Park envy

Before I begin poking fun, let me say this: We live in a great city, with a particularly outstanding parks and recreation department that manages two canoe liveries, three community pools, two golf courses, an indoor ice rink, dozens of ballparks and hundreds -- literally hundreds -- of parks. There's always something to do... free or very cheap.

However, Ann Arbor does have a tendancy to grab a vacant parcel of land and post a sign proclaiming it "Zoe Park." (There's not really one called Zoe Park. That's an example. Work with me.) Sonja and I joke about it a lot as we drive by what's literally an overgrown 20-foot x 20-foot chunk of land with a Parks & Rec sign. They call them "nature areas."

The point of all this is... when we moved into our house four summers ago (or was it five?), there was one of "those" parks right around the corner. There was a sign out front touting it as "Evergreen Park," and that's about all that was there... a large parcel of evergreens on a city street where there happened to be a gap between houses. Not even a walking path.

That changed this summer. This is now two blocks from our house:

We knew they had started doing some work there last summer, but didn't realize such a great playground was in the plans. Sonja and Zoe stumbled upon it during a walk Saturday afternoon. We were back for another hour on Sunday, a precursor, I'm sure, to many more summer evenings and weekends. Here's some highlights:

There's this wacky swing that Zoe loves (I'm hypothesizing that it's for handicapped folks. Or really big toddlers):

We think Zoe particularly likes this swing because of its extensive safety system. She's very into seat belts currently (thanks, Dora the Explorer!)... and nearly melted down when Sonja started to pull her in the wagon without first buckling up.

There's also this puppet-show style stage...

... tucked beneath this big slide (yes, there's somebody up there with her!):

She even had a pretty great time going down by herself, which we were a little surprised by considering her typically cautious personality.

Of course, she liked it best when Mom sat at the bottom of the slide so she could "keek Mommy in a butt."

So, we have a great new park around the corner from us. Fantastic. What could be better?

It's just that... I don't mean to belly-ache, but... well... remember that Saturday afternoon walk during which Zoe and Mommy discovered the new park? If you're wondering what Daddy was doing at that time, he was putting the finishing touches on this:

A hundred bucks, hours of back-breaking work (for someone who doesn't really do back-breaking work) and the first thing Zoe says upon seeing it is "ride to paygown?"

Oh well. Come play with us at the park.