Slide!

Cooper loves the slides at our favorite playgrounds. At the playground nearest to our house, he can climb all seven stairs, get onto the nice wide platform on the top, turn himself around, and gently slide down. All by himself! He goes down the slide belly down, feet down and arches his back just a little so that his chin doesn't smear the slide on the way down. The bonus to that is you can see his wild grinning all the way down.

I am so proud of him for being able to climb up, get in the right position, and slide down all by himself. Not to mention that it makes my life really easy. All I do is keep a close eye on him while he's climbing the stairs. The slide platform is about four and a half feet up, so by the time he gets to the top step he's pretty well up there.

He also likes the giant big kid slide, which even I find a bit intimidating. This slide is probably a solid twenty feet tall, and I assure you it was built far, far before any sort of child safety measures existed for such things. It is all stainless steel, narrow, and steeper than most slides. The steps that go up the back are almost twice as high as they are deep, so it is more like climbing a poorly designed ladder than climbing stairs. It gets hotter than hell in the summer. Cooper loves to climb this slide, which he is only allowed to do under extremely close supervision. He gets all twenty feet up in the air, at which point Matt or I pick him up off the top step, get onto the platform, and then slide down with him on our lap. He then immediately runs over to the back of the slide and starts scaling it again. He's so fast that if I walk from the bottom of the slide, I catch up to him at about the fourth or fifth rung- when he's already at least 4 feet off the ground.

He is utterly fearless.