Nothing beats a playground for an outing with toddlers / preschoolers (which one applies to two-year-olds? I'm not quite sure these days...) They're free, they offer exercise and fresh air, they're a great way for kids to practice various gross motor skills and learn to play nicely with others. For parents, it's a nice change of scene from the house or backyard, requires relatively little mental effort, is a fun way to interact with your kid(s) and can even have fitness benefits. (I'm sure someone has done a piece for a parenting mag on this kind of thing -- Playground Pilates! Tone your Triceps with your Tots! Swings, Slides and Rock-hard Abs!)
Yes. Playgrounds are good.
The one we went to this morning -- Beaver Brook park in the suburban
oasis of Belmont -- was especially good, with its many different play area
options and -- best of all -- a big water play area with all kinds of
spray jets and big rocks for little 'uns to play on and amongst. We'd
never been there before, and it was well worth the trip.
But here's why playgrounds also stress me out. The first is twin-specific. (And probably also applies if you've got two small children close in age.) If the playground is anything other than a very small "tot lot," it's a constant challenge to keep an eye on both kids at once, as they will almost inevitably want to go in two different directions and do two different things. Today at Beaver Brook, true to form, all Elsa wanted to do was play in the water, while Clio only wanted to go on the swings. The place wasn't set up such that I could push Clio and keep Elsa in sight, and even if that was an option, it wouldn't have been ideal. Because Elsa might have tripped and done a full-frontal face plant, nosebleed and all, and it would have taken me that much longer to get to her, and everyone would be thinking "where on earth is that poor girl's mother? Somebody call social services!" Or she might have blithely grabbed a bucket away from some other kid, and gotten scolded by some judgy, helicopter mom thinking, "where on earth is this girl's mother, and why hasn't she raised her daughter properly? Call social services!"
All of which leads to other, related reason that playgrounds stress me out -- the other parents. (If you hadn't guessed already.)
I fully realize that this is partly, or even mostly, my own problem. I know that I'm a good mother, that I do the best I can given the challenges of twin toddlers, and that I shouldn't give a crap what other parents think -- particularly judgemental parents. They're probably the same people who think that feeding your kid non-organic produce or letting them watch television is tantamount to abuse. Who needs them? Meanwhile, I suppose it's silly for me to assume that anyone's judging me in the first place.
But the fear of judgement is just one aspect of the intra-parent playground dynamic that I never have felt totally comfortable with. And I think this may be in part because I'm not a stay-at-home mom who does the playground thing on a regular basis. I get the sense that there's some kind of unwritten code of interaction and etiquette that I'm not quite cued into. Like how friendly you are or aren't supposed to be with other parents. Whether or not you're supposed to let your kids use other kids' toys that are lying around. How much you're supposed to interact with other people's kids, and how "parent-y" it's acceptable to get with them.
Today, for example, I was standing next to a slide, and a little boy who'd just come down it needed a boost down. He was calling for his mom, who was a few feet away, chatting with another mom, and I found myself quickly deliberating: his mom will be over in two seconds, but should I just help him get down? Or would that be weird? Or is it even weirder to ignore him? (Plenty of parents have ignored my girls in similar situations.)
I guess I just find the whole thing odd. Parenting is such a private thing in our culture. You'd think that might change in a place like a playground; instead we're all there together "parallel parenting." Which, on the one hand I like -- I don't particularly want to feel obligated to look after anyone's kids but my own -- but on the other hand I find oddly unnatural and isolating. Especially, admittedly, as the harried woman who's running around trying to keep after two toddlers while other moms are happily hanging out with their one child.
And then there's weird, random, bad vibe stuff that crops up -- like today: at this playground we went to there's a big long bench in the shade, and a number of people had parked their strollers in front of it and/or put their diaper bags on the bench. I sat down with the girls on an empty segment of bench to give them their snack. We were sort of between two strollers, but there was nothing on the bench, and the owners of the strollers were nowhere near. Then this guy comes over and gives me a sort of dirty look and very purposefully takes his stroller away and parks it in front of another section of bench a few yards down. Then proceeds to go back and play with his kids some more. So, I'm thinking: what? If you park your stroller in front of a certain section of bench, does that mean that part of the bench is yours? And nobody else can sit there? Even if you're not currently there? And even though it's PUBLIC FREAKIN' PROPERTY??
On the other hand, I may have been completely misinterpreting his actions. What do I know? I'm just a working mother of twins. An interloper on the carefully constructed, highly coded society that is the sub/urban playground.
But please tell my I'm being paranoid, in this and the other things I mentioned. It would be a great comfort.
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