Summer is here!

School officially ended yesterday with Molly's awards program and Adam's last exam. Yippee! It's nice to not have that school pressure. I have lots of goals and big ideas for the summer and for our first year of homeschooling. I'm not sure how many are realistic, but I guess we'll figure that out as we go!

I've been working on the pool off and on for a while now. I drained the most of the old, yucky water out, and since it's been raining like monsoon season around here lately, the bottom of the pool in the deep end buckled up a little. So now it has a little bit of a crack that leaks. Joy. To add to that, it's leaking around the light again. Soooo, I did some research and discovered an underwater epoxy sealant clay stuff that will seal off all that stuff. So the pool is full and pumping, the chlorine has been doubled in the skimmer, and I will use the leaf sucker thingy to get the remaining leaves off the bottom as soon as I get a new pole. (The old one broke last summer.) Then I'll have to get in the 68 degree water and seal the leaks. Yes, 68 degrees is COLD! I usually don't even get in the pool until it gets over 80 degrees.

I went out just a bit ago to empty the skimmer basket. Last year, I finally got tired of replacing the plastic ones after they broke to the tune of about 2 a year, so I paid twice the price and got a metal one. Wellllll, metal rusts! So now I have a skimmer basket with a big hole in the bottom. I lined it with one of those skimmer sock thingies, and stuck it back in. So now it's pumping and filering, the water hose is trickling in to make up for the loss of water, and the chlorine is doing its thing to clear up the water so that I will actually be able to SEE what I'm fixing. Right now, the green color goes nicely with the grass. (sigh) So do the kids really enjoy it THIS much????? I am hoping we'll get more use out of it since we will be at home more since we are homeschooling. We'll see... Anybody interested in a slightly used pump, filter and slide?

This is what it looked like after Hurricane Elvis came through a few years ago. It was off for 12 days after this picture, and it looked worse then than it does now, but it cleared up.
We are planning a trip to the water park on Tuesday with about 40 other people as sort of a summer kick-off party! It should be fun. We are praying it doesn't rain!