Brenden at the DZ

Brenden at the DZ
Originally uploaded by Sandra Maynard.

If it's April it must be time to start working on the pool!

Halfway through March the pool looked pretty decent, with just a thick layer of leaves on the bottom to mar its perfection. I spent a warm afternoon fishing out a bagful of leaves around that time. Not a week later, the weather warmed considerably and the algae bloomed. My beautiful pool turned into a swamp. I should have bought the requisite chemicals right then, but yo soy la slacker so I didn't get around to that until this weekend.

So the algae is dead and the pool is nominally blue but the bottom is now covered with a thick ooze. I turned on the pump to 'waste' and started vacuuming the bottom. When the pump is on waste it just sucks up the water and spits it out with no filtering. If I tried to filter and recirculate, I'd have to shut the pump off and backwash to clear the filter every 5 seconds. As it was the pump was spewing nasty booger-green water. I have barely scratched the surface - I mean the bottom - but it will be a month at least before the pool temperature will be tolerable.

So far I have only worked on the pool if Jon was able to watch Brenden. I'm going to have another go at vacuuming this afternoon if weather permits so I'm going to bring his exersaucer out so I can keep an eye one him. An exersaucer is kind of difficult to describe. He can sit upright in it, turn around, and it has a lot of little squeeky / rattle toys on it that he can play with. One thing he can't do is move it around but just to be safe I think I'll tie it to the patio furniture so that he can't bounce it into the pool.

Speaking of El Jefe:

Letter to Brenden Month 10

Holy crapoly, you're 10 months old! And you're sick again! Will you stop it? If you get sick I get sick! And this time instead of a cold followed by a sinus infection, I have a cold with a sinus infection!

Ah, guilt from mommy. I'm starting early, aren't I? It's a good thing you can't read yet.

So what's new with you? Not much to be honest. I don't really feed you baby food anymore - just the fruit. You are refining your grip so that you don't sqish peas too hard any more. Green beans seem to work better, and you just dig the hell out of goldfish crackers. You like scrambled eggs which is a great quick protein fix. Last night you ate scrambled eggs and peas, most of which you fed yourself. I'm truly sorry that the pool isn't clean yet because you were a mess! It would have been so easy just to grab your ankles and dunk you a couple of times after that.

I'm joking, honey. Partways. But it's cool that you can feed yourself so well.

Your new daycare provider has proven to be a mixed blessing. She opens late and closes early, which means your dad and I have split taking you and retrieving you. I mean mixed because your dad is taking care of you more and just like everything else he attempts he does it well! Sonya took an entire week off for Spring Break and you and dad had a great time!

Our favorite game is 'pass the toys' - I hold out a toy, if it's an animal I make the appropriate animal noises (you have an awful lot of ducks, hon. What's up with that?). You grab it out of my hand and stuff it in your mouth. I move onto another toy and we repeat. You are obsessed with you 'Baby Tad' singing frog - you push a button on his belly and he rewards you with a song. At that point you tackle the frog and start chewing on his lips.

But your favorite toy of all time is the TiVo remote. It's the one remote in the house that rewards you with noises when you press buttons. If I let you play with it all I hear is "kerPLIK kerPLIK BONK BONK BONK bing bing bink plikplikplikplikplikplik BONK BONK BONK" for hours on end. Last night I was just trying to change the freakin' channel to watch American Idol and you started crying hysterically, trying to grab the remote out of my hand. I finally dug through the TiVo menus and found the setting that turns off the TiVo sounds. You're going to hate me forever now, aren't you?