An Afternoon at the Park

I am not a mom who spends a lot of time at parks and playgrounds with her kids. This is for several reasons.

1) I have to drive to any park and we all know packing up everyone in the car takes a bit of extra effort

2) Joash doesn't have a really good relationship with playground equipment yet. In the past, he has never wanted to go and explore a playground structure on his own, he didn't really like to swing and he didn't really like slides. So, that kind of limits the amount of fun one can have at a play ground. Why would I drive somewhere to have my kid pretty much want to just sit on my lap the whole time. We can do that at home.

3) Joash doesn't do well when there are too many unfamiliar kids around. Yeah, he is a bit shy and timid. So, he doesn't really like to go on anything that another kid is using. And if he is on something and another kid comes over, he gets off right away and runs to me.

But, a new year has come and I thought we should try out the parks again. The last two days have been just wonderfully sunny and spring like, so we went to two parks this week. The two parks that are closest to our house are pretty small and for the most part not used all that much, which fits Joash pretty well.

Mataya tried out the swing and surprised no one by loving it (since she pretty much likes everything her brother does not like).

Joash tried out the swings to and surprise - he really like them. Until another kids came to swing...

Joash did run and climb on the play structure a bit more this year on his own, so that was nice. He is still not a fan of slides though. He would only go down if he could hold on to my arm the whole time. So, we will have to keep working on that one.

So, I think parks and playgrounds are growing on Joash. His favourite thing still was to play with the stones and dirt around the play structure, but I think all kids are like that to an extent. Mataya loved it, so we will have to visit these a few more times throughout the summer.

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