Learning Judgment at the Park

 

Nimue is full of curiousity and ideas. This leads to plans :)

I'm happy to report that while she sometimes dreams up things that may be unwise, she will check out the situation before actually attempting said insanity. In the case of the picture above, she climbed up the slide with her scooter, looked at it, and went down the stairs instead. Common sense coming in??? Amazing.

On the other hand, when consequences don't seem dire, she will fully execute her plans:
On our walk back from downtown yesterday, we discovered that the big water structure at Las Palmas Park was on. A source of considerable joy, since the only time it is on is when someone is willing to pay $60/hour to have it turned on for an event. Many, many kids of all ages were playing on it, and Nim jumped right in after pondering whether or not it was worth it to have to walk home wet (this choice didn't take long). Not a problem for me, as I had the latest edition of the Economist with me, so I settled under a tree to read. I glanced up occasionally to see her having fun, wished I had the camera, and then fell back into my magazine. I glanced up again, and Nimue was making mud structures on the edge. Back to reading. On the next glance, she was using the front of her soaking wet long skirt as a bag to haul more sand over to the construction zone.

Darn. Really wished I had the camera then.

She noticed me watching her and got a really guilty expression on her face until I pointed out that it was fine as long as she didn't complain on the walk home. Back to the engineering problem for her and the magazine for me.

The next time I looked up, she had buried her wet self in the sand pile. Good old-fashioned messy play. Repeat the process several times. A fine and unexpected ending to Friday afternoon.

Around 5:15, it was time to leave, so she brushed off her feet, put on her shoes, and we headed home. On the way back, we noticed a pack of long-haired middle-school aged boys out raucously riding their bikes, generally acting like groups of boys that age. Nimue looked up at me and asked "Are they orphans? They look like they're orphans. They look really wild."

Funny that young teenagers out enjoying themselves on a sunny afternoon struck her as a pack of feral orphans on the streets of Sunnyvale.

I looked down at the bedraggled, wet, stringy-haired sand monster next to me. "Then do you look like an orphan?" I asked.

"No, I have a parent with me. I'm tame."

Sadly the image of the bedraggled, wet, stringy-haired sand monster is left to the reader's imagination, as upon arriving home, she ran around to the back yard and stripped off all of her clothes and began cavorting around in her birthday suit before I got there. Tame. heh.