Kiddie Park

At the Championships, one of the very nicest things was the Kiddie Park. Wow. The Boy was in heaven, and there were various things that he enjoyed:

• A whole lot of slides like the one above
• A snake made of ice, but hollow inside so little folks could crawl through
• Ice baskets that The Boy could sit in and I could spin
• 'Hands on' sculptures of bears, elephants, etc.
• Little ice houses with ice furniture inside
• An ice rink with ice walls
• An ice maze in the form of a Chinese castle

One of the neatest slides was made to look like the Great Wall of China. Inside the ice were various colors of fluorescent tubes. At night it is gorgeous, and my pictures of it are lame, so, imagine. As a slide, it looks cool, but the long, shallow slope was not conducive to high speed terror. First, The Boy got to the top, but appeared to leave much of his courage at the bottom. It was pretty high. So, he didn't want to slide alone.

I went with him. He was wearing nylon pants, gloves, etc., and I was wearing jeans, a tee-shirt, and a flannel shirt. He didn't slide very well, and I didn't slide at all. I inched down the slide on my rapidly cooling butt and pushed him along with my foot. We both made it. It would have been nice to have ridden this one on a sled, but that was, according to the sign out front, prohibited.

All in all, the Kiddie Park was great.