A Day in the Park

We were supposed to have a randomly warm day today, in the 70s.  Well, it didn't quite make it that high, but it was fairly nice this morning.  Since it was also a holiday and Bill was off work, we decided to take Karina to the park.  She was so excited!  Every time she sees a photo with a playground in it, she gets excited and points it out to me.  So when I told her this morning that we were going to a playground, she was ready to go!

She gets pretty distracted by her books, but once I tore her away from them, we headed out.  When we pulled into the parking lot, she started squealing and giggling.  Then when we walked over to the playground, she was holding my hand and pointing and smiling.  We went right up to the equipment and climbed up together.  This particular playground has one large jungle gym with a tall swirly slide, a medium sized bumpy slide, a slightly smaller tube slide, and a very small slide that makes a short curve.  That one is shorter than me, only about three or four steps up to get to it. 

The first thing Karina wanted to do was go down the bumpy slide, but she absolutely had to have me go down with her.  Down we went and she was very happy.   The second time I made her go down on her own, and Bill waited for her at the bottom.  Actually, he held her hand from the top down.  She went so fast, and she loved it!  We wandered around for a minute, and she seemed to not know what she wanted to do.  I finally convinced her to try the smallest slide, because she has enjoyed that one in the past.  I wasn't prepared for just how much she would love it!  She must have gone down that slide 50 times.  It was nice because I could just stand next to it, and Bill was able to take pictures (I of course left my camera in the car, so who knows when I'll ever see these pictures).  Finally she decided she wanted to go on the swings. 

She doesn't really like the swings, so I don't know why she always asks to go on them.  She only lasts a few swings and then she wants to get down.  I think she doesn't like the motion of it.  So, after swinging for about 10 seconds, she was done.  Now she was ready to try another slide.  This time she wanted to go on the biggest one, the swirly slide.  For this one, you have to go up about 8-10 steps to one platform, and then up about 5 more steps to get to the top of the swirly slide.  The first few times she went down with me, but she was trying to go down before I was ready so finally, I just let her go.  She did great!  She held on to the side of it as she went down, so she didn't lose her balance.  Her sneakers kept her from going too fast.  She was so excited!  She probably went down that slide about 20 times before finally she was just getting so tired we were afraid she was going to get hurt.  Plus, the playground was getting really packed.  All the bigger kids were really really patient and nice.  None of them got upset if they had to wait for Karina to go down in front of them.  One boy was playing some game and had kind of hidden up at the top of the swirly slide, so when Karina wanted to go down, he got right down.  He was really gracious, too, and didn't even mind at all.  I didn't even have to ask him to move or ask Karina to wait her turn, which is what I usually do.  It was just such a perfect morning.

After the playground, we did walk over to see the dog park, but there weren't many dogs out, so we just found a table and had lunch.  Karina was afraid of the tree roots on the ground, which was kind of weird, but not so much for her.  She freaks out if leaves get in her way.  We had a nice lunch, hit the grocery store, and went home for her to take a nice nap. 

What a great day.