Today we hit up the Riverway Sports Complex in Burnaby, a place we drive by often on our way home from work and daycare. This is a huge complex with baseball diamonds, a lacrosse box and soccer pitches. It didn't seem promising, but rumour had it there was a playground there - and there was a cache for us to find too. The playground was underwhelming to say the least - hardly any taller than Charlotte and mostly used as a stretching post for athletic types. But Charlotte announced that she loved it, and if she's happy, I'm happy. She played, she ran around on the grass, and all was well. Until, from out of nowhere, some kid, perhaps a five-year-old boy, raced at her out of nowhere and attempted to grab from her the pen she held in her hand (which she had in turn pinched from me). Charlotte was at quite some distance from me at that point, all by herself in the middle of the field, and this little incident has stuck with me. The boy was old enough to know better - this was no toddler scuffle over something that one wants because the other has it. And to fast forward this scenario a few years... Am I reading too much into this? Because part of me thinks that this kid's parents need to keep an eye on things. A bigger boy willing to attack a smaller girl as she is on her own... Seems to me that there is something there that needs to be nipped in the bud. As it happens, his mother did see what had happened and she shouted at him "Alex, no!". But it was perfunctory, it was light, and she went back to her baseball game. For Charlotte's part, I was proud of her - she screamed at him, refused to relinquish her pen and came running back to me. Good for you, my girl, for sticking up for yourself.
Charlotte played for a long time, then we went to look for the geocache. There are actually three caches in the complex, but we went for the one closest to the playground, "The Fastest Game on Two Feet - WLA Champions". As we approached GZ, Charlotte called out "Geocache, where are you?", much to my delight. My little girl is becoming a geocacher, just like me! She loves to make the find, but she still doesn't like to put the caches back again and seem to think she should be able to take them home as a souvenir. The park is located at N 49.12.331 W 123.00.051:
https://mapsengine.google.com/map/edit?mid=z7IAXiVD2wGY.ke14vi-3MYtI&pli=1
How is that we have gone almost all year without visiting this amazing playground so close to work and daycare?!? The days are so short now that we did most of our playing in the dark, but it was still pretty amazing. "I love this playground!" Charlotte announced as she headed yet again for the dodgy steps up to the super-long slide that wasn't too fast or too slow, but was just right. She didn't like the steps at first and would make me hold her hand as she climbed them, then I would run down again to catch her at the bottom. I was proud of her when she got brave enough to do them by herself, though I didn't get as much exercise out of it when that happened! Charlotte doesn't like to be crowded when she's getting ready to go down the slide, so when two older boys were jostling her at the top, I asked them to wait until she had gone down. She was half-way down when they came barrelling down behind her, knocking into her and sending her flying. She was quite upset and cried hard, but she was more surprised than anything. That didn't stop me from angrily telling the boys that I had asked them to wait. At least the parents came rushing up and apologized to us and dealt with their kids.
Charlotte and I went off to explore other parts of the playground while she recovered from her little trauma; it's made from natural materials for the most part and is pretty amazing. There is a giant crowsnest in the middle of the playground with several ways up, none of which Charlotte is ready for yet. When she is, my heart will be in my throat as it's very tall and designed to be challenging for sure. She recovered from her incident on the slide and was soon back at it again. It was all I could do to tear her away to go home for dinner and the geocache that was hidden nearby was completely out of the question! I ended up going back the next day during my lunch break to find "CoRGQ #18 - Trees Galore". A new challenge to take up - the Richmond GeoQuest! The playground is located at N 49.09.917 W 123.07.363 and is point #86 on the map at the bottom of home page.
