Thursday Terrified Parent Blogging 102711

A couple of cell-phone pictures from last weekend, on an early-evening run to one of the local playgrounds. The sun was pretty well down when SteelyKid decided she wanted to climb on the giant rope climbing structure they have. she's gone on this before, but it's never lasted long, so we figured, why not?

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(It's blurry because of the low light-- I brightened it massively in GIMP.)

She's gotten considerably bolder and more agile since the last time she went on this. And it got even better:

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That's right, at one point she was over my head. And about five feet away horizontally, with a network of ropes between us, so there was basically nothing I could do if she slipped.

This was only a tiny bit terrifying.

She was very careful, though, and managed to pick her way along all over the thing-- which really is awesome, enough so that I'm amazed it's allowed to exist at a public elementary school in this litigious age. She went back the next night as well, for more climbing, though I wasn't along that time.

And that's where things stand in Chateau Steelypips. No FutureSibling! yet, though we're coming up on one week to the projected due date. Which isn't doing anything to lower the ambient stress level, let me tell you...

More like this

We have rope structures just like this sprinkled around the various playgrounds here in SF...my daughter loves them.

She's at the stage where she enjoys getting "chased" across them by her overweight, huff'n-n-puff'n dad.

A few weeks ago, a friend brought her daughter over to the park behind our house. I enjoyed watching her transition from timidly climbing the rope ladder when she first arrived to practically running up it with no thought by the time she left. It's fun to imagine all those neurons making additional connections to make the process more efficient.

Hi,

I wrote a similar article about my daughter climbing the rope structure at golden gate park.

Its great to see the kids progress. Wish you wonderful times with your kid,

Dinesh