Chutes and Ladders

Now that the weather is nice, we’ve been spending a lot of time outside trying to tire the kids out. We take a lot of walks.  Those are “fun.” (Sometimes like a root canal)  The kids are distracted by every little thing.  We take a wagon along and sometimes they’ll ride in it. They like to push their toy busses, so mostly the wagon is used to carry the busses after the kids get tired of pushing them.

The other night the kids went for a tiny little walk. Not too far into it, they got crabby, so we went home.  Once home, they played for a little while in the front yard. Then all of a sudden Jessie just took off down the sidewalk for her own little walk.  Matt went after her and just walked along behind, making sure she didn’t get schmushed crossing the streets.  After a bit Sam decided she was missing out on something, so she convinced me that we needed to go on another walk, too.

Jessie led Matt over to the playground thingy behind the community center a block from out house.  I’m not an expert on playgrounds, being some 40 years removed from my own experiences there (and back then the school playground equipment was located on the blacktop….), but these days the trend seems to be one big connected unit made up of various climbing devices and walking bridges and steps and slides.  The one by the community center is pretty big.

Jessie loves to climb. She’s scared to death of slides.  Sam does the climbing because it gets her to the slides, but since she has such short little legs, it’s more of a task for her to get up them than it is for Jessie. Sam, however, lives to go down the slides.

I stood down at the bottom to catch Sam when she got down at the bottom of the slides.  Matt climbed up the device to follow Jessie up and down stairs to make sure she didn’t fall off.  At one point Jess thought about trying a slide. She sat at the top forever debating whether to go or not.  Sam eventually came up behind her. She waited for a bit, then got impatient and just shoved Jessie.  Jess came down the slide with the most terrified look on her face. Sam came down right after her just full of giggles.

Eventually they started picking up stuff (straws, cigarette boxes, etc.) and we decided to leave before they got to the glass and used condom.

A block from daycare there’s a little park.  Park might be generous.  It’s a vacant lot that the city somehow owns and they put of a very small playground unit with one slide on it.  We stopped there after daycare last night on our way home. 

It had a small, short slide.  Sam loved it.  Jess wasn’t too interested until she got sick of going up the few stairs and back down again. Eventually she tried the slide, decided it was fabulous, and they both went up and down for quite a while.

And then there are the ladders.

These things scared me to death when I was a kid.  Our kids aren’t even two, and they just go right up them without a care in the world. I let Jess try one the first time thinking she’d give up after the second rung.  Nope. Right to the top she went.  Eventually Sam decided she had to try it, too.  I spotted them and rarely had to grab them.  I took a few pics of them going up while Matt was watching them.  He was a bit more hands-on than I was.  Mom, you may not want to look. 

Jessie

Jessie

Jess on the slide

Sammie

Sam