One super hot Sunday (July 4th, to be exact), we wanted to give the girls some relief from the heat, so against my more high-horsed-sometimes-eco-loving judgement, I consented to the purchase of a sprinkler. The frolicking, not watering, kind.

It was 5:00 on a Sunday, so Josh ran in to the only open store in town–Zehrs–and bought the only sprinkler they had for sale. An $8 plastic hydrant-looking one. Perfect.

Er… until we hooked it up and it sprinkled for about 34 seconds then a hole blew out the side of it. Just a little glitch. I took it back and got a different one. Well, a different colour. It was the only sprinkler available in town at the time.

Same thing happened. I debated going back to get the blue fire hydrant sprinkler, but even I learn faster than that. So I admitted defeat, and was secretly a little pleased that I could continue staring down my nose at people who waste water. I pretended not to enjoy the fact that Josh was spraying the kids with the hose. Okay, so I took pictures…

Then Josh reminded me that we’d just replaced our hose and still had the old one, which had been rendered virtually useless by my driving over the end of it until it wasn’t very likely anything would ever attach to it again. And since that hose was just sitting there, he said, why not poke some holes in it and make it a sprinkler? Well, I’m no carbon footprint calculator, but I think reusing rubber hoses makes up, at least a bit, for wasting water. Especially when it’s 35 degrees outside.

So we made a ring and wound the hose three times. We used duct tape to keep it together because if you’re going to make a sprinkler out of your old garden hose, you may as well go all in with the trashy and white. Plus, it works.

Then we tied a knot in it to keep water from just flowing right through the hose. That part’s important. Had there been a store open, we would have gone and picked up a small clamp so we could just cut the hose off. But maybe you’re also trying to make your garden hose sprinkler at 6:00 on a Sunday and there are no stores open for you, either. Next, Josh used a nail (a little one) to poke holes in the hose.

Once the holes were safely poked, we fired it up. It was actually quite awesome. It was more of a mist than a stream, which was great for the kids because they weren’t scared of it, and great for me because I felt we were using less water. If you poked larger holes, my two days of 12th Grade Physics tells me you’d get more of a stream than a mist, but we like our mist.

The kids had a great time playing in it! So did Josh, but he made me promise I wouldn’t post the pictures of him shrieking across the lawn topless. Instead, I’ll show you this photo of Rissa, because she seems to be under-represented in this post, and because how cute is it that she had to wear goggles in the mist?

I’m ruthless at my sessions with babies and little ones. If your child starts crying, I’m going to keep snapping. And I absolutely adore shots of kids crying. I can’t explain why. Maybe it’s just that it’s such an honest expression of emotion with really young kids, and you can see that in their faces.

Lest anyone think that I’m heartless only with their children while coddling my own, I wanted to share these photos of Marissa. I took these in March, and I keep looking at them over and over again. Marissa’s at the tail end of the age where kids cry, all in, totally shamelessly. Even Bria, at five almost six, hides her tears or, when she does just go for it, it’s usually fake. It’s funny how quickly we learn to hide sadness. Maybe I just envy the way kids put it out there, unabashed.

As I was putting these pictures together for this post, I got to thinking about all the images I have of other people’s kids crying or sad. I think that I likely have at least a sad picture from easily three-quarters of all the shoots I’ve done with kids under eight, and I have quite a few of crying babies and toddlers. I think I might put together a collection of them all. Anybody wanna see it?