Bedtime Story

Last night's story came from a time when I looked like this- 

Look at that beautifully crimped hair!  That was a real labor of love from my mother, I can only imagine!

When I was a little girl, we lived in Alabama where it's really hot and we had a pool.  It was the in-ground kind, not the above-ground kind, and there was a deep end and a diving board. 

Sometimes my parents liked to invite people over to swim in our pool with us. 

One time they invited some teenagers from church over to swim.  There was one boy that came and he was chubby.

And that chubby boy got onto the diving board and he BOUNCED! one time and he BOUNCED! two times and he BOUNCED three times and 

CRACK!!

The diving board broke. 

And the chubby boy fell into the pool and the diving board fell into the pool and he felt really bad and my parents said, "Oh no!" because now we didn't have a diving board.

But Grandpa Mark, he likes to fix things with wood.

(Like if you had a plastic toy duck and it's eye fell out he would replace it with wood?  Yep, like that.)

So he got a big wooden board and he stuck it on top of what was left of the diving board and he drilled it into place and then we had a big wooden diving board that was super springy!

(But didn't you get splinters?  What color was the wood?  Did it ever break?  How high could you bounce on it??)

*****

And tonight's story went something like this- 

So when we were little kids and we had this huge pool and we did all kinds of things in it!  In the wintertime the pool would freeze and we could go ice skating on it!  Even our dog Skipper liked to get on the ice and slide around... or maybe we just liked pushing her onto the ice and watching her slide around...  

In the springtime we had to drain out all of the water and then we could go down into the bottom of the pool and run around and up the sides of the pool and even take skateboards down there and skate around.  

But the summertime was best of all because we had a pool right in our own backyard!  And we could swim in it anytime we wanted to, as long as we had a buddy.  

And then I sang them the buddy rap, which went something like this-

There's a rule about the pool
It's very, very cool.
You have to have a buddy or you will drown!

Having a buddy is the coolest thing around
'Cuz if you have a buddy you'll be safe and sound!

And yes, I still sing that song to my kids when we go swimming.

So in the summertime we would play all kinds of games in the pool, especially mermaids.  When we played mermaids we would take a diving ring and stick our feet through it so our legs were stuck together, just like a real mermaid.  And then we would swim around and flip our hair up out of the water, just like Ariel. 

But what we always really wanted to do was to play with our Barbies in the pool and pretend that they were mermaids.  Our mom said no because there is a filter in the pool that sucks out all of the dirt and she thought the Barbies might get sucked into the filter, but we didn't listen to her.  So one day we took the Barbies into the pool and we played and had so much fun, and then... 

...we forgot about them!  

We left them in the pool and we went inside to have dinner and we didn't remember about them again until the next day, when we ran out to the pool and found them floating in the water- without their heads!!

So we ran over to the big loud filter and took off the lid, and there they were, a bunch of Barbie heads floating around like a big bowl of Barbie head soup.  The filter had sucked off their heads and left their bodies behind.  

And we never took our Barbies into the pool again.

And now we'll see if any of them have nightmares tonight!