Attention! All Personnel! Incoming Helicopters!

Ava scares the hell out of me sometimes. She's just fearless and she barrels through her day without a care in the world while we guide her away from anything pointy or strangly or jagged-cliffy. We talk about how we walk the fine line between wanting to keep her safe from harm forever and realizing that if she doesn't roll off the couch she won't learn how not to roll off the couch.

Today, we were at the Very Awesome Park by our house. They have this amazing structure that has slides and ramps and rings and steps and places to jump and places where you can pretend you're a pirate (Arrrr.). It's plastic. It's a big red plastic Fun But Safe Place, that is securely anchored to this squishy rubber surface that would almost be fun to land on after falling from somewhere high up. As Rob and I were herding our little daredevil around the section that she's most likely to be able to navigate, I looked around at the other parents who were doing the same thing. Most of their kids were older than Ava (who is 21 months on Tuesday, OMG she's so big), but there they were, huffing and puffing through this extremely cushy playground. And I realized that I was perilously close to becoming a Helicopter Parent. NOOOOOOOOOOO!

Remember when we were kids? Remember the parks of the 1970s (I'm sofa king old...)? Lorenzi Park was so cool when I was a kid. We used to love to go there. And every single thing in that park was made of rebar and chains and hard plastic, and you know what you landed on when you jumped off the really high super awesome swing after you'd been going back and forth and back and forth and kicking furiously and you could just not go any higher and so you jumped off like it was an Olympic sport? You landed on gravel. Unless it was the end of the weekend and every other kid in Vegas had already done what you were just now getting to and all of the gravel was ground to dust from all of the landings, and sometimes you landed on dirt, and sometimes you landed on caliche and that's when you were done swinging for the day and you went home and bathed in Bactine.

So today at this modern newfangled fancy schmancy park, we circled around our kids like they were little teacups running around on tightropes stretched over canyons of broken glass. And all I could think of was that my kid will never learn how to do a death drop (yeah, you know what I'm talking about...) and that makes me sad. And relieved. But mostly sad.