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Kids never fail to baffle me.

We had three younguns over to the house Saturday for an evening of swimming and burgers, along with their parental units - a poker buddy and recent parolee from the prison work camp, and his wife (who, as a side note is joining Wife tonight at the exercise bootcamp because my better half likes to lure friends into the middle of the desert - where their screams won't be heard - during the summer's hottest day and torture them with squat thrusts, chair dips, push ups and something called fire hydrants, which really doesn't sound pleasant unless water is spewing out of it to cool ya down). According their units, the rug rats were fairly new to swimming and we were more than happy to let them crash our pool. Wife and I found two-player Marco Polo was about as much fun as throwing a tennis ball against the wall 400 times, so getting a chance to have playmates in the dogs' water bowl (our pooches have a 25,000-gallon water bowl because we like to spoil our pets) was a bonus.

As we made our way out to the pool, the motherly unit produced pool toys for the brood - retrievable cups, a plastic Winnie the Pooh and a plastic Care Bear. Wife threw the toys around the pool, and the younguns with their floaties keeping their little noggin's above water would chase their toys around the pool. The toys looked new and I remembered thinking, man, the only pool toys we got when kids were rolled-up, used socks and Ziploc baggies - the gallon freezer bags at least - that you'd have to zip quick to trap the air. That was our floaties. Dear Ma would duct tape to Ziploc bags to each side of our chest and toss us into the pee-warm water of the neighborhood pool. Since the duct tape hurt like a bugger to yank off after swimming, I learned how to swim quick. Lil' Sis was not so lucky. And when she and I asked for pool noodles the Ol' Man gave us a Styrofoam block and told us to use our imagination to turn it into a noodle.

A Winnie the Pooh pool toy would have put us with the town's elite, I'm sure.

As far as Wife and I go, the extent of our pool toy toy box are noodles and a battery-powered fish that will nuzzle your bung hole if you're not watching. We chose not to pull out the friendly fish with the kids around.

After an hour or so of being pulled around on the noodles and chasing their cups, filling them and then proceeding to dump the pool water on any adult's head within arm's reach, the ankle biters realized there was a whole lot more to the yard than just the pool.

"What's this, Daddy?" I heard one of them asking their pop, and I knew it could be one of three things: rotted hunk of citrus, fallen pine cone, or one of the pooches presents they like to leave me. Thankfully it was the second one.

"It's a pine cone. It came from their pine tree."

"Wow! Look at all of them on the ground."

"Let's grab them all," said another sub-three-footer.

Wife and I exchanged glances. We didn't have to say anything, we both knew what the other was thinking. Who needs to mortgage the house to buy fancy pool toys when you have pine-cone shedding pine trees? That's our toy store. We'll gather every fallen cones and stock them away until we have a munchkin or four of our own. Once they're ready for water toys we'll pull out the cones and explain these are what all the kids want to play with. Just ask Daddy's poker buddy what his kids play with now - you got it, junior, pine cones.

I'm still pulling cones out of my skimmer basket, two days later, but I'll have to say it was worth watching them haul every pine cone they could find and dumping it into the pool. I learned that while you can supply the rug rat with with his or her own jet ski and pet dolphin, kids will always find something a little more interesting. It might seem mundane to those of us over the age of six, but to the younguns something like a pine cone is like finding the Holy Grail of pool fun. And that must be the cool thing about having freeloaders of your own, everything is new, and different, and fun whether it be a salad spoon or Daddy's chainsaw.

Now I'm not saying you can't buy our freeloaders a nice water basketball hoop or a floating fortress because we have pine cones and we plan to placate our kiddies with fallen palm fronds and pine cones, by all means charge it to the card and bring it over. You can even be proactive and buy the pool toys now, it will give Wife and I a chance to test them out before we get a munchkin or four.

And anyway, I'm getting tired of beating Wife at one-on-one Marco Polo.