VestibularStimulation

Opal and I had a quiet day yesterday, at her request, but it was really a bit too quiet and she was pretty hyper last night and bad-tempered this morning. So today we took a picnic to the park, and spent nearly four hours. She is now well worn out, and I am sorely missing ibuprofen (to which I turn out to be nastily allergic). We had contemplated adventure, but instead went to a local park just a little farther away than usual which has a tire swing. Opal went on the tire swing until somebody else stopped the swinging something like 6 times, and until she actually called a halt once. Somebody else's father pushed for a while, but I spent at least 30 minutes pushing 3 kids at a time higher! and faster! I also spent several minutes pushing the one little girl who did not want to swing high and fast, whose father wandered over, startled to find his daughter swinging alone with a line of little girls waiting. It was a good break for me. (I understand why pushing is not popular; it's a lot of work, particularly if you're trying to make 150 pounds of kids get high enough to make the chains go slack, and the likelihood that you are accidentally going to touch somebody else's kid's butt is high, which has got to be nerveracking if you're male.)

Oddly, the park was dominated by girls at all times, and the boys that were there were almost all under 5 (with the exception of a lanky kid in his late teens who was combining loosely watching smaller kids with practicing his parkour, flipping off the fence; a father who knew him asked him to demonstrate proper front rolls, on your shoulder instead of your head, and, unable to resist the call of showing off, he said nonchalantly "You're really supposed to use your hands but I'm too lazy" and did a forward roll from a stand up to a stand again with his hands in his pockets).