Alpamare

Ella and Alex both are always talking about how much they want to see Joey's toddler group, speculating how cute it must be.  Sometimes they toss in comments about how much they miss preschool, admitting that they're jealous of Joey and his youth, sighing that they yearn for a simpler time.

And I chuckle mercilessly: baby, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Well, today they got their wish: although all of Switzerland's grade schoolers were off these past two weeks, the preschool mothers decided to keep on meeting for playgroup.  And since today Susannah was celebrating little Christopher's birthday in school, I would have hated to miss it.  Ella and Alex were over the moon, going on and on about how excited they were to see the big party and making solemn promises to be kind and gentle to all of the little kids.

And they had a wonderful time. There's one little boy who just a year younger than Alex, and Alex and he became fast friend over Legos: Alex was clearly thrilled to have a new little friend who could speak English.  Ella took the little girls in the group under her wing, and, with a comical air of martyrdom, built them castles out of the giant blocks and set up complicated train tracks and cleaned up stray toys.  Apparently it wouldn't do to look like she was enjoying preschool too much.

And, when it came time for Susannah's cupcakes (baked from her own precious stash of Trader Joe's cake mix: we expatriots each have our little hoard of tastes from home) we all sang happy birthday to a very special little guy.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Christopher!

After playgroup, we made a quick dash for the train station.  This is the last day of vacation that the kids will have all year, so we decided to make it a good one.

Back when I was researching what would be our new home, I made a point of trying to find places that the kids would really enjoy: extra-fun places that would really help sell them on their new home.  And the first place I read about was Alpamare, an enormous indoor water park, the largest in Europe, located on the south shore of Lake Zürich, about an hour away.  With ten long indoor water slides, and heated outdoor pools (warm enough to soak in during the winter, even), and an indoor wave pool, it sounded like the sort of place crazy people like us would love.

But last winter I wasn't quite brave enough to take the kids. There was something daunting about keeping three kids safe in a foreign water park.  And by summer, when I was starting to feel more confident, it didn't make any sense at all to take them to an indoor park, not when we had a beautiful pool with incredible waterslide right across the street.

But now it's fall, and we're entering the realm of now-or-never. Now, I decided.  Last night I showed Ella some pictures of the water park, and she responded with a squeal and a hug.  So it seemed like a good idea.

And a good time was had by most.

I really want to be able to say that I liked this place, but, honestly, it was the first real disappointment I've had this year. For one thing, it was incredibly expensive: even with free entrance for Joey and Alex, we still had to pay over $70 for entrance, which I find steep even for Switzerland.  And for that price, our time in the park was limited to four hours: if we had gone over that time, we would have had to pay extra, for each fifteen minutes over.

I knew that all in advance, though, and so I made the kids eat their lunch on the train and bus ride to the water park: sorry, no time for snacks or dilly-dallying.

I was prepared for the price, but I wasn't prepared for the crowds.  I should have been: the entire under-18 population of the country is off school. It was hard just to find an empty locker.  But, once we did, we got changed in under five minutes.  Any longer and I think the kids' heads would have exploded. They could see the wave pool through the window at the front entrance, and they couldn't wait to get in the water.

My complaints aside (the crowds, the constant noise, the chlorine smell) the kids loved it. Ella and Alex especially: everything seemed magical to them. The water slides were wonderful, they thought, and they held hands running up the stairs for another go, and another. For Joey, things were a little more complicated: almost all of the waterslides required an inner tube, and no lap babies were allowed on inner tube rides. Joey was stoic: he stood by and watched Ella and Alex go around and around, stunned, I think, but the echoing din.  But I have to admit I got impatient.  I wanted to play, too!

Apparently I wasn't the only parent to find this frustrating: as I waited for my kids, I watched a dad coax his too-young daughter onto an inner tube, only to have her slip off before going down the slide, after he'd already gone.  He stood at the bottom of the slide, beckoning her, and then telling her to wait, all while she screaming.  To my horror, no one tried to help the little girl: they only pushed past her for their own turns on the slide.  So I waded into the entry pool, picked her up out of the water, and brought her back to stand with Joey, trying to string together words that might be reassuring for a hysterical three-year-old ("Shh...Papi kommt.").  I was not the right person for the job, but eventually I got her calmed down and, just as I assured her, Papi came, he looking a little shame-faced. Me, I probably looked a little jealous.

Alex, on his way down one the ride that the little girl fell off.

But there were a few waterslides Joey and I could enjoy together, the ones where we could slide down on our bottoms.  The lines were long, but Joey continued to be patient and calm...calm until it was our turn to sit down at the top of the slide. Then his face lit up into an enormous grin. And the ride was really long, too (261 meters, says my brochure).  For the first half, the tube was coffin-narrow, forcing Joey and me on our backs, and halfway down, somehow, a strobe light started to flicker inside the slide.  And then, abruptly, the strobe light ended, and we shot outside for the second half of the slide.  Which would have been fine if it hadn't been under fifty degrees out, and if there weren't sprinklers showering cold water down on us from above, too.  I was a little freaked out by the end.

She's going in!

But you know what? Joey was more than fine. He wanted to go again.

Instead I coaxed him onto a different slide, one with a arctic theme.  Again, it was more than just a water slide: halfway through, the slide shot through a large space that was dark, except for some eerie purple and ice blue glow, with cracking sounds echoing through the chamber: apparently we were shooting through a glacier channel.  We both agreed that was pretty slick, although Joey was more taken with the penguin statues at the beginning.

I'd never seen a themed waterslide before, and they had a couple others besides those two.  One, called Thriller, which none of my crew wanted to go anywhere near, was haunted-house themed, and apparently it ran through a chamber with wall projections and black lights.

There was a pretty view from the pool.

The kids eventually got frustrated with the long lines (fifteen minutes, always, at least) and decided to go swimming instead. There was that outdoor pool that they really enjoyed, particularly because they had music piped under the water.  The kids couldn't get over the fact that they could hear something underwater. While they were giggling and bobbing, I relaxed and enjoyed the view, overlooking the Lake Zürich. That was definitely my favorite part of the day.

But it was over too quickly when a lifeguard approached me and said that all kids under six had to wear water wings in the pool.  Kindly, he offered me some from their pile of castoffs. Alex was thrilled: he loves flotation devices.  But Joey...well, Joey was tired.  And tired Joey decided that water wings were well beneath his dignity.

Pre-water-wing, Joey had a wonderful time, practicing
bellyflops in the wave pool and being chased by Alex

So he and I sat at the edge of the wave pool and watched Ella and Alex play, me with the wings in my lap, and Joey with a scowl on his face.  Every minute or so, he'd grumble to himself "I don't need water wings." I figured he was getting some necessary rest.

Finally, Ella and Alex scrambled out of the pool and asked if they could go back to the waterslides.  Joey hopped up too. "Slides? YES!"  No, I told him. If you go on the slides, you need wings, too.  Joey studied me carefully, apparently decided I meant it, and resignedly held out is harm, his chin down and his lip out.  And, even as we walked over the slide, I still heard him growl to himself "I don't need water wings," as he plucked at the badges of shame on his arms.

At the end of the day, after we had returned the hated wings and were changing, Joey stopped and took my face in his hands, something he does when he really wants me to pay attention. "Next time, mommy, okay? You say to them 'Joey don't need water wings,' okay?"

If I told you Joey fell asleep while he was eating his dinner, would you be surprised?

The water slides of Alpamare.  The one that Alex was pictured on is #1, just
for a sense of scale.  For an indoor water park, these things were long!