H2Whoa

I heard a knock on the door the other day. Actually, it wasn’t the knock I heard, but the dog tearing through the house barking warnings on the chance that this might finally be an intruder or someone else generally meaning us harm like that guy who mows our backyard. It was one of the neighbor moms. She needed help carrying something into her home, and since her husband was at work, she looked to me for help. You’d think this would be a common occurrence since I’m the only male who’s home most weekdays, but fortunately for me there are apparently few heavy objects that desperately need moved during weekdays.

The boys were playing happily on the floor and Abbie was still finishing her lunch, so I had a couple minutes before a boy would fall and bonk his head or Abbie would give her sign for “all done,” which is throwing her remaining lunch onto the floor. I slipped outside to her car not knowing what was to be lifted. As soon as that Taurus trunk flipped open, I knew exactly what she had: A Banzai Falls Water Slide! It’s a ten-foot tall inflatable water slide, suitable for hours of fun and games until somebody gets hurt. We’d had our eye on one for a couple months, but opted against purchasing one since its durability was questionable, and it seemed immorally and possibly illegally dangerous to expose our young children to a product that combines pools of water with consciousness-drainingly high speeds.

But now the slide is clearanced. In fact, everything is clearanced at the nearby big box store. The good stuff won’t last long, though, because all the families with children who can actually get out during the day are buying it right now. I immediately called Ellie to inform her that we were going out that night on the closest thing we get to a date anymore: Buying heavily discounted merchandise.

We’d been waiting for to clearance their outdoor merchandise all summer. We’re moving into a house next spring, and now is the time to stock up on outdoor goods for our still unknown house. We need a swing set, and patio furniture, and a lawnmower, and a Banzai Falls Water Slide…

Unfortunately our family vehicle can only haul the water slide while the kids are in the car, a fact I didn’t realize until we were in the store and I noticed that my desired swing set was about as long as a Subaru.* We bought the water slide for Abbie’s birthday party in a year or two along with a few garden supplies, and went back home to put the kids down for the night. Then we recruited a neighbor to stay in the house with the kids and returned with our pickup.

Surprisingly, the store didn’t have a clerk in the outdoor department eager to help pull enormous heavily discounted merchandise off the shelves at 10pm. I had to ask at customer service for someone to help. After a minute, they pointed me to an associate. I calmly explained my situation, and quickly discovered he was deaf. Literally, he couldn’t hear a thing, and I couldn’t get him to understand what I needed.** Fortunately one of the nearby associates who explained to me that he was deaf was also able to help us pull merchandise in the outdoor department.

We didn’t buy as much as I anticipated that night. We bought a swing set, a longtime must-have for me, and an outdoor playhouse, which we didn’t know we needed until we saw its price was two-thirds off. They loaded everything into our truck, and we drove home to unload it. Fortunately one of the neighbor dads was around to help me unload our haul.

* Literally.
** If I needed help with a cat or a ball, I could have signed my need to him. None of the baby sign language materials I’ve seen have covered “patio furniture,” though.