I bought the new wading pool at Canadian Tire, which as you know is a store that I’ve boycotted for a decade but apparently going there once to buy a deck carpet (which, by the way, was nothing like it was pictured in the catalogue but I bought it anyway because I was having an anxiety attack triggered no doubt by the fact that I had broken the embargo that I had held so dear for so many years in order to procure a brown carpet for my sundeck)   (Who have I become?   Seriously, WHO?) opened the floodgates and I began thinking things like, “You know what?   Canadian Tire is six minutes away by car and going to Toys R Us where they have the same pool is fourteen minutes away by car and why should I pollute the environment for that extra eight minutes and expose myself to the fiery hellstorm that is Toys R Us when I can get away with dragging them through a boring automotive store instead?”

I’m telling the story all in reverse order and if this was a novel I would begin cutting and pasting so that it actually flowed in a semi-coherent way but it’s not a novel, it’s a blog, so what difference does it make?   None, that’s what.   You love me because I tell stories out of order or maybe you just read this because you are my mum or you know someone that I know and they’ve said I’m funny and you’re waiting for that to actually be the case.   Believe me, I’m waiting, too.

When you are the parent of a four year old and a monkey, there are four seasons.   Halloween.   Santa.   The Rainy Season.  And Wading Pool Season.   A wading pool is obviously an imperative aspect of WPS.   And we needed a new one because the old wading pool did not have a drain in the bottom, yet held something like eleventy million gallons of water and had to be dumped after use because The Birdy is still in diapers and, well, I think it’s pretty obvious why.   So on Day One of Wading Pool Season, even though my back is in horrific shape and every day my mum gasps in horror when she sees me lifting anything at all ranging from The Birdy to a full-sized SUV, I still thought, “Hey, I should dump the wading pool!  It probably is full of pee!”   Good idea, right?   Wrong.

The pool was hard to dump.   First I stood on the edge and collapsed it down and let the cold pee water pour all over my feet, but then that got boring and I figured that I could probably lift it if I pretended it was a burning building and that something important was trapped inside, like my iPhone or my favourite sweater.   So I chanelled that inner strength and I lifted it.  I am strong!   I am woman!   I am invincible!  Besides,  it wasn’t THAT heavy.   Or was it?   Yes, it was.   I know this because afterwards, things were bad.   My back?   Bad.   So bad.   Not even painful but numb and tingling and weird and everyone who is a raging hypochondriac knows that pain is tenable but weirdness is unacceptable.   I tried to call and report the weird feeling to my medical staff parents but their line was busy.    They do not like call waiting.   I don’t like it either, but that doesn’t mean I can live without it.   There are plenty of things I dislike but find imperative to my existence.   Like water, for example.   I’m sorry, but I just don’t like drinking water.

Which reminds me that I missed perhaps the best part of this story.   So let’s rewind back to the bit where we’d left the wading pool under the deck all winter where it filled with a stagnant stinky dark-green muck filled stew.    When the time came to drag that sucker out, I thought to myself, “Self, you should empty out some of this revolting slime before shifting the pool or else you’ll hurt your back.”   (That’s foreshadowing, internets, except in this case it’s occurring after I already told you that I hurt my back which makes it not actually very effective foreshadowing, but foreshadowing nonetheless.)   I had a vague memory of suctioning pools in the past (What pools?  What the hell part of my past involved pool suctioning?) by using a piece of hose and applying your mouth to the hose to start the suction, then the water all merrily pouring out of the hose and harmlessly absorbing into the ground, a surface made for toxic absorption.     I found a filthy four foot piece of hose that looked like perhaps it had previously been used for suctioning a dog’s bowels and decided that would be OK because I wasn’t going to DRINK the water, merely start the suction.   I knew it was a bad idea.   I KNEW IT.   But that did not stop me from actually “starting the suction” by which I mean “taking a huge gulp of the pool sludge which I can still taste somewhere in the back of my throat and nose which probably as we speak is mutating into a never-before seen swamp-dog-poop-triggered cancer”.   I DRANK THE WATER.   I DRANK IT.   It was worse than the worst thing I’ve ever had to drink.  (Which would be milk-I-thought-was-fresh-but-actually-had-formed-small-sour-milk-sponges-within-itself.   FYI.)  It was so awful that even typing that gave me a flashback so real that I gagged.

I have no idea what story I was telling anymore but I’ll just jump back to the part where I had a weird feeling in my back from lifting the fourteen quajillion tonnes of water and dumping it onto the lawn.    So there I was, repeatedly dialling my mum and watching House Hunters with the kids (they love real estate shows) (OK, not really, but I was trying to bore them to sleep and besides I LOVE House Hunters, I have no idea why either so don’t ask) when I suddenly started thinking, “I wonder if anyone has ever ruptured a disc and then become permanently paralyzed from the waist down as a result?”    Which then of course became an absolutely real possibility — the only possibility — in my mind and my mum was still ON THE PHONE WITH SOMEONE ELSE so then I started to panic and hyperventilate because if I was paralyzed, how would I get the kids to bed and if I did get them to bed by CRAWLING UP THE STAIRS ON MY BELLY WITH THEM CLUTCHING MY HAIR, how would I get back down?   And if I did get back down those  steep stairs, how would I go back UP if one of them needed me which they do every single night and I should stay up there but there is no phone up there to call for the help which I so obviously may need?  And why am I so dizzy?   Maybe the ruptured disc is causing some kind of clotting which is going to my brain?   And am I having a stroke?  AND OH MY GOD DID I RUIN MY ENTIRE LIFE BY DUMPING THE WADING POOL AND I HATE WADING POOL SEASON WHY DOES IT EXIST AT ALL AND WHO MADE UP THIS RULE WHERE THE KIDS GET TO USE A WADING POOL IN THE SUMMER AND WILL I HAVE TO BECOME A HEROIC WHEELCHAIR ATHLETE TO RAISE MONEY FOR WADING POOL LIFTING AWARENESS?  BECAUSE I’M ALREADY TOO BUSY, I DON’T KNOW HOW I’LL HAVE TIME FOR THAT SORT OF PHILANTHROPIC WORK!

That’s sort of how my mind works, if by “sort of”, I mean “exactly”.   I don’t really know what stopped the panic attack, I think House Hunters ended and I gave up on my mum and The Birdy fell asleep so I took her upstairs and part of the way up the stairs I realized that I could, in fact, walk.   So that was good, because I’d make a lousy wheelchair athlete, I’d be always hurting myself or other people, like that time I tried to learn how to ski and got tangled in the rope tow and then immediately skiied into the back of someone else and skiied with him in tandem all the way down the mountain because neither of us could stop due to the way our skis were crossed and he was shouting at me in German as though I was doing it on purpose, like skiing into someone’s backside and getting STUCK was some sort of strange Canadian winter hobby.

So yeah, we got a new wading pool.   It’s inflatable, so it doesn’t weigh anything and I’m pretty sure The Bun has already put a hole in the bottom due to his compulsion to place everything in the yard into the wading pool right after I filled it with clean fresh water in order to make it as dirty as possible.    In addition to the new hole, it has a tiny little drain at the bottom which is so small I could imagine that if one really wanted to empty this two hundred gallon pool through this drain, it may take up to twelve years to actually get the water out.   But I’ve decided, really, who has ever become sick from swimming in a wading pool that may or may not be polluted with a bit of pee?   They don’t put their faces in it.  They’re too little.   Mostly they just sit in it and throw things at each other — things which shouldn’t be in the wading pool to begin with, like deck furniture and gardening tools — and then they cry and fall over and scream until I help them to get out.  Then they ignore the pool altogether, seemingly content to have it present in the yard, the giant inflatable flourescent blue eyesore that it is. So  I’m just going to leave the water in from this point forward.   At least, until it starts looking at all like sludge.   Then I’ll get Clayton to start a suction to help drain it.   I’ve kept the hose, just in case.