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Bravery!

By Jess
I think it's safe to say that our favorite playground equipment is the slide, or "Aah". Most often we bike up to the small playground situated outside the married-student housing near us, but this week we've branched out to  and down to the

The campus playground offers little more than swings and a small structure with monkey bars, a curved ladder thing, and two slides: one, three feet long, and the other, maybe four feet long and slightly steeper. All summer long, pretty serious coaching was required in order to get Alex to go down the longer slide. It's been fun to watch him grow more confident, going down the little slide all by himself and then more eagerly tackling the slightly steeper one.

Still, I was not prepared to go to Morrow's Meadow in Yorktown (the next town over) and have him go down a seven-foot slide all by himself without a care in the world. There are two playsets there, and we ended up on the one intended for older kids simply because the more age-appropriate equipment was in full sun.

I was surprised again tonight when Alex took on the super-twisty slide at the Burris Backyard playground (which is totally awesome and also a short bike ride from our house) ALL BY HIMSELF. ... Except that he needed help scooting over the bump at the top. Before we left, he also went down the tube slide -- that twists in the middle. Somewhere on the trip he tipped backwards and bumped his head. I'm not sure he entirely trusted it after that.

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