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We had a great lunch. Green beans in my favorite style. Chicken, which I'm assured was delicious. Beets and carrots. And some of our new CSA fruit for a snack, with cherry tomatoes mixed in because they came from our garden and why not?
Put it in Jenn's (cheap-ass) tiffin. Packed it up. Went outside.
Ana asked to carry it because she wanted to be helpful. So I let her carry it.
She took all of two steps, swung it a tiny bit, and it popped open and spilled all over the ground.
The fruit was salvaged, and some of the beets and carrots didn't spill, but the rest was a total loss.
We were *right in front of our house*, too.
I broke down and cried. Ana patted my shoulder and tasted one of the saved carrots to cheer me up (carrots being a food she doesn't like but that we encourage her to try anyway - and to her credit, she didn't admit to eating it for that purpose until I asked her about it), and Evangeline offered me a mint leaf (I'm so tickled pink that these kids can identify mint at 30 paces!), and they were just so sweet (right up until at the boat where they complained about being hungry hungry hungry and I knew I really thought we should save the fruit, there wasn't much of it and I was largely out of cash), but still.
I cried, did I say?
It all turned out all right. We met up with Jenn, had lunch at a Korean place, got a metric ton of food (which we ate just about every bite of - the girls more than ate their share, but they've been ravenous lately), and it only cost a good $32, which isn't half bad for the amount of food we ended up with.
We ended up at Teardrop Park. Teardrop Park, as I've said, is the one that's designed to appear hewn from the eternal rocks that have only been there a couple of decades. There's sand at the bottom, sprinklers at the top, and a huge slide in between.
The padding on the sprinklers is mostly white. It has all the advantages of the blacktop (it can be shaped to make hills, it's not slippery, it doesn't come apart like a puzzle for vandals to rip up) without the disadvantage of burning flesh. Ironically, because it's in a part of the city that never sees sun, and because it's covered with very cold water 100% of the time when it matters, it can be black! It's not gonna ever hurt *anybody*!
The sprinklers should've been turned off due to a leak, but somebody had "helpfully" pushed away the barricade with the sign informing us all of the fact. So the water all leaked out of the sprinkler area, down the stone steps, and into the sand at the bottom of the slide, where it eventually made a puddle right where kids land. (There would be a puddle there anyway, if not quite as big as this one got before I redirected the growing river. Kids throw water down all the time and then some.) It was actually *really cool*, and all the kids clearly liked playing with it and fiddling with the rivers and redirecting them and digging and taking water from the puddle and whatnot. I'd love to go to a playground designed like that, with water and sand mixed in such a way that it does more than just clog the sprinklers.
Put it in Jenn's (cheap-ass) tiffin. Packed it up. Went outside.
Ana asked to carry it because she wanted to be helpful. So I let her carry it.
She took all of two steps, swung it a tiny bit, and it popped open and spilled all over the ground.
The fruit was salvaged, and some of the beets and carrots didn't spill, but the rest was a total loss.
We were *right in front of our house*, too.
I broke down and cried. Ana patted my shoulder and tasted one of the saved carrots to cheer me up (carrots being a food she doesn't like but that we encourage her to try anyway - and to her credit, she didn't admit to eating it for that purpose until I asked her about it), and Evangeline offered me a mint leaf (I'm so tickled pink that these kids can identify mint at 30 paces!), and they were just so sweet (right up until at the boat where they complained about being hungry hungry hungry and I knew I really thought we should save the fruit, there wasn't much of it and I was largely out of cash), but still.
I cried, did I say?
It all turned out all right. We met up with Jenn, had lunch at a Korean place, got a metric ton of food (which we ate just about every bite of - the girls more than ate their share, but they've been ravenous lately), and it only cost a good $32, which isn't half bad for the amount of food we ended up with.
We ended up at Teardrop Park. Teardrop Park, as I've said, is the one that's designed to appear hewn from the eternal rocks that have only been there a couple of decades. There's sand at the bottom, sprinklers at the top, and a huge slide in between.
The padding on the sprinklers is mostly white. It has all the advantages of the blacktop (it can be shaped to make hills, it's not slippery, it doesn't come apart like a puzzle for vandals to rip up) without the disadvantage of burning flesh. Ironically, because it's in a part of the city that never sees sun, and because it's covered with very cold water 100% of the time when it matters, it can be black! It's not gonna ever hurt *anybody*!
The sprinklers should've been turned off due to a leak, but somebody had "helpfully" pushed away the barricade with the sign informing us all of the fact. So the water all leaked out of the sprinkler area, down the stone steps, and into the sand at the bottom of the slide, where it eventually made a puddle right where kids land. (There would be a puddle there anyway, if not quite as big as this one got before I redirected the growing river. Kids throw water down all the time and then some.) It was actually *really cool*, and all the kids clearly liked playing with it and fiddling with the rivers and redirecting them and digging and taking water from the puddle and whatnot. I'd love to go to a playground designed like that, with water and sand mixed in such a way that it does more than just clog the sprinklers.
