I thought I had posted this but apparently I wrote it on my laptop while riding the train and didn't post it later. This is the trip to the park prior to the one where Sydney climbed up and went down the slides on her own.
Sunday November 22nd, 2009 a warm day so we took Sydney to the park. The trip started out with swinging and then moved on to the slide and teeter tottering. The slide has always been a questionable activity. Sydney likes going down it but doesn’t make an effort to go down it again. Still, knowing that it makes her grin and laugh, we keep going back to it. The first couple trips down were fun and Sydney showed an interest in walking back to the steps and climbing back up for another trip. We put her down one more time and this time Meghan was going to try to take a picture of her going down and grinning (which is hard to capture because of the camera delay). Near the end of the slide though, the rubber on Sydney’s shoes caught just enough to cause her to flip off the end of the slide going face first down into the dirt and wood chips that make up the floor of the play area. Meghan didn’t see it happen because she was looking through the view finder of the camera. I saw it in slow motion from the top of the slide. Sydney was there on the ground face down, butt in the air. I held my breath watching her awkwardly squirm trying to get up and rushed down. Meghan looked down, gasped, and rushed to her. She stood Sydney up and her whole front was filthy from head to toe. Sydney had wood chips and dirt all over her face and in her mouth. She stood there making a face and trying to spit out all the wood chips and dirt. Meghan brushed her off leaving us with a dirty but wood chip free baby. Oddly, Sydney didn’t whine or cry through the ordeal.
With that experience behind us we did some teeter tottering and then decided to try the smaller slide. (The little kid area has a small blue slide and a slightly longer but not higher curving red slide. Both are probably 5 feet tall.) I don’t recall whether Sydney made it down the blue slide once or three times but on her final slide, her shoes caught the slide and she flipped landing face down on the slide itself. It was at that point when we decided we had had enough sliding for one day. Again, no crying. I expected a bloody nose from that one, but she was unscathed. Sydney actually led us back to the swing as if to say "I've had enough of that! Let's do something fun."
After Sydney’s bath later that night she had nothing more than a couple red dots on each cheek as if someone had dotted her with a red ink pen. Most likely she got poked with some of the wood when she landed on her face.