More water park fun: A review

In my quest to tour local water parks, today I took my son to Coconut Cove in the South County Regional Park in Boca Raton. I'd heard from another mom that it is really good, and with a glowing testimonial like that, how could I not go? Coconut Cove is close enough to go to casually, but not exactly nearby, but I had to try it out.

After I paid to get in, the cashier gave me two bracelets to put on us. My son -- being a boy and all -- has never worn a bracelet of any kind. I have never put anything like that on him. And apparently I suck at putting these bracelets on, because both of them ended up too big for him and shaken off onto the floor. I returned to the cashier and asked if she could give me two more bracelets, and she told me she wasn't allowed to -- I should just show the bracelets I had if someone asked me about them. By this time, though, I had crumpled the bracelets into a wad, which wasn't very impressive.

The disheartening part about our trip to Coconut Cove, though, is that my son -- the same child who played for almost two hours at Splash Adventure just last week -- refused to so much as stand in one inch of water here. I guess he's just having an off day. With my son clinging to me, I tried walking him around the water playground, up the stairs, showing him the cute foam sea turtle just under the surface of the water, pointing out the other children who were happily playing.... He wouldn't take the hint. So I gave up and went home. (Notice the lack of photographs in this post.)

To compare it to Splash Adventure last week, though, I would rather have gone there than Coconut Cove today. The water playgrounds at both parks are almost the same, and Splash Adventure is closer to my home and about half the price. True, Coconut Cove has two tall water slides and a river float, but they were closed today -- and my boy wouldn't have been interested or able to use those features anyway.

Next week, I hope to try out yet another water park.

My work is so hard.

Oh, and I just found out about the City of Miami's first water park, Grapeland (what is up with that name?!), which just opened. Yay!

Pushy

If anyone is reading me, welcome to my wildlife blog -- I mean my mom blog.

Just to prove I can write about my child, I'll tell you about one of his hobbies. He loves to push things around. I think it started when I got him a hippo push toy to help him steady himself when he was learning to walk.



(Not actual picture of my son.)

Then my mother gave him a ride-on-top/push behind Winnie the Pooh train for his first birthday. Because the train has lights and lots of buttons to push and plays repetitive songs that are as loud as the runways at Miami International Airport, my son thought this was way more fun and quickly abandoned his hippo.



(Also not a picture of my son.)

Now my child has moved on to strollers.



We got a free, lightweight umbrella stroller with the last car seat we bought. I bet if I put a pedometer on my son, it would prove he gets those 10,000 steps in, plus, just pushing this thing around the house. And it doesn't even have a single light or button, and doesn't play music. Weird.

The problem is that he doesn't want to ride in strollers anymore. He'd rather push them. (Sorry, Paula! My son didn't know your beautiful baby girl was in that stroller. Honest.) I try to take him for a walk to the park around the corner, and he throws a fit because he wants to push the stroller down the street. Believe me, I'd rather let him do that than be the victim of another one of his tantrums, but I can't let him loose around all those cars on the road. When we get to the park, he wants to push the stroller around -- the slides and swings, he can take them or leave them, but don't get between him and his stroller.

It's not just strollers. If we're at Target and I try to put him in the seat of a shopping cart, he reaches out to the bar with both hands so he can push it. While he's in my arms. Once he's in the seat of the shopping cart, and we pass by someone's unattended cart, he strains to reach out and push it. While he's sitting in his own cart.

Today when I asked my son if he'd like to play outside, he smiled and immediately situated himself in that little umbrella stroller. OK. Well, this was different. He let me push him out onto our patio ... past the pool fence ... onto our dry, crunchy weed patch beautiful backyard lawn. Then he heaved himself out of the stroller, knocked me out of the way and started pushing it around. The little sneak!

As I watched my son navigate the yard with his wheels, I started thinking, you know, our society really needs people who can push things. This is a very valuable technical skill. Where would we be, for example, without the fancy restaurant waiter who pushes the dessert tray to the table? The guys who haul hand trucks stacked with beverages to stock the shelves? The intense medical professionals wheeling a hospital gurney? People in management? Oh, wait -- managers push people around, not things.... Anyway, I'm sure I could come up with more jobs that require pushing as a skill if I thought about it some more.

I think the kid is going to be OK.

Sailing on Biscayne Bay

Sailing on Biscayne Bay

The great possum rescue of 2008

I am having the worst luck lately. Yesterday, my Internet service was down again. And my Mother's Day.... Well, this is what I planned to post yesterday.

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Ah, Mother's Day. A time to celebrate mothers and take time to reflect on ... wait ... reflecting? Something reflecting in the pool. No, there's actually something in the pool. Let's take a closer look....

It's a baby possum, clinging to the pool-vacuum hose floating on the surface!

My husband takes the pool net to scoop the rat lookalike into a bucket. Poor thing could have been there all night.

So my husband decides to put the possum in a cat carrier with a little food and water so it can dry out and regain its strength before releasing it.



Then he begins a long afternoon of -- what? doing things to celebrate the mother of his child? -- no! Fixing the busted lawn sprinklers, of course.

Later that night, we let the possum/opossum/Pogo go into the wilds of our yard. It hung around at first, then took off like a shot into my wildflower garden. Since we went through all of this trouble to help the possum, I sincerely hope it doesn't just become roadkill.

As my husband would say, "It was a dark and possumous night."

I guess if I'm a quote-unquote mom blogger, then I'm going to have to step up the mom posts and stop blogging about wildlife so much!

Wherein an electrocuted iguana ruins my lunch

The scene: yesterday, in the kitchen. I have just returned home with my son from a fun outing. It's lunch time. No sooner do I set down the diaper bag than the power goes out.

No power means no cooking.

No cooking means a cold lunch.

And you don't want to open the refrigerator too much, because you don't want the warm air to move in. You don't know how long the power will be out.

So I scrounge around and come up with slices of deli turkey and ... um ... I think that was it.

By the time my son declared he was done eating by threatening to fling the remains of his turkey (at least he only threatened this time), the power came back on.

I didn't think anything more about it until I saw this headline today:

Iguana causes power outage for 20,000

So 19,998 other people had a cold lunch too? I'm thinking.

Seems an iguana wandered into a substation and got jolted to death, causing the power outage.

This is one of those times when you shake your head and say, "Only in South Florida."

It's a man ... it's a dad ... it's SAHD!

I met an interesting creature today. I've heard of them before but never met one in person. They have been glamorized and yet also sometimes been the subject of suspicion. I'm talking about:

The stay-at-home dad!

Able to get up with the baby in the middle of the night, do the laundry and fix the dishwasher (or so I've been told). Happy to heft a 40-pound child up his shoulders, run to the store for those three things that annoyingly got left off the shopping list and open every stubborn jar in the kitchen. Willing to lift the couch to find a lost binky, give the dog a bath and rub the wife's feet when she comes home from work! A Renaissance man of many talents!

And you know what, he seemed like a perfect normal, average, nice guy.

A regular dad.

SAHD dude, slow down -- you're making us SAHMs look bad....

Vizcaya Museum and Gardens

Vizcaya Museum and Gardens in Miami