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
