Reading: Getting caught up on some very old Entertainment Weeklys that I uncovered during my cleanup yesterday.

Listening: Various harpsicord concertos by J.S. Bach.

Hot Day at the Shady Playground

Tab was off today for Memorial Day. The university is miserly with holidays. There are no university holidays at all in the five months between New Year's Day and Memorial Day at the end of May. When everyone else in the area has off for Martin Luther King Day in January and the President's holidays in February, the university employees are still at work. And in the autumn the university does not give its employees holidays on Columbus Day or Veterans Day. So we're enjoying having Tab home for the long Memorial Day weekend.

The weather was hot and humid today, with no breeze. The twins needed some exercise (Daniel spent last night at his grandmother's house) so I took them to the only nearby playground with shade. I packed a lunch for them and a jug of water for myself and sat at the picnic table reading while they ran around enjoying themselves.

This playground has lost some of its equipment since we first started coming here a couple years ago. The first thing to go was the round-and-round. I don't know the actual name for it; "round-and-round" was what the boys' called it. It was a large circular platform with handles that you could push around and then jump on for a ride.

Next the two little bouncy horse rides were removed. I was especially sorry to see them go since they were Stephen's favorites. Another mother told me the horses were removed because a local day care operator used to bring the kids in her charge to this playground, and one of the kids fell off. The day care operator complained to the township, and the township was afraid of law suits, I guess. Of course, if the story is true, it was the day care operator's fault for not supervising the kids well enough. The bouncy horses were not at all dangerous, unlike the round-and-round, which might have caused injuries.

The most recent casualty is the horse swing. The last time we were here, back in the fall, I noticed that it was broken. Now it has vanished completely. Daniel used to love that horse swing. He learned how to ride it before he could make himself swing on a regular swing.

Every time we come here, I wonder if something else will be missing.

Because this playground is in a wooded area, it is rather dirty. The picnic table is dotted with bird droppings and tree debris, and there are bugs everywhere. Stephen and Matthew were intrigued by the caterpillars they found on the playground equipment. At one point, I felt something crawling on my foot (I was wearing sandals). I looked down to see a huge beetle, which I quickly shook off. For the rest of the day, I felt as though I had little bug feet crawling all over me.

On the way back from the playground we stopped at Acme to buy some Breyer's mint chip ice cream. You couldn't pay me to eat this flavor in the winter, but whenever it gets really hot, this is what I want. I like Breyer's the best, too, because the mint part is really minty tasting, and Breyer's doesn't dye their mint chip ice cream a lurid shade of green.

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