New Kiddie Pool

I had ordered a kiddie pool way back in July but it never did arrive!  So I canceled it (hmmm... I think I'm still waiting for the refund?) and ordered from a different company.  I also realized that I didn't have a pump - an electric one at least, so there goes more money out the door.  Ha!

Here it is... it's not too much, but gosh, does it take a lot of water to fill it up:

Graham and Charlie are taking their time getting in. They say it is too cold!

Looks like they are having fun?  Hmm... the pool does seem pretty small:

Graham is playing with his "amphibious" car:  Charlie is not liking it too much with the splashing on his face:

The boys get bored after about 30 minutes.  I guess that's better than them being inside on the computer for 30 minutes!  I was chatting with a friend of mine who is an optometrist, and she said that kids need to be outside for at least 2 hours a day.  2 hours??! These kids will play in the backyard for only 10 minutes sometimes and then it's "Mommy, can we watch TV?" or "Mommy, can we play on the computer?".  Sometimes they only have to say "Can we..." and I would interrupt them and say no! :-P

We dumped out the first batch of water onto the grass after they were done with the pool and I realized how much water we were wasting! So, instead - I decided to buy a water pump to get all that water out of the pool and into our rain barrel.  Yay!!!

The hose for the pump wasn't long enough so we sort of "connected" another one of our hoses to the pump's hose.  I was trying to save as much water so here I'm trying to collect the water that is dripping out.  It probably didn't really matter, but for whatever reason I was being overly cautious about conversing water:

We have water in our rain barrel again.  Super yay!!!  The pool filled up our rain barrel and then some.  Yikes!

I figured I might as well wash out the other rain barrel that's located in the front of the house.  If the boys keep filling up these pools, I might have to connect another hose so we can dump all that pool water in this water barrel that is located out front too:

While I was in the front area, I noticed some crack along the side wall.  Noooo...!!!

Hopefully it's nothing serious??!  But there is a gap along this side of the concrete.  Hmmm....

I tugged on the support for the rain barrel and seems like it should still hold.  Hopefully the concrete doesn't give because I would hate to see the rain barrel rolling down the hill!

Okay, everything is level for now!  Everything keeps leaning after a few months around here. I swear we are not going to buy anymore properties on a side slope!

Well, we've only filled up the pool a couple other times and I've used the water pump so I can drain the water into the yard and water the grass.  The boys have helped occasionally to fill up the watering cans to water the veggies and flowers in the garden.  And looks like the animals have been drinking from it too! You can clearly see paw prints!  I'm guessing raccoons??!

The raccoons better not think that this is their new watering hole!  I made the mistake of leaving water in there a few nights ago since the rain barrel was totally filled up and I was going to water the yard again the following morning with the leftover water.  I might have to think twice about doing that again!

It's suppose to hit 90F again this weekend so this pool might come in handy again.  Maybe there's a way to incorporate the slip-and-slide with the kiddie pool somehow :-D