Daddy / Daughter Evening...again

As noted before, there seems to be a connection between Daddy / Daughter evenings and Emma’s bath night. In fact, I made a graph.
So imagine my surprise when Laura painted the town last week on a non-bath night. I was so happy I jumped on the bed, had ice cream for dinner, and shot my BB gun at sports action figures around the house. I’m pretty sure that was me. Dunno. In any event, all I had to do was keep her relatively clean between dinner and bedtime and I wouldn’t have to give her a bath.

Both of our next door neighbors are single, elderly women. I try to help them out where I can, but given my upper-percentile non-handiness quotient, this help has mostly come in the form of sprinkler repair, which has unfortunately become a forte of mine in these last 4 years of home ownership.

One of our neighbors calls on me for the simplest of tasks (last night I sprayed a hornet’s nest for her) that she could easily perform for herself, but I think she just likes the company. I wouldn’t classify this as one of those lonely older housewives / latin pool boy relationships just yet – even though I do flash a little butt crack now and then. It is purely the result of excessive belt-to-belly friction and not an innuendo.

Where was I? Oh, yes. One of our neighbors came over on that night to ask me for help with a broken sprinkler. She had run over one of her sprinklers with the lawn mower and bought a new one that needed to be installed. I grabbed Emma and we walked over to the neighbor’s back yard.

One thing I like about most sprinklers is that they’re easy. There’s one end that shoots out water; this is the end that you point at your lawn. My neighbor happened to buy a funky gear-driven shrub sprinkler. I swear it had a miniature nuclear reactor in there, plus little spoilers on the side to keep it from going airborne at high speeds. I believe that’s a new feature. Anyway, I remember thinking, “How hard can this be? It’s just a sprinkler, after all.”

As I screwed the sprinkler into the ground I looked up and noticed that Emma had found some flower pots in the yard that were filled with potting soil. She was picking up handfuls of dirt and letting it run through her fingers. Not a big deal. She wasn’t wallowing in it. Or eating it.

I got the sprinkler in and asked our neighbor to turn on the water. It had an adjustable orbit; I figured it would be easier to adjust the orbit once the water was on and I could see where it was shooting. It wasn’t like I had to type in GPS coordinates to the sprinkler – just turn a few knobs.

She turned the water on and the sprinkler…sprinkled…in a stream across the lawn. The sprinkler was located on the edge of the patio, and I wanted it to shoot a 180 degree orbit. When it got to 185 degrees, I hurriedly bend down to adjust it. I turned every knob on that sprinkler, but it didn’t deviate. 190 degrees…200 degrees.

Me: “Sprinkler, stop moving.”
Sprinkler: “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Quinn.”

I notice out of the corner of my eye that Emma has inched over to the edge of the patio and is dipping the very end of her toe into the spray of the sprinkler adjacent to me. Still not a big deal; it’s only her toe, after all. Meantime, my sprinkler is now approaching 270 degrees and it about to spray a full blast of water onto my neighbor’s house, including kitchen windows. I look around to see where my neighbor is, and find that she has stepped over to the far corner of her yard to address some other issue. She is effectively out of earshot. I turn around again to see that Emma is now fully deflecting her sprinkler with her entire leg. “Still,” I reason to myself, “she’s only wet below the waist. This is certainly no cause for a bath." As for my own sprinkler, I have no choice now but to stand directly in front of it and deflect the stream with both hands so that it doesn’t soak my neighbor’s house.

Have you ever been sprayed with a fire hose? I have once: when Lauralee and I were making out on the Main Street Plaza and didn’t leave when asked. Well, this sprinkler didn’t sting like that fire hose, but holy cow did it get me wet. Oh, and it moved so s l o w l y. Picture me standing there, dripping wet, while I shuffle from right to left a millimeter at a time, blocking a sprinkler with my hands. It was a totally ridiculous sight. I look over at Emma, and she (no doubt inspired by her dad) is now blocking her own sprinkler with her hands, and the water is spraying everywhere. And she’s giggling uncontrollably. I can’t go get Emma, or my neighbor’s house will get drenched. I can’t tell my neighbor to turn the water off, because she can’t hear me. It was the longest few moments of my life.

Finally, the sprinkler began…sprinkling…on the lawn again, and I walked over to ask my neighbor to turn the water off. As we headed back to sprinkler box, we now saw Emma, totally devoid of any previous inhibitions regarding water, running around amongst the sprinklers with her arms out like an airplane. She kind of looked like a 1999 post-world-cup-winning-goal-scoring Brandi Chastain. Emma was so soaked, her diaper was practically dragging on the ground. Would she need a bath? Well, technically Emma was just covered in water, and what’s a bath if not covering your child in water? It’d be a tough decision, but I bet I could justify just drying her off and putting her to bed.

My neighbor got the water turned off, and I *gasp* read the sprinkler instructions on the back of the package. Convinced that I now knew what I was doing, I adjusted the sprinkler. Finally, it was working right. My neighbor thanked me, and I turned to leave when I noticed that Emma had revisited those flower pots. Only now her clothes and hands were soaking wet, so the dirt was instantly transformed to mud which instantly covered several large portions of her body. It was a lost cause. She’d need a bath.

I picked her up and hung her in front of one of the sprinklers to get as much mud off as I could. Puzzlingly, she did not enjoy this as much as running through the sprinklers on her own. Kids.