Sand Baby

It was a beautiful day outside, so I decided to take Michael to Da-An Park after school. It's a huge park, right downtown, and I knew that it had a playground, although I had never been there. I didn't make Michael walk, although it was only three bus stops away from the school, as I wanted him to have enough energy to play.

He was excited to see the playground, but even more excited to see the giant sand pit right beside it. He headed straight towards a pile of sand toys (that belonged to other children playing there) as fast as he could. I had to run after him and explain that we weren't at school and that those toys didn't belong to him. He was pretty upset that he didn't have a shovel and pail, and only reluctantly went off to play on the rest of the playground when I promised that the next time we came, I would bring sand toys.


My little monkey is never content to do things the conventional way. He uses climbers as monkey bars and always goes up the slides, rather than down. I snapped this picture right before I told him to get down. He's only allowed to climb up slides where he can see the top, so he knows if someone is going to slide into him.

Then he decided that he wanted to play in the sandbox even without toys. His new game was "Let's see if I can get every inch of myself covered in sand."



Needless to say, he got completely filthy, and was perfectly happy. Luckily they have a tap (that you can see behind Michael's head in the above picture) for washing off the kids after they get out of the sandbox, so I was able to at least wash his hands.

Then, he found his favourite kind of "friends." There were three of them, about sixteen years old and female and they did everything he said. It was great for me. I got free babysitting, but I think some of the other parents were jealous that my kid was getting all the attention. It was kind of amusing watching these three teenage girls following Michael around and helping him climb up slides.

When he started getting tired, I took him to the central library which was right across the street. It's the only library in Taipei with a decent children's English area, but I don't think anyone knows about it because it's in the second basement, around a corner, out of sight, without any signage. The chinese children's area is in the first basement and has a huge sign in English and Chinese that says "Children's Reading Area," so I think most people just stop there, because there was only one other girl in our area the entire time we were there.

We read a few stories and then did something for me. Sat down in a restaurant and ate a meal. Other than the times that I've eaten with Linda, I've always gotten take-out as Michael cannot sit still for more than a few minutes at a time, and hates food that is too hot. Which means I always get warm (if I'm lucky), but never hot fresh food. We stopped in a nicely empty, clean, bright pasta place with an English menu that was more expensive than my usual, but not overly so. It was empty because it was three thirty in the afternoon, but that was just as well, as Michael wouldn't bother anyone else. I had the lasagna. It was really nice. I'll have to do that more often.