r [WARNING: Here comes an old man rant!]
These kids today are so spoiled. Back in my day, if it was hot, do you know what we could do? Sweat. We could sweat. Maybe we could find some shade under a tree so we could sweat a little less. Or, if we were really lucky we might talk Mom into letting us drag a hose out onto the lawn, attach a sprinkler, and run through it.
Do kids today have to beg for a hose and a sprinkler? No. They can just go to a splash pad! What’s a splash pad, you ask? (If you’re asking that, you really need to get out more.) A splash pad is a park that contains some combination of fountains, streams, rivers, lakes, waterfalls, showers, and sprinklers for kids to run through on hot, sunny days.
The splash pads they have for kids today are amazing, and they’re getting more intricate with each passing day. It used to be a splash pad was just a few fountains spewing water up into the air, but now they’re even more elaborate with things like a “lazy river,” where you don’t even have to walk, you just sit and float through all the splashing. There are so many fun and creative ways to get wet now that a kid may never need to be dry again!
These days there’s a splash pad in almost every town. All you have to do is show up to a park with a splash pad and unleash your kids on it. You’ll need to be sure you packed some towels, and some sunscreen, and some water bottles for hydration since you can’t actually drink any of the splash pad water because, well, kids have been standing in it and some of those kids have bodily fluids they don’t completely know how to control.
So, yes, splash pads can be fun, but no, you shouldn’t drink the water.
Back when I was a kid, we had no qualms about unhooking the sprinkler and drinking straight from the hose. Sometimes we’d even put our mouth right on the actual end of the hose. Usually, the water would be a little warm, but we didn’t mind because it was water. And none of us died from it. (That I know of.)
And when we were done drinking from the hose and running through the sprinkler, we’d go find the shade from a big tree and sweat a little more.
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