Sunday, September 27, 2009

Newfanlged playground wipes out 3/4 of family

Sadie as Veronica Lake.











Someone told Wife about this cool new playground that was near us, so tonight we went and had a look-see. It was just as space-aged as advertised, featuring not a single familiar playground ride. There were about a half dozen different spinning things and some weird kind of zany climbing things and there were at least three of four things I honestly couldn't figure out what they heck they were or how to use them. It was truly bizarre. It was also rather deadly as we discovered.

So, there were these two spinning rides that I'd never seen before. They were bowls that were set at a slight angle--not quite 45 degrees. The child (or adult) would sit in it and, thanks to the angle, they would start spinning around. If they were sitting right, they'd start to spin faster and faster. Soen was able to adjust his speed fairly well. We had to stop Sadie, because she started going to fast for her liking. That's when yours truly decided to literally give it a whirl. I got in and sat all the way down, not realizing that once I got moving, I'd be unable to stop my self. And that's exactly what happened. Over the course of about two minutes, I started spinning faster and faster until I was pleading with Wife to stop me. I think she thought I was joking around, but eventually she got the message that her husband was going to be in a very serious way rather soon, so she stepped in to stop me. I was finally able to pry myself out of the seat but when I got out, I was so completely dizzy--honestly, I've never been so dizzy in my entire life--that I just fell over... right onto my daughter, knocking her down and bruising her shin. It was a good minute before I could stand up and help with our now screaming daughter. Meanwhile, Wife was comforting Sadie and giving me looks like I'm some kind of abusive drunk.

Two down, one more to go.

A few minutes later Soen was riding on this space-aged merry-go-round. It kind of looks like a monorail track that's set on an angle (what's the deal with this angle business?). Kids can lie on it with their feet dangling on either side of the track. Anyway, Soen slammed his heel on one of the posts that hold the track up.

We decided perhaps it was time to go before we completed the beer frame. Sadie was still limping around as she went to bed tonight. If she's limping tomorrow, we'll take her to the doctor.

UPDATE: She's fine, thank the gods. I was actually kind of worried as to how I was going to explain this to the doctors.

2 comments:

Sasha said...

Elio also got trapped in that spinning thing! They have them at Smith Playground and he hopped in. We were about 25 feet away, playing with Marina and all of the sudden we heard him screaming "Mom! Help me!"

Some guy dragged him out of it.

Anonymous said...

this sounds like a place to implode! what are they thinking? - kids (and their parents) are too precious to torture this way. I can't imagine anyone else likes it either.....hopefully sanity will return to the designers! dd