Need a sitter?

Dennis and I were feeling lazy, so we spent the morning fixing this blog and eating waffles.  Dennis has been sufficiently embarrassed by those of you have scolded for not tech-supporting his wife, so we’re transferring everything over to Blogger, which actually allows comments and doesn’t rearrange my pictures after I post them. I’ll let you know when the new site is ready for visitors.

Ella had a more industrious morning, hosting a party for her brothers. She served some of her carefully hoarded chocolate and taught the boys pin the tail on the donkey and generally proved that there's nothing you can't do with a little bit of construction paper and some ingenuity.

Poor hemorrhoidal donkey

And then, when the party was over and it was time to eat lunch, she taught Alex to make tiny sculptures out of the wax rind from their cheese: a bow and arrow, spectacles, a plants vs. zombies chomper.

Behold, the power of cheese.

And after that burst of creative energy, she declared it was time for fresh air and sunshine. Alex protested: "Fresh air and sunshine. That's what Teacher Pam [his former preschool teacher] used to say every single day. Do we have to?" Ella, wise pied piper of four-year-olds, told him of course he didn't have to, but she was going. So, predictably, he sat at the window, watching her for a few minutes before running for his shoes.

Making a spiky fortress out of the quickly melting ice.

Dennis and I probably could have let them continue parenting themselves for the rest of the day, but guilt got the best of us, so we pulled ourselves out of our stupor, poured ourselves one more cup of coffee, and gathered our things for a trip to the top of Ütliberg Mountain.

I'll bet your mom didn't take you to awesome places like this.

It was our plan to walk the Planettenweg trail, the trail across the mountain crest that we started two weekends ago. At the far end of the trail there's a large playground and a gondola ride down the mountain, and all of that sounded like a lovely way to pass the afternoon.  But when we got to the top of the mountain we quickly reformed our plans. The playground next to the train tracks was an icy, slushy mess, and each of the kids fell several times.  We didn't have much hope for the adjoining trail being safe, much less fun, so we let our soppy-bottomed children hang out on the playground for a little while, but we went no further.

As I've shown you before, there's a little coin-operated swing ride on the playground, and Dennis and I spent a lot of time waiting for the kids play on that. It was an exercise in absolute anarchy: more than once, the kids hesitated for a hair too long in front of a swing, after waiting patiently for a turn or two for their chance to ride, only to have another child sneak right in behind their bottom. Every time the swing started slowing down, the kids started pushing and jockeying for position. I don't quite have the vocabulary to scold children for snatching swings from mine, but I eventually remembered the universal language of the hairy eyeball, and Joey finally got to take his turn.

Contained.
The phone booths here have ambient music,
and so the kids, having discovered this,
took a dance break.

We retreated from the slush and pushy kids to our favorite sanctuary, the Google cafeteria, and regrouped with a cup of coffee while the played on the cafeteria slide.   I'd found a list of good playgrounds in Zürich, and Dennis picked one out that wasn't too far from Google. Unfortunately, when we were planning our route, we didn't take changes in elevation into account, and it turned into quite a hike, getting there. More than once on the way Ella asked me "Mom, are you sure this will be worth it." And I answered her, quite honestly, "No, I'm not. but I hope it will be."

Well, as we rounded the corner to the playground, she called out to me "It is! It was totally worth it!"

It was a pretty excellent playground. Unfortunatly, it no drier than the one on top of Ütliberg, but at least it wasn't slushy.  The equipment was really tempting, there were little cars, bikes, and sand toys to borrow.

And, best of all, there was a little adjoining cafe that served lager and Spanish reds.  So I can honestly say a good time was had by all.