The Arachnobot Playground of the Future.
The Saturday Adventures have been mostly on hold for a while as I try not to Almost Die a third time, but last Saturday I did feel good enough to take the Babies! to a playground Sweetie and I had driven by on the way home from one doctor's visit. I mostly sat while they played, and I took a lot more picture than I have here but to be honest, I'm really really tired right now and haven't been feeling well the last two days, so I'm not going to go to the trouble of texting the pictures from my cellphone to my email and then loading them into the laptop. If the pictures here aren't enough, you'll just have to use your imagination. (Younger people who's imagination has been stunted by videogames and television should ask an older person to use their imagination for them.)
The playground is near a middle school by the richer part of Madison, and is made up -- as you look at it, above -- of all kinds of vaguely-futuristic, woven rope-and-metal slides and jungle gyms. It's both neat and a little frightening, like a summer camp run by Giant Robotic Spiders who are friendly but will still give you noogies when you try to sleep and also have Giant Robotic Spider Pincers.
The Babies! did not seem put off by the arachnobotic theme; Mr F even seemed to like it. He started climbing on stuff, and he almost never climbs on things at playgrounds, having apparently inherited my dislike of heights. But he took to this place:
He kept busy climbing up and around things and working up a good sweat. (Despite being cloudy, it was about 90 degrees and about 150% humidity.)
Mr Bunches enjoyed it even more, especially the slide, which was by far the weirdest and most-uncomfortable looking slide I've ever seen.
To begin with, it looked like a tongue. I'm not even joking:
The giant-tongue slide made it seem as though Mr Bunches was climbing up out of the throat of some underground monster and then sliding down. And the fact that there were no rails whatsoever made me worry each time that he'd just go flipping off of it. He never did, but when he made me go down it, I almost toppled over.
More my speed was the little pod-like teeter-totter path-way thing:
That you could teeter on or walk across or stand and teeter on. But by far the best thing were these little spinning seat kind of things, a seat that looked like a metallic flower turned into a crooked stool. When you'd sit on them, they'd spin a little, and if you let them spin, they'd slowly pick up speed until you were whirling around a really good clip. Mr F and I rode on one while Mr Bunches did the other, and I took this picture as we were going:
That was just moments before Mr Bunches got flung off onto the ground, which appeared to be made of rubber chips and was quite soft; it was almost fun to fall off of things. Which Mr F and I did shortly after that picture, causing all three of us to stagger around dizzily for a few minutes before rejoining the world of the stable.
In all, we spent about 60 minutes there, heading home only after they'd tried all the stuff two or three times (except that Mr F wouldn't go down the tongue slide) and then only after Mr Bunches played "Buzz Lightyear" for a few minutes, standing up on the edge of the playground and saying "To Infinity And Beyond" and then jumping into my arms.
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