Slip N' Slide

Uncle Justin bought Chase a Slip N' Slide for his birthday. Since it was a balmy 90 degrees on Monday, it seemed time to set it up. Chase has never seen one, and didn't really know what it was all about. One of the neighbor kids was outside, so I enlisted his help.

I would have loved to show Chase how to run and slide down, but the most I can do these days is waddle. So I asked Jaden to give Chase a demo on how it is done. Chase liked what he saw, but couldn't quite coordinate the running and sliding together. So he started out with just sitting and I pushed him down the hill. Then he discovered he went faster if he was on his back, rather than his butt. After 30 minutes of trial and error, he would run, stop at the top and then hop onto the slide. This at least gave him a little more momentum, and he was making it down to the splash pool at the bottom. Even though he wasn't going very fast, he kept saying, "This is a lot of fun, this is fun!"

However, his screeches and laughs soon turned to tears. After he went down, he wasn't paying attention, and walked across the slide just when McKenna was going down. She took him out at the knees. Her head hit him pretty hard on the shins. It took a good 5 minutes before he was ready to play again. We had a quick talk about being observant and walking off to the side once he was done. After that it was back to sliding. Pretty soon I had to put a halt to the fun. The mosquito's were coming out and my grass was turning into a mud slide. I reassured Chase there would be many more days of fun to come!