MARK MY WORD: WE'RE SPLASHING OUR WAY TO A PERFECT FOURTH OF JULY HOLIDAY

Splash, splash. Oh, what a relief it is to have a pool.

It's a great way to cool off on a Fourth of July weekend.

Joni and I had a pool party Saturday. But this wasn't a party for adults, it was a splashing good time for our children and friends' children.

Becca and Bailey love the water. You'd think they were fish the way they take to water. Of course, 3-year-old Bailey believes it is mandatory to constantly change swimming suits. "It's wet," she tells me, explaining why it is necessary to put on a dry suit so she can go out and get wet again.

We had struggled through the hot summer with a blue, hard-plastic, children's pool. We would set it up on the driveway on weekends and let the kids splash around. The driveway slopes down to the street, making it easy to drain the small pool.

But we wanted a bigger pool and this weekend we got one. It's an above-ground pool all right, just not very much above ground. It stands about two feet tall and is about eight or nine feet long. It's one of those pools you inflate.

A few years ago, we tried one of these pools. We set it up in the backyard, but it promptly was punctured, destroyed by the sticks and sweet gum balls that make our backyard Mother Nature's mine field.

This time around, we decided it would be better to put an inflatable pool on solid ground. We cleaned off our backyard porch, which sits on a concrete pad covered with outdoor, green carpet.

It's seen better days, but it was perfect for a pool, we figured.

We borrowed a neighbor's air pump and before long we had an inflated pool, complete with a school of goggled fish decorating its plastic sides.

Then, it was just a matter of filling it up with gallons and gallons of water. We brought the hard-plastic pool onto our screened-in porch too so that the kids could use it as a wading pool before entering our bigger pool.

There's nothing like sitting in freezing water on your shaded porch to make you appreciate these hot days. Bailey and Becca seemed oblivious to the ice water. Having built up a sweat cleaning up the porch, I climbed in to cool off. I cooled down in seconds. I rolled around in the water like a thrashing alligator in an attempt to get my blood flowing again. Joni sat on a chair and watched us shiver. We pleaded with Joni to join our splashing trio of human icebergs. But she declined, electing instead to watch the water antics from a distance.

After a few hours, the water had warmed up, in part from all that splashing. Within hours, we had friends' kids in the pool.

Of course, it didn't take long before Becca and a friend decided to take the plunge in our neighbor's in-ground pool. Compared to our neighbor's pool, ours is nothing but a puddle.

Still, it is a pretty nice puddle for $49. You can't beat the price. It sure beats trying to swim in the bathtub.

There's room to stretch out. If kids weren't shouting, giggling and stepping all over you, it would be a pretty relaxing spot.

There's one small technicality. We haven't figured out how to drain the pool without flooding the porch. But it's amazing how much water kids can splash out of a pool. The way I figure it, the kids will have splashed all the water out of the pool within a few days. Then, we can start the whole process all over again.

All in all, the porch makes a pretty good pool room. The pool's not bad either.

OK, so it's not a hot tub. Joni nicknamed it the cold tub. But when temperatures approach triple digits, this plastic bubble pool has just enough sparkle for a perfect Fourth of July holiday.

~Mark Bliss is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.