Splash Day

Today was La Luz's end of the year party. To celebrate the girls spent the morning in wading pools, running through sprinklers, sliding through slip and slides, and eating Plum Street snowballs. It was the perfect way to end the school year.

La Luz is positively the most unadventurous (almost) 3 year old I have ever met. She refused to get into the pool for the first hour because there were "a bunch of kids splashing around in there". No kidding; it's a wading pool. She ran just close enough to the sprinkler to narrowly miss actually getting wet and looked at me as if to say, "phew, that was a close one mom". She stared at her friends on the slip and slide, mesmerized. She watched them laugh and scream and wipe out and occasionally cry but she didn't get anywhere near it, at first. It was 85 degrees and sunny but as soon as a breeze kicked in she asked for her towel saying that it was a "a little chilly".

It is not that I mind how unadventurous she is, in fact, I kind of love it because it has made life easy on me as a mother. I have never had to child-proof cabinets, never fussed over breakables and pointy edges. I have never even had to use baby gates (except to keep Loki out of certain rooms). La Luz asks before doing something she thinks might be slightly daring - "can I stand up on this sofa?", "is it okay to jump off the bottom stair?", "do we put this (insert name of any random, inedible object) in our mouths?" - that's about how it goes. Occasionally, though, I want her to act without asking, jump and slide and fall down and test limits and do all of those things that being a kid is all about. I guess I have to remember, she eventually does all of those things, just in her own time.

Here she is after working up some nerve and carefully, very carefully, making her way down the 5 ft of slippery plastic. She screamed with joy the entire time. She is splayed out at the end not because she made some running jump but because (I think) she got to the end and figured it was safer to lie down and crawl out than try to walk on that thing.



She eventually got in the pool too - and loved it. I had been telling her all morning that she would think it was great. She didn't believe me and only worked up the nerve when there were 10 minutes of play time left. I guess that's how it goes....all in her own time.