slipping and sliding
It's cooled down now, but the end of last week through the weekend it was terrible hot. Monday too, so for our first day of summer school (camp? not-school? what do we call it when we celebrate the end of school but then keep meeting on the same schedule?) the kids came prepared to get wet. But how much fun could we have with just the hose? Quite a lot, it turns out.
thrilling!
It was a bit of a process to come up with that setup, and really the kids should get all the credit. I resisted the ladder on safety grounds, and I resisted the tarp because I thought it would be a pain to dry and put away after. But both worked fantastic, as long as we had at least one person holding up the ladder. Zion and Elijah even tried a few runs head-first, despite the kind of tough drop at the bottom of the slide. And nobody died!
one of many sucessful runs
As cool as that was, it wasn't even the best waterslide experience of the past couple days. As I hinted at yesterday, the boys and their friends—or, to be precise, Zion and his friend—discovered that the algae on the spillway at Estabrook Town Forest makes it very slippery indeed. At first they were just sliding down on their bare feet, but that was of course kind of risky: even though the water over the spillway was only a couple inches deep and the pool at the bottom not more than 18 it was inevitable that before too long they'd fall and get wet. So they made sure that wasn't an issue by just jumping right in!
the photo fails to capture the sense of speed
(That also reduced the risk of head injuries from falling backwards, which I appreciated.)
The slide kept the kids entertained for well over half an hour, and they would have stayed even longer if we had let them. And it was hot enough that they didn't mind being wet for the rest of the walk and the car ride home. Who needs to pay big money to a waterpark to have all kinds of wet slidey fun?!