her in her crib. With no alternatives she lays down and goes to sleep without much fuss. In fact there are days when she’s fidgeting around in her crib for half an hour or more, babbling quietly and peeking over the side of the crib, when I realize that my presence is hindering not helping. I leave the room and she cries for a minute or two and then falls soundly asleep. (I discovered that by accident, when I had to take a break from her room for my own mental health after she toddled laps around her crib and alternated giggling while throwing her pacis out of the crib and then bawling when she realized she no longer had any pacis. I got up and left, frazzled as all hell, and she astounded me by falling asleep only minutes later.)

In a way it’s kind of ideal. It wasn’t easy by any means, but she transitioned from our bed to her room to her crib on her own time, when it was clear that she needed to. It just happened – not by itself, it still took time and effort to make the adjustment, but it was certainly easier than I expected it to be.

But. I still miss her terribly. Not quite as terribly as I did at first – her transition to the crib was much harder on me than it was on her – but still it aches. I enjoy having my own space in bed, being able to roll over and rustle without worrying about waking her up, and being able to read at leisure in bed (or type, as I am doing presently). What bothers me most, though, is that it seems to have been an all-or-nothing deal. When she was in our bed she needed me next to her at all times, and she needed to nurse all night long. Now that she’s in her crib she needs her space to flop around and grab her pacis and put herself to sleep. I can’t have a little of both. It makes sense logically: once you get used to going to sleep a certain way you rather like to do it the same way all the time. But there are days when I just want to hold her. I want to press my lips against her forehead and curl my body around hers the way I did when she was little, when she clutched me at night like a large mama security-blanket. It was tough being there 24/7, but it was so very special to me.

It’s true, what they say – as a parent you spend so much time wishing for things to move forward, then when they do you wish you hadn’t been so hasty. I wanted so much for her to sleep better at night, and yes I am absolutely thrilled that she is indeed sleeping better. But I think what I really wanted is more just the reassurance that some day she would sleep better. I remember feeling so panicked that she would be like that forever, waking up every 2 hours for the next 3 years. I worried that it was unfixable, a permanent problem. I worried that I had done something terribly wrong. Now? Now I look back and realize I didn’t. I did what was best for her and for me, and it worked out just fine. Hindsight, right?

I take solace in the thought that we will hopefully have another little one in the future. That’s what keeps me from hyperventilating when I realize Kate is growing up so darn fast. It’s not that I don’t enjoy who she is now – I do, in so many ways – I just wish I could have all of it at will: the newborn snuggles and little baby coos along with the funny, active toddler I have now. I need a little time machine so I can zip around at will to my favorite moments, reliving them over and over. I suppose that’s what journaling is supposed to do… but it’s not quite the same as experiencing it, needless to say.

Lessons learned from our (Kate’s and my) first trip to the beach:

* Bring an interesting toy to give to the child in case they should happen to wake up before we get there and be Unhappy.

* I need a new bathing suit that actually fits.

* Put sunscreen on your friend’s back without being asked. Otherwise they will think they got it and will come home with a sunburn.

* Swim diapers do not hold in pee. Do not put swim diapers on your child unless they are actually going swimming. Or you will get peed on.

* Those little beach chairs rock! Much nicer than laying on a sandy towel (especially for someone like me who doesn’t “do” sunbathing).

* So do beach umbrellas. This white chick needs shade.

* Freezing water bottles makes a great ice pack. Unfortunately said ice pack did not actually melt enough to drink while at the beach. Perhaps less freezing.

* Bringing a bunch of fruit for Kate was a good idea, she needs lunch or she gets cranky.

* Sand gets everywhere… especially when the sand-covered child who usually likes to run off and explore suddenly decides that she wants to crawl all over mom. Baby powder, however, gets it right off. Neat trick!!

I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, but I’ve been living here in MA for 6 years and I had never once gone to the beach with the intention of going and hanging out on the beach. Once we took my parents there to walk around and eat seafood, but that was it. And on my honeymoon in Myrtle Beach Den and I did attempt the beach, but it was July in South Carolina and I am Canadian – I walked out onto the beach and said, “Oh hell no,” and spend the rest of my honeymoon in the shade by the pool. Honestly beaches kind of scare me, mostly because of the “burned to a crisp” aspect. Then there’s the sand, the people, the cold water.

It went surprisingly well. Kate did seem to enjoy the sand, though not as much as I would have thought she would – though that may be because I wouldn’t let her to do the fun things, like eat the driftwood and rocks. We had some pails and shovels and she seemed to like that. She had the most fun, I think, climbing onto and off of my darn chair. We went all the way to the beach so she could play with a chair?

I did walk Kate over to where the waves were breaking, and she watched them suspiciously, nervously. Then one little wave crept up to her feet. She fell backwards, landing on her bum, then threw her hands in the air and cried. And cried. I stood her back up, and she still cried, shaking her arms for emphasis. So, does not like ocean waves. It was pretty cold – I certainly wasn’t going to go swimming.

It was a good day, for sure, a good outing with the toddler, but not exactly relaxing either. It’s not like I could read, as I had to make sure Kate wasn’t trying to eat something or walk onto someone else’s blanket. You can occupy them for only so long with their cool toys, next time you glance over she’s taking off again. Thankfully the sand slowed her down considerably! She actually didn’t walk around much for the first hour, but unfortunately for me she figured out how to walk on the sand by the end of the day.

I put SPF 50 on both of us – I did it once before we left the house, more on her when we arrived at the beach, and then put more on both of us halfway through. She looks fine, I’m a little pink. She definitely got some of her daddy’s skin tone – there is some Native blood in him, he tends to tan nicely. Unlike me, who wavers between Ghost and Lobster.

A good friend of mine had a baby last week and it has stirred up in me all kinds of emotions. Shockingly, mostly good ones. Mainly am I excited to someday do it again: not just have a baby, but to give birth again. Almost everyone looks at me oddly when I say that, because it’s apparently not a very common sentiment of women who have given birth before. But I am weird and not only do I love being pregnant (throwing up notwithstanding), I love labor and I love birth.

I have thought a lot about pursuing it further, to become a birth doula. It’s something I’m pretty certain I would love doing, something that would give me an emotional high, be fulfilling. It is not, however, something that will make a lot of money, nor is it at all practical with a small child. That’s the part that’s holding me back right now. Den has a very secure, predictable day job. We don’t have any relatives nearby who are available during the day – everyone works. If a birth happened during the day – which they would, given how spontaneous these things occur – then Den would have to call in to work and stay home with Kate. Which may possibly work a few times, but seems kind of counter-productive to me. And stressful. I am thinking that the joy of attending births would be significantly diminished by the stress I experience trying desperately to get someone to watch Kate.

So, as before, it’s an idea I shelve for now. “Maybe later” – later, after the kids are in school, after they are self-sufficient. But then I will probably (hopefully) have a job of some sort… or be in college in order to get said job. (As I said before, being a doula just is never going to pay much.) Maybe I’ll find another way to be involved in birth somehow.

::

My mom was visiting us for two weeks, she just left. My mom and I have never been super close, but we have been getting along great ever since I moved out. It took a while for me to understand – we are just very different people. She is a great person, warm and giving and gets along with everyone. She is always there to help a friend or family member in need. We just clash personality-wise when we live in each others space. It was a good thing when I moved out.

Watching her with Kate, however, really made me think too much of what could have been. Kate loved her, and of course my mom reveled in the attention of her granddaughter. There was something so wonderful about watching them together. And of course it was so much easier on me. Needed to run to the store while Kate was napping? No problem! Needed Kate distracted while I cooked dinner? No problem! Needed a babysitter so Den and I could attend a work event? No problem!

It has left me very homesick – though not exactly missing home itself. I miss my family. I see my SIL’s relationship with her parents, how much they lend a hand with the kids, and I think about bow it could be if my family were close. What a different life it could be. That doula thing? I could do that if my mom were here. Not only is she willing to babysit on short-notice, but she thinks the idea of being a labor coach is wonderful.

I find myself really mourning. And the thing is, there is no way to change it. The area that my parents live, so close to Vancouver, is absolutely not affordable – not to mention the fact that my husband, the sole money-maker, works for the Military. It’s not like he can transfer to Canada. We love this area, we have his family here (but they are not available the way my family would be – they all work). I love just about everything else about living here. I just wish my family were a few streets over, not a 7 hour flight.

Kate, though she is still working on those two new teeth, is still sleeping through the night. Which is exciting, other than the fact that with this new-found sleep also comes a new-found morning wake time: 6am. I am, as you can guess, not thrilled about this. In fact I am trying to figure out how to go back to waking once or twice at night if it means she’ll sleep until 8:30 again. But I’m willing to bet that since she is no longer dependent on me getting her to sleep she is starting to take her cues from elsewhere… like the sun. She has room blackout shades, which are taped down with masking tape, but light still filters around them. I am going to be getting drapes or something to hang in front of them, to see if that helps. I suspect it won’t work, though.

On the good side of things when she does get up so early she’s awake and happy and playing for about an hour before some power switch in her flicks and she crumples in whines and back to bed we go – both of us. Until around 9:30. It occurs to me now that this is why she was on only 1 nap a day so young – she has been combining night sleep with a morning nap for a long time (typically sleeping around 13 hours at night, all told). Now it’s split up, amounting to roughly the same.

Maybe next week she’ll start sleeping longer again, who knows.

We are having one of those days here… the kind where everything is just a big friggin disaster. So far today I have had the toilet lid smacked into me (while I was peeing); the cat fell on me and scratched my arm all up (while I was peeing! Apparently peeing is dangerous in this house?) – it stung all day, too; my finger was bit (by the baby – not too hard, but enough for me to say, “Ow! What the heck?!”); Kate has been whining and crying, “Mamamama” all day, no matter what I do; Kate also has a diaper rash that just won’t go away; and I got my period and have bitching cramps. Oh, and Den is working all weekend! The biting, whining, and diaper rash are due to teething. The cat, however, is just an asshole. An asshole who has no friggin’ balance and sharp claws.

I’ve been trying to let Kate go diaper-less to try to let her poor diaper rash dry out a bit, but that is biting me in the ass. I figured she’d pee somewhere, but at least she’d already pooped twice this morning. I hear sprinkling sounds and I look over to see that she had just pulled my phone off the end table and then let loose. Yes. My child peed on my phone What the hell? (I think it’s fine, she didn’t pee directly on it at least…. just a lot of splashing.) After I got her cleaned up from that she nurses and then pees on the carpet. Got that cleaned up and I hear a grunt, look over and she’s pooping on the floor. On the hardwood, thank the light. Back into the shower she goes. A few minutes later I spy poop on the carpet. How is this ever going to dry out if she keeps having to get washed down? No wonder she’s rashy. Diaper goes back on.

I just went to grab one of her toys off the floor of the bathroom and put my hand in another pile of poo. How many times did she go in a short span of diaperless-ness?!?!? That’s it, I’m going to bed.

I got it on video! Took me a few tries, but I finally caught her. She just started doing this a couple days ago, bouncing to music. Previously she’d do it holding on to furniture or a large toy, but this time she was in the middle of the room doing some kind of primitive toddler hop and twirl. Tee hee! I love it.

Kate has started dancing. Previously she would “dance” while sitting by twisting her upper body left and right. It was cute, and very understated. The other day Den called me over while trying to stifle laughter and we watched her pressing a button on one of her toys to get a song going (ironically it sung “Up and down!”) and then she started doing squats to the music, bobbing up and down with her whole body. I am trying to get it on video, but she keeps running over to me as soon as she sees the video camera. It was absolutely hysterical!

She still likes to climb into the lower corner cupboard, which has remained mostly empty due to her habit of pulling things off the shelves in the back and chucking them on the floor. I had stored baby food in there, which I let her pull down, but the baby food is now mostly gone and the cupboard holds only some unused bottles and cat food dishes. But yet she still likes to pull open the door and climb in, peering deep into the dark corner shelves and playing with the bottles. Yesterday she was under there as I was putting together a smoothie for myself. The blender sits on the counter directly above that cupboard, and I wasn’t sure how she was going to react. So I turned it on and stepped back to watch her. She stopped what she was doing and looked upward curiously. Then she opened her mouth and, “AHHHHHHHHHH!” She was singing along with the blender!

Yesterday evening she was tired and needed some extra cuddles, so I sat on the living room floor with her. She was playing with her toys but kept walking over to me and crawling onto my lap, turning to sit with her back against my chest. Sometimes she would lay across my lap, stretched out like a sunbathing cat, making noise to entice me to give her tickles and kisses. I am thankful she is still a cuddly baby! (Even if she’s not really a baby anymore.)

We ate dinner at a restaurant, my mom, Kate and I. I had a sippy cup of milk for Kate, which sure is convenient in places like a restaurant when I’m trying to eat something too. Kate was feeling a bit tired and thus kind of clingy, but she went into the highchair without much fuss and accepted my offering of cheese and bread. When my dinner came I added to her tray steamed zucchini and carrots. She looked like such a big girl sitting there eating food, then reaching up to snag her sippy cup off the table for a swig of milk when she wanted some. And then of course the requisite leaning over the side of her chair to look over the low wall separating us from other dining patrons, so she could flash her smile at everyone.

I got her a wooden snail pull-along toy, which is very cute and she seemed to take to right away. During the exploring the toy phase when she sat down and looked it over I watched her pick up the attached string, drape it carefully over the snail, and pat it with her fingers as if tucking it in. Yeah, this child is all girl.

::

In other news, last night Kate slept 10 hours. No, not total…. 10 hours straight. I put her to bed shortly after 8pm, and she woke up at 6am. That is unbelievably fantastic.

She’s been waking only once at night for a few days now, doing 6-8 hour stretches, but this was a new record! I think it’s all due to a few things that have happened, the night-weaning being the first step. Also she’s been putting herself to sleep for naps and bedtime sometimes – not consistently, but frequently enough. I try to put her down and if she’s still running around her crib when she is clearly tired then I get up and leave. She’ll protest-cry for 2 minutes or so, not get hysterical or anything, and then she’ll whimper a bit and lay down and fall asleep. If she continues to cry I go back in and try again. I’ve found that sometimes my presence is just encouraging her to play in her crib rather than sleep. But then other days she really does need me and will get absolutely hysterical if I leave. Den still rocks her to sleep and puts her down completely asleep. When she wakes up in the middle of the night I learned to wait a few minutes to see if she’ll go back to sleep. Sometimes she will, sometimes she won’t.

I know when the next set of teeth come in her sleep will get all screwed up again and things will change and change again. But mostly I’m just relieved to know that she can learn to sleep. After all those months wondering and worrying, of having people tell us that we have to do X or she’ll never learn – that we can’t keep responding to her or she will continue waking more and more – well now I know what we’ve done works for her.

Kate is nursing all the time again, which I’m moderately okay with (it’s irritating, but it’s a phase and it helps her calm down), but she’s not really DRINKING much. She’s doing it for comfort because either her teeth bother her or she’s feeling insecure, not sure which.

And I’ve discovered she LOVES the sippy cup. She gets all excited when she sees it – I actually have to hide it from view or she’ll cry when I don’t give it to her, lol. I was giving her water in it with meals, but she’s started really actually drinking from it so I decided to switch to whole milk so she gets the extra calories. She drank 3oz today! After nursing!

On one hand I’m kind of happy about that, she’s making the transition very seamless, she’s happy as a clam about it, and I like milk, lol. But on the other hand I’m very sad too. I’m not ready to wean her, I hadn’t really planned on giving her cow’s milk yet to drink daily. Ideally I’d give her breastmilk in a sippy cup, but the pump is not working well for me anymore – I just am not very full and the pump only works if I’m full. So it now takes me a long time to pump maybe an ounce or two. And then with the sippy cup she has a habit of drinking half and then I have to toss the other half. I am simply not going to work that hard to throw it out!! So cow’s milk it is. But gah. My supply will go down if she continues to drink more cow’s milk. I wish she’d just settle down and actually nurse well! Silly child.

But then it occurs to me…. if she’s transitioning well maybe that means I could wean her earlier and start IVF sooner. I have to admit, that is tempting. Now that she’s a year old I feel more and more desire to get pregnant again. And by “sooner” I mean this fall rather than January. But right now I’m just not ready to wean her… I guess I’ll just take it as it comes. Things have a habit of changing month to month.

::

I don’t think I ever mentioned that I got my period back last month. I felt something was “off” for a few days and couldn’t quite put my finger on it until I felt a familiar achy feeling in my ovaries. After over 2 years since I’ve had a natural cycle I knew that I was ovulating. Sure enough AF was along shortly. This month was the same thing, I could feel ovulation without a doubt. I marked it in my notes where I wouldn’t see it unless I was really looking, but so that I could find it when I needed to. It seems I just can’t let go of some things…. I have to take notes and track dates. It’s just how I function now.

Getting my period back has been excellent for my hair – after 12 months of crappy-ass oily, flat hair finally I feel like it’s getting back to normal. I was breaking out all over the place for a month, though… that part might be settling down. I wonder how it has affected my milk supply, but at this point it doesn’t really matter all too much, I definitely still have milk.

Along with the cycling has come the reminders, though – the reminders that I’m not normal and this is never going to be normal for us. At least when I wasn’t cycling I was in a different mental space. I wasn’t ready for another baby, I wasn’t thinking about it, and it just didn’t bother me much. But now I see people around me getting pregnant, or even trying to get pregnant, and I feel jealous. I hate that jealousy. And even when I try to completely ignore the ovulation it’s like my body won’t let me, I’m too aware of it now. I have nothing written on the calendar, I intentionally avoid counting days or anything. And yet I know. My body puts on flashing lights when I ovulate and I can’t help but think that we should cover our bases… just in case.

I am irritated that I’m back in this mental space before I wanted to be. We’re not going to be doing IVF for a while, not going to be purchasing insurance or going to see a doctor. We’re not going to be “trying” for another 6 months. I was really hoping my period would hold off until then, until Kate weaned and I decided to get back to that. But instead I’ve been dumped here prematurely. For other people having sex and ovulating and not using contraception would equal getting pregnant. For us it’s just another phase of waiting for IVF… just a big mindtrick one.

Kate is just so amazing. She’s growing into quite the little girl, I must say. I love watching her, studying her, taking her in.

I love how she sits on the floor flipping through her board books, touching the pictures and babbling english-sounding toddler nonsense at them. She does not eat her books at all anymore, and she deftly flips pages one by one using her thumbs. I remain very excited that books are among her favorite toys in the house. Three series I really recommend are the Priddy Books Bright Baby, the Usborne Books That’s Not My… series, and Scholastic’s Baby Faces.

The skill she is currently working on quite a bit is the in-and-out. She loves her bucket of blocks – a simple toy, nothing fancy, but she plays with those blocks every day. A toy we have that I didn’t intend to get but have found very high on her list of favorites is this gumball machine. She loves putting the balls in the top and watching them come out the bottom! She just got some nesting cups for the pool (bath toys) and she was fascinated with those. Just today I saw her trying to stack some blocks for the first time! So exciting watching her figure new things out.

Music toys are, as usual, some of the best shit ever. I am going to use some of her birthday money to get this set of musical instruments. We have electronic music things, like a little “guitar” and a small piano, but she really likes the small instruments she plays with at our local playgroup… egg shakers and tambourines and the like. I’m pretty sure she’ll have a blast with a drum.

Kate is a very sturdy walker now, bordering on running at times. Her absolute favorite pasttime is pushing things. Toys, chairs, boxes – whatever is in her way will get pushed. My living room gets rearranged on a daily basis. For her birthday she got a shopping cart and she’s been pushing that around, as well as her musical push walker. She’s always so proud of herself too, giving me her big wrinkly-nose grin as she walks past pushing something.

Our kitties are still her best friends – at least in her mind. A couple of weeks ago, upon waking in the morning, she walked out of her room right up to one of the cat, put her finger out, and said clearly, “KIH-GEE!” She was so thrilled. She doesn’t say it all the time still, but it was certainly her first word.

She has developed “Mumumum!” when she’s hungry and wants to nurse. Which is frequently. It is also accompanied by shirt-pulling so there is really no confusing that one. At first I thought of course she was saying “mama,” but it’s clear to me that the times she says “mama” meaning me is completely separate from her saying “mumumum” meaning my boobs. Yesterday we took a bath together and she played with her toys happily for quite some time. About 15 minutes in she turned around, saw my boobs, and said, “Mumum!!” and her face lit up light a christmas tree. And then of course she had to play with them for a few minutes until I told her to please stop poking my nipples, thanks.

She doesn’t say “dada” very often, though she has in the past, but she defintely knows what it means. I can ask her “Where’s dada?” or “Go find dada!” and she will look around for him and grin at him (and me) when she finds him. She walks over to the door when she hears him come home from work, or when I say, “Is that dada?!?” It is so special watching her play with Den. She adores her daddy. She has to go over to give him hugs and be carried around for a few minutes when he first gets home, then she follows him into our bedroom while he gets changed. If he closes the door she’ll stand outside and yell “AHHH!” and he echos back, “AHHH!” It will go on for however long he’s in the bedroom for.

She makes a lot of noises right now. She loves to be jiggled in your arms or on your knee, she makes an “ahhhh” sound so that it comes out all vibrate-y “Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah.” Den would also lightly pat her mouth as she made noises so it made funny sounds, and now she’s learned to do that for herself! She puts her finger in her mouth and wiggles it back and forth to make funny noises. I now often hear that from the back seat of the car. Hilarious. Motorboat sounds, too now. “Bbbbbbbb!”

She flaps her arms a lot in excitement. And when she’s super excited she holds them up over her head as she walks around, usually with some prize gripped in her fists. Like pinecones.

While eating in the highchair she will put her arms over her head, shake her arms, and shout “Eeeehhhhh!” with displeasure as she arches her back and throws herself backward. This has two meanings: either “I want more food,” or “I’m done please remove the food.” They sound exactly the same. (A friend today translated it as, “I am displeased with the state of my food tray!” which seems pretty damn accurate!)

Speaking of food, the girl is all about eating now. At about 11 and a half months she went from “I like to nibble on a bunch of different foods, k I’m done now,” to a voracious, “MORE FOOD!!! FEED MEE!!” She started shoveling food in her mouth handfuls at a time and loudly yelling when she needed more. Den and I would just look at each other in surprize, all WTF is this? Growth spurt, I figure – and probably eating less milk, though she’s nursing more frequently it’s for little sips all day long, I don’t feel like she’s really taking in many good nursing sessions during the day. She still is not very picky, eating almost anything we give her. There are a few things she doesn’t seem too enthralled with (blueberries for some reason – she squishes them and drops them overboard), but she’s great at restaurants, I can give her pretty much anything off my plate. Her favorite foods are banana, strawberries, grapes, and cheese. For veggies squash and sweet potato remain her favorites. She loves meat: chicken, turkey, pork, steak… she’ll eat it and demand more, even if there are other things on her tray. It’s amazing to me watching how she’s learned to chew things. We’re all done with the baby food – for a couple months I was just using them when I was lazy, but she’s gotten to the point of grabbing the spoon and making a mess, and she prefers real food anyways.

We’ve been spending more time outside now, which is fun for her and me, except for the goddamn bugs. I hate bugs. The mosquitoes really like her and I. But we have that small toddler pool for her to splash in – which she only found moderately entertaining, for some reason – and the fresh air is great. Also an unexpected benefit of the outdoors: our dogs don’t have issues with her outside. We’ve been keeping them separated, which is a huge PITA, but the small space isn’t good. Outside the dogs run around like mad and Kate shrieks with joy.

So we have had some issues with pools. My kid loves water – LOVES water – and I was very excited for summer to arrive! Finally the temps have reached 80 degrees and we are getting a little prickly-like and opening windows and such and I thought, yes! Pool time!!

We have two pools, currently: a very small round baby pool, and a larger inflatable kid pool with inflatable slide and inflatable waterfall. It was so much inflatable awesomeness! I couldn’t wait! We were going to go swimming!

Except… I had to blow it up. No big, right? Except when I took it out of the box and unfolded it I said holy shit, how big IS this thing? Then I looked at the box closer and my mom did math in her head (something that apparently skipped a generation). “6 feet? No 7 feet.” I stared at the thing and realized that, no, I was not going to blow this thing up myself. I called my husband and asked about a pump. Now apparently there was a mis-communication, him thinking I was asking about a bicycle pump, me thinking he meant a manual pump like a bicycle pump. Turns out that is a very important distinction. We drove all the way to walmart to buy a pump only to later have Den tell me that we already had an electric pump for inflatables, just not for bicycles. (Side note: Why the hell would I need a bicycle pump to inflate a pool?)

Regardless, we finally got back from Walmart with an awesome little pump and I started to try to inflate it. It wouldn’t inflate. Visual inspection revealed that was because the air was escaping out through a large round hole input thing… you know, the kind that are designed so that you can inflate it with a vacuum cleaner. Which we have. Making the Walmart trip doubly unnecessary. I was thrilled.

We’ll skip through the part about how I inflated it inside with the vacuum, then tried to maneuver it out the back door…. to the part where I positioned it in our back yard and filled it with water…. through the water hose which only works from our front yard spout. (The back yard’s broke.) So it filled up and I realized, holy cow, this thing takes a lot more water than I thought.

But finally! Finally it had water in it! Not a lot, just a few inches, but enough. I found a bathing suit and got into it. (Black? Possibly not as slimming as I once thought. I have lost weight, I mistakenly thought this would mean I wouldn’t have lumps.) I wrestled Kate into a swim diaper and rash guard – she was not thrilled. We got out the fun pool toys and I stepped in the pool as I put Kate down to stand in the water.

I yelped as she started crying. We leapt out of the pool. Hose water? Fucking cold. Since it was already 5pm by then there was no way it was going to warm up enough today. Maybe tomorrow. Right?

Except after half an hour the pool was most definitely a lot deflated. It seems there’s a small leak.

On the positive side, the water table I ordered her for her birthday has shipped and should arrive any day now.