Much to me and my husband’s disbelief, our little girl turned two recently. (Two! I’m officially no longer a mama with babies at home.) To celebrate, we followed our new family tradition and had the grandparents come play with C while we took S out on a special outing with mommy and daddy in the morning.
After folding the sheet in half – we proceeded to duct tape together all three sides, leaving only a small hole for the hose. This brings us to our first couple of tips:
Tip #1 – Use the widest duct tape you can find.
Tip #2 – Don’t tape the sheeting on grass, it gets stuck to the tape and makes it less effective. Tape on concrete or decking first, and then move the pad to the grass before filling with a hose.
Next we slid the hose into our very large pouch and started filling. We also added a bottle of neon food coloring for a cool water effect.
Tip #3 – Watch the hose! Much to our party’s amusement, both grandmas accidentally pulled it out while it was filling and proceeded to drench themselves as well as a few innocent onlookers.
At this point our water blob looked almost exactly like all those pretty Pinterest pictures. However…
This is what it looked like about 15 minutes later. What happened? A few things. First, we didn’t have nearly enough food coloring so by the time the bag was full it was no longer visible.
Tip #4 – If you want to color the water, be prepared with LOTS of food coloring.
The second problem was our yard wasn’t level so once the thing was about 80% full it completely rolled over onto itself and down our gentle slope.
Tip #5 – Find level ground.
Even at this new position, the ground wasn’t totally flat. To prevent all the water from sliding to the bottom (and the whole thing bunching up against the fence) we decided to leave the blob about 80% full. This actually worked out great and we didn’t even have to seal up our hose hole.
Since the blog got a lot of grass and debris on it when it rolled over, we threw in the towel on keeping the it cool and dry. We hosed it off and went for more of a slip-n-slide/water trampoline affect instead. As you can see, the kids loved it.
Similar Stuff: More from the “We Tried It” Series
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