Places to Go - Cabin John Regional Park (Rockville, MD)

(check out the baby deer in the black and white photo above, so pretty).

Lately T's obsessed with all moving vehicles - cars, trucks, trains. He likes to stare out the window and point them out to me. His favorite are buses, when he sees one he starts jumping and shouting. Seriously, he's becoming such a cliche. I used to think it was cute that playgrounds put random steering wheels everywhere (as if you can "drive" the playground away) but I didn't really see the purpose. Then I had T, he can spend HOURS driving the playground. Hours.

So a few weeks ago we went with a few friends and their kids to Cabin John Regional Park in Rockville. If you've never visited before, this place is pretty awesome - lots of playground structures all in a SHADED wooded area - play train structures, car structures (T spent at least an hour sitting in the backseat of a nonmoving play car, um, yeah), huge slides, lots of things to climb, etc. Plus restrooms (CLEAN restrooms) and picnic tables scattered throughout the playground. But the true highlight is the miniature train you can ride for an extra fee ($1.75 a person, children under 2 are free) the ride lasts about ten minutes and takes you through the woods (on this trip we saw a tiny fawn resting on the ground - how cool is that?). Kids love it and, honestly, adults do too. Check the website for train times and schedules, when we visited it ran every half hour throughout the day.




The park had HUGE mulch "mountains" that the kids loved playing on. yup, the coolest playground equipment ever and they chose mulch.


Porky the litter eater amused all the kids. So much so that they started feeding him mulch instead of litter. Poor pig.





F now knows how to do cartwheels, they've become her "party trick." I'm scared she's going to kick someone in the head. Her friends appear to be scared of the same thing.

Places to Go - NYC Part IV, Imagination Playground

NYC ended up taking up more posts then expected, so, I promise, this will be the last one. On Sunday, we spent the morning at Imagination Playground in the South Street Seaport. A few months ago, the New Yorker published a short article on the history of playgrounds and featured Imagination Playground when discussing the future of playground design. The vision behind Imagination Playground is to "encourage child-directed, unstructured free play." According to the their website, "with a focus on loose parts, Imagination Playground offers a changing array of elements that allows children to constantly reconfigure their environment and to design their own course of play." I was curious to see how my children would react.

The good news is that the girls loved all the water (the playground has both a beach area and a pool area). On the downside, none of my children were as interested in the moving parts as I had hoped. Once my oldest daughter figured out that she was too heavy to float on a block, she tried to bury it in the sand. All that being said, the truly unique part about Imagination Playground was watching all the parents interact with their children. Adults loved the moving parts concept, so, rather than reading newspapers, parents were building forts and houses and cars and their children were loving every minute of it. Pretty fun to watch. If you're ever in NYC, check it out.

For more on Imagination Playground, click here - http://imaginationplayground.org/parks/

And for a summary of the New Yorker article, click here - http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/07/05/100705fa_fact_mead