The Table Slide

I actually wrote this in February.  I never posted it because I was trying to add a video that just would never load.  So as you're reading it remember this was in February, and we were tired of winter.


This is what happens when you leave three engineer-minded males alone:

This table slide was actually the result of a brainchild of the two-year-old engineer. But the backstory starts last summer.

Last August I noticed some standing water in our basement. Our basement had always been dry so I mentioned this to my engineer husband expecting him to promptly diagnose and fix the problem. Evidently he thought my "the basement is flooded" reports were just the over-reaction of a pregnant woman because he didn't investigate.  In fact he just reassured me, "It's a basement, it's supposed to be wet" (this is really out of character for him). Until the door to the storage area wouldn't shut because it was swollen with water and there was mold growing on the walls we put up just months before. Then he acted on it rather quickly. Turns out our water softener was leaking.

Side note: You know how with your first pregnancy you follow all the rules and microwave your lunch meat and won't even look at Caesar dressing. Well, by the third when your husband reroutes the water around the filter to fix the water soften for a week and half, it doesn't even occur to you that you shouldn't drink it. And then once the water system is fixed you're like, "oh that's why I was so sick."  But that really has nothing to do with the table slide.

Really, the only thing the basement flooding last summer has to do with our table slide is that it left our banquet table water damaged and unusable for normal table purposes.  We had planned to get rid of it, but hadn't gotten around to the task of maneuvering it through the basement around the toys, up the stairs, outside, and to where ever one disposes of large water damaged banquet tables.

The whole table slide came about because of another basement flood.  I was down doing laundry on a very raining day and noticed puddles again.  I texted G, "BASEMENT FLOOD."  Evidently he's learned to believe me about these things because he came home over lunch to investigate (this was the first of two times that week I sent him urgent texts and he had to home over lunch, the other time was a few days later when we had the chicken massacre).

GD was in little engineer heaven.  He put on his rain boots and headed downstairs with G to solve the problem.  They discovered it was not the rain that caused the flooded, but our 20 year old water heater had rusted through and it was time to replace it.

One piece of advice my mom gave me growing up was, "Marry someone who can either fix things, or afford to pay someone else."  I married the former, and then gave him two little assistants.  Within four hours we had a new water heater up and running, partially wired by a four-year-old.

And a cardboard box that it came in to play with.  The cardboard box was turned into several different things before, about a week later, GE had a eureka moment that it would make a great slide coming off of their plastic play fort in the basement.  The cardboard wasn't quite strong enough to hold two boys trying to slide down it.  So their father brought out the twice-water-damaged banquet table and, tadah, we now have the latest and greatest innovation in mid-winter indoor fun.

We've had minimal injuries on it. So far.