When it's this hot, water is the answer.

It's been hot. The kind of hot where the fan doesn't help because it's just blowing hot air around. The kind of hot where the only solution is to stay cool with water. However, I am cheap and I have no desire to take my 4 kids to the pool by myself. Mostly because there isn't a baby pool at our local pool, and two of the kiddies need me when in the water. NO FUN. So I like to stick around home and play in the water. We have a little purple wading pool that we fill with water, and all the kids love to play in it. They'll also put a sprinkler under the trampoline. But lately, we've decided to get creative with our water play. Check it out.

 First we made a hanging sprinkler from a 2L pop bottle by heating a nail and melting holes in it all over. All you need to attach it to a garden hose is a male to male end adapter, which I happened to already have hanging around the house. The kids loved this.

 We made a tinfoil river and floated all kinds of things down it. We used a whole roll of dollar store heavy aluminum foil and then put the hose and the top running at full strength. We found that the pop bottle lids worked the best and the kids had a blast racing them. James had fun being the giant and stepping in the river or snatching the "boats" out as the passed by him.

 Next we played with ping pong balls, golf tees and water guns. I drilled holes in some old 2x4's that were sitting in the garage for just such a purpose. Then I put golf tees in each hole and balanced a ping pong ball on each tee. The idea is to be able to shoot the balls off all the tees before the other person. This was tricky, but only because Mr. James kept grabbing the balls or knocking them off before you could even start shooting at them.

It has been a fun couple of days, and we'll be playing with all of these fun things again this summer, as well as some more new and fun water activities I've got planned.