The Playground with the Dangerous Equipment

This afternoon I brought the kids to the playground at 117th Street and Morningside Avenue, a playground which in our household is known as The Playground with the Dangerous Equipment, in honor of its old-fashioned slides with exposed ladders and nearly nothing in the way of guard rails. The playground in question is slated to be demolished and replaced with a more modern playground, one with safer and more attractive modern equipment, beginning this coming spring. My friend Deborah, visiting from Weehawken, came with me, and we watched my nearly-4-year-old play while we took care of the twins, who are too young to play at The Playground with the Dangerous Equipment. (Being 10 weeks old, they're too young to play at any playground.) Deborah also took both twins for awhile and officiated while my son and I raced one another on the nifty racetrack they have at that playground.

While at the park we observed, to our great surprise, the daffodils in FULL BLOOM. I found the sight of those daffodils incredibly disturbing, and am less and less comforted by meteorologists' insistence that what is going on in NY this winter is unrelated to global warming. I was curious to see if anyone else had noted this phenomenon, and sure enough, there it was, in Joe Schumacher's blog. (I didn't get any pictures of it myself when I was there because (a) I don't usually carry a camera with me, and (b) I do not take pictures on Shabbat. In honor of this blog, though, I will try to start taking more pictures, something I've been meaning to do for awhile anyway. For starters, I'll try to post pictures of The (aforementioned) Playground with the Dangerous Equipment, sooner rather than later.)

We ultimately had to leave because my son was defying my instructions on how to play relatively safely on the Dangerous Equipment. (There's a huge surprise.)