Maypole Monkeyshines

This weekend past was another beautiful spring weekend and Daddy spent it with two beautiful little people - Zach and Miranda. We began our adventures Friday night at 7pm, when Daddy picked up the wild monkeys at monkey-central. We walked up to 3rd Avenue then over to Daddy's cookie meeting. The church basement is also used as a daycare/preschool and is geared for kids with mats, a basketball hoop, etc. They both had fun playing on the slide, but the real fun was the giant stage with its star-spangled curtain. Zach loves playing peek-a-boo and this was industrial-strength peek-a-boo.

We left before the meeting started and followed the moon to Daddy's house. Both little people stayed up pretty late, but we were all up and stuffed with yummy (and nutritious) breakfast in time to make it to the Sensory Freeway for Zach's sensory gym session. While Zach was doing this, Miranda and Daddy went for a walk - we said "hi!" to some of Daddy's friends, Miranda learned how to be quiet as a mouse (she thought this was hilarious) and we even went to the pet store where Miss Miranda was quite taken with a cage full of Siamese kittens.

After Zachy was done with his gym session, we stopped by the realty office so Daddy could drop off his rent, then went to meet our friend Gannon (pictured) and his twin boys Barry and James (not pictured - they were moving too fast) at the 79th Street park on Shore Road.








This is our favoritest park of them all and we come here whenever possible. The first stop was the swings - and swing we did (by the end of the weekend Daddy actually had tennis elbow from pushing swings too much). But eventually even these two hard-core swingers need a change, so it was off to the monkey bars and slides.

We did a lot of really good climbing and sliding and Zach made friends with a boy named George, who kind of forced himself on Zach, which is exactly what Zach needed. They played on the overhead monkey bars together for 20 or 25 minutes and Zach seemed happy to have the company and someone to share his grapes with. Miranda loves to climb and went up and down the spiral slide so many times that Daddy got dizzy. We spent several hours at the park, taking breaks for snacks and rests, then packed it up and headed for Daddy's house.

Of course we were sweaty and dirty after all the horseplay, so a good scrubbing was in order and both little people were eager and ready for a bath. Afterwards we had some dinner and decided to go out for our evening walk. It was really nice out Saturday evening, so we walked around for quite a while, until it was time to follow the moon back to Daddy's house once again. We had story time and music time - Miranda does not "play" instruments, she "sings" them. When she wants me to play the guitar, she will say, "Daddy can you sing the guitar?" It's very cute!

Zach went to bed on the early side but Miranda stayed up way late and hung out with Daddy. Predictably, Zach was up about 6:30am the next morning and was raring to go. He is usually sensitive about others' needs though, and will lie in bed with you for a while to give you the chance to wake up (or grab another half hour of sleep). Eventually, we all got up, had another breakfast that couldn't be beat and set about the business of the day. It got pretty cold out Saturday night, so even though we wanted to go to the park, we waited a while for the world to warm up. We played with our Playdoh pump, making some yummy blue and yellow spaghetti, and we did some coloring with our colored pencils.

By about 10 am we could wait no more, so we headed to another of our favorite places, the Fort Hamilton High School park on Colonial. We had the park mostly to ourselves when we got there, but it got steadily busier throughout the morning. We did it all - swinging, climbing, running, jumping and sliding.

After quite a while, Zach lead us down to the field where we finally managed to get the old kite up into the sky. Zach did a great job of flying the kite and was able to manage it all by himself! We had a couple of crashes and one string-breakage incident (the fence saved the kite) but all in all it was a successful flying day.

We had kind of a picnic on the field and played in the sand/gravel/dirt on the baseball field with all the toy Matchbox cars that Zach had brought along.

While we were having our lunch/snack on the field we saw all kinds of firetrucks and helicopters doing their thing - the house at 86th and Colonial had caught fire and had been pretty well gutted - we saw this as we walked by on our way back to Daddy's house, admiring all of the shiny equipment. Fortunately, we were told that no one was hurt.

We went back to Daddy's house and relaxed for a while, playing with our toys and generally just being silly, until it was time to say farewell to Daddy's house for another fortnight - when we meet again for that wonderful time together I fondly call: Monkeyshines.