baby pool capers

He did a classic Dennis the Menace move today. I don't know if an actual comic strip featured this situation, but it certainly seems true to character. I filled up the plastic hard sided baby pool for the first time today and Dennis and I enjoyed playing together in it for quite a while this morning. This was the first day we ever used it. After we splashed and danced and played with the boats, and after all of his attempts to get Honey to come into the pool with us failed ("come swim Honey you have fun"; "get in swimming pool, Honey, come on, Honey"), it was time to go in and dry off. We had to take lunch to David at work, so I got us all dried off and changed and ready to go. It had started to rain, so we put on our rain coats and gathered all of our things, and we headed to the car. As soon as I opened the door, Dennis went and jumped into the baby pool in his dry clothes, dry shoes, and raincoat. He wallowed around in the pool in the rain, got out, got all his toys, and went back and jumped in the pool again. I was half furious, half tickled at him, but I tried to tell him seriously that we only got in the pool when Mommy or Daddy went in too and that we only went swimming when we had on SWIMSUITS. Then I dried him off, changed his diaper, put on more dry clothes, found a windsuit jacket that might serve as rainwear... And we set off again. This time I carried him to the car. I was frazzled when I started the car and accidentally backed into the baby pool. Now it has 3 holes in it, and while duct tape might suffice for our short usage periods, I feel terrible about ruining it on its first day of use. David and I hid it so that he won't see it out there in the morning and ask to go swimming again. It was inexpensive, and we can easily replace it (maybe with one of those neat ones that has a slide in it), but I still feel kind of bad about it. I have to laugh at the whole of it though. It was just one of those days.