I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s August out there, and around the ol’ raincoaster homestead that means one thing and one thing only: making a laughingstock of yourself trying to play with the kids’s beach toys.

You name it: hula hoops. skipping ropes. beach balls. shovels and pails and pimped-out sandcastle engineering equipment. swimming pool badminton. trac ball. nerf football. water balloons. boogie boards. that stupid little rope on the ring with the dooie at the end of it that you stick on your ankle and dance around like Ed Grimley rolling on E.

They whup my sorry ass every damn time.

But among the glories of summer toys too tempting for even those of positively Malkovichian gravitas, one stands supreme, like the lone cherry on the very summit of the quadruple chocolate-mint meltie with extra crushed hazelnut praline that lives in my dreams, if not in my diet.

The SuperSoaker.

And, as with all the many immortal archetypes which chime agreeably in our collective unconscious like the orchestra of the divine Big Band which plays at the right hand of God (except when the bagpiper is there), the history of the SuperSoaker is nothing less than an epic of human achievement and a moral fable of the most exquisitely resonant irony.

And iSoaker has it; here’s a snippet:

The year of 1989 began the water weaponry revolution. The origin of the Super Soaker® actually dates back to 1982 when Dr. Lonnie Johnson, a nuclear engineer, first had the idea of making a high performance toy water gun. At the time, he was employed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena California as a spacecraft systems engineer on the Galileo mission to Jupiter. As a part time inventor, it took eight (8) years before the gun was finally introduced to consumers…

The idea behind the Power Drencher was actually derived from some work Lonnie was doing on a heat pump that used water as opposed to freon. He hooked up the model of the pump to his bathroom sink at his home. “I turned around and I was shooting this thing across the bathroom into the tub and the stream of water was so powerful that the curtains were swirling in the breeze it sent out,” he said. “I thought, ‘This would make a great water gun.'” (Quote from a Weekend Edition interview between Lonnie Johnson and Liane. Click here for more information.)

Unlike its motorized predecessors, Johnson developed a gun that relied on air pressure and arm pumping for pressurizing the firing chamber. The end result was a water blaster capable of delivering more water farther and faster than any other water gun on the market. The brand name, Super Soaker®, was introduced nation-wide in 1991 through a series of TV-advertisements.

If we, the adults, cannot beat those darn kids at their own game, the least we can do is learn enough to bore them stupid on the subject, right?

I’m going to do something I’m probably going to regret and jump into the Caesarean Section vs. Natural Childbirth debate.

First, I’m going to say that I’m not for scheduling C-sections because it’s “easier” for either the doctor or the mother than going through labor. It especially makes no sense to me, as recovery times for C-sections are significantly longer and more painful than for natural childbirths.

C-Sections, although having a low mortality rate, are just not as safe as having a child naturally.

But, no one should be looked down upon because they wanted an epidural.

No woman should feel guilty, “less of a woman,” or grief because she had to have a necessary C-section instead of natural childbirth. And other women shouldn’t necessarily feel superior for having a natural childbirth, either. Neither one makes you a better or worse mother.

I think that we perform too many medically unnecessary C-sections in the US.

Yet at the same time, we cannot forget that dying during childbirth was not uncommon all that long ago.

I think there is a distinct lack of true dialogue between mothers-to-be and their healthcare providers.  I don’t know if it can be traced to a bottom-line driven healthcare system, lack of knowledge, malpractice fears, or what.  But either doctors need to listen more, or women have to be more aggressive in questioning their doctors.

Or, better yet, how about both of those?

And yes, this is coming from a woman who had a scheduled, medically necessary C-section.