Sprinklers Rio de Janeiro style

We live in a big city, a big HOT city 4 months (or more) out of the year.  In my day, we kiddies would spend hot days running through sprinklers in the yard.  Hell, when we lived in Florida, my Mom would send us out into the summer rain in our swimsuits. 

Could you imagine that here?!  Cariocas melt in the rain, even when it's 100 degrees. I think they would create social services just to come take my poor children away if I ever let them play in the rain on a hot day.  Heaven forbid if  I let them do it in the mud! 

In their defense, I live in Rio and the mud is probably more feces than actual dirt.

What to do?  I can't drag my bunch to the beach everyday and my building does not have a pool.  I have considered New York styling it and busting open a fire hydrant but, yet again, I would be flogged.  Plus that is just wasteful, and I don't know how to open them anyway. 

So I joined a club.  Oh yes, a country club baby, if you can call it that. It's the Fluminense club. It's more like paying to use a large, rundown common area of an apartment complex.  But you know what, it gets the job done and it gets it done close enough that we can walk there from home. 

I joined this club for one main reason, the shower in the walled-in park.  They have a little shower area, an aquatic park if you will, that consists of 3 showers, a faucet, and a padded floor for the little ones. Of course they took 3 out of 4 knobs off the showers/faucet so we can only turn on one shower. 

Water conservation so we heard.  And it gets a little knock down drag out fight-ish during the peak of the summer when there are 20 kids trying to play under it.  What can you do. It's our sprinkler. 

And the big posse full of kids only brings up more more memories from my youth. Some kids are totally prepared in their bathing suits with towels waiting for them. And then there are kids like mine, who's Mom totally forgot to bring anything. They run around in their underwear, or naked if they are little enough. They air dry while eating a Popsicle on their way home. 

There's screaming and hollering, laughing and spilling of buckets of water over other kids' heads and sometimes the feet of the grown ups.  We big people sit on chairs a couple feet away from the shower, watching and chatting amongst ourselves. 

It's very simple and very pleasant.  And in a weird way, I feel like my boys are getting a taste of my youth, in Portuguese.