I am standing in my sister-in-law Tessa’s backyard in 99-degree heat watching her daughter Cleo belly-flop onto a brand-new inflatable splash pad that has been out of the box for less than the time it takes to scramble an egg, and I can smell it from the patio. Not chlorine. Not lawn. A smell I can only describe as the lobby of a Pep Boys.
The box arrived Friday from an Amazon seller called something like SUNJOYY-MAX, and Tessa cut the tape, plugged in the little hose adapter, and inflated the whole thing on the deck while it was still creased from the warehouse. Twenty minutes. A whale-shaped splash pad, manufactured I would estimate forty-six hours ago in a facility that also makes traffic cones, was full of municipal water and a four-year-old before the off-gassing had even gotten started.
I am a member of a Facebook group called “PVC Mamas: We Read the Manifest,” and the consensus there on inflatable summer toys is that you are supposed to hose them down with a vinegar dilution, leave them open in direct sun for at minimum 72 hours, and then hose them down AGAIN before a child so much as sits on the edge. Some of the more careful moms in there go a full nine days. One woman in Florida quarantines hers in a screened porch for two weeks and has never had a single ear infection in three children, which I think speaks for itself.
The compounds we are talking about, according to my sister-in-law Pam — different sister-in-law, this is Garrett’s older sister, she works the front desk at a pediatric ENT and is basically a nurse — are phthalates, something called DINP, and a plasticizer she pronounced “deh-hex-uh-something” but said I would know it if I saw it on a label. She told me at Easter that the smell coming off a fresh pool float is the float “crying out,” which I thought was a little dramatic at the time but which I am now revisiting in Tessa’s yard.
I tried to be diplomatic. I said, “Tess, did you maybe want to let it breathe for a couple days?” and she said the box said it was “BPA-free,” which, and I mean this lovingly, is the toxin equivalent of a restaurant putting up a sign that says “No Rats Today.” There are roughly four hundred other things on the manifest, sweetheart. BPA is the one they let you advertise about.
What I do at our place, and what I have offered to set up for Tessa twice now, is a galvanized stock tank from the Tractor Supply on 25, filled from a copper-fitted hose I keep specifically for drinking and kid water, with one cup of food-grade Redmond salt stirred in because salt is a mineral, not a chemical, and the kids come out of it cleaner than they went in. Garrett calls it the trough. The twins call it the trough. It is a trough. It is also the only thing on our property a child can lie down in without absorbing a Goodyear plant through their lower back.
Meanwhile at the splash pad, three other moms had shown up with their kids, and not one of them was bothered by the smell. One of them, Kelsey, was eating a Costco churro directly over the water feature and laughing. I love Kelsey. Kelsey would let her son sleep inside a brand-new yoga mat. We are not going to change Kelsey today.
I left around four with both twins because Wren had started complaining her tongue tasted “like a balloon,” which is a sentence I have now heard from one of my children in three different summers, always within an hour of an inflatable being introduced to a gathering. Cleo, when we left, was asleep face-down on the whale’s tail, hair wet, cheeks pink, breathing in deep contented little draws of what I can only describe as the new-car package.
Tessa texted me last night that she was going to “air it out next time,” which is the splash-pad equivalent of saying you’ll start flossing, and I told her I love her and that the trough is open every Saturday through September. Bring a towel. Bring Cleo. Do not bring the whale.