Paddling pools: expectation vs reality
Children's paddling pools look amazing in the pictures on the boxes but come and laugh at the contrasting pictures of what they actually look like when inflated
It's a sad-but-true fact many parents will recognise. You show your child the box containing the paddling pool you'd just bought. Cue huge child excitement. You spent hours wrestling with packaging and foot pumps and hoses. Cue huge child impatience.
Then just as you've inflated everything properly and got the water temperature right, your child comes running out in their swimsuit. Cue not a little child disappointment that that the small, wobbly inflatable in your garden doesn't look nearly as big and flashy and exciting as the picture on the box.
Of course, they'll jump in anyway and refuse to leave the pool until their lips turn blue. But we've been tickled by one blogger's hilarious collection of images of children's reactions to their real paddling pools verus their expectations from the packaging.
In the first picture, the boy looks thrilled with his rainforest-themed pool but, once it's out of its box, it's clear the kids on the packaging seem to have got a better deal.
In the second shot, the girl stands next to her tiny whale slide - and, looking at the apparent size of the slide on the box, no wonder she was disappointed!
But our favourite has to be the two kids with the, erm, less than giant, crocodile slide. We hope those frowns soon got turned upside down once they started playing in the water!
The blog is ironically called World's Smallest Kids Play on Inflatables, and it seems every beach balls suffer from Incredible Shrinkage Once Out of the Package syndrome: in the last shot, the ball on the packaging clearly dwarfs the children playing but the reality is quite different!
We don't know about you, but these pics are not only making us laugh, they've got us itching for some proper sunshine and a few hours to splash around with a bit of inflatable disappointment ourselves!
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