Doodaddy

Looking Beyond the Playground

We walked home from the bus stop today past our usual little-kid playground, and I noticed that we hardly know anyone. I waved at one mom with a 10-month old, and briefly chatted with a 16-month old’s nanny. Every single baby, in fact, was under 18 months, and mostly we know those families only well enough for a friendly nod.

That’s when it struck me:

Yearlings own the playground.

It’s not like we dislike the place — we can still enjoy a good playground day. But when Boobaby was around a year old, a quick trip to the neighborhood park was all the stimulation she ever really needed. Lately, though, we’re just as likely to hop on a bus to explore kid-friendly museums and the lairs of all San Francisco’s long-haired freaky people.

So rather than near-daily playground visits, we might go two times in a week. Boobaby loves our new outing-filled routine. I, on the other hand, am having a hard time adjusting.

My nature is to expect things to always stay the same — work, social circles, household.  Once it was that every few years I’d look back at my life and be surprised at how much had changed. I can’t be so slow now that I’m a parent: Boobaby accelerated the pace of change to where every month entails a major shake-up to the routine.

• One day we’re rocking Boo to sleep in a baby swing and the next she’s flying off the grown-up swings.
• From not focusing on other kids at all, now she’s developing real friendships.
• And where we used to haunt the playground so often that we knew its every crack and crevice, we now pass that mantle on to a new cohort of year-old babies.

And although I pine a little for it already, I hope the new crop enjoys their playground — and it’s theirs in that authentic way you can make a place your own by visiting it daily to learn its mysteries — even half as much as we have.