Swing, Swing

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This weekend is going to be a little nuts with Lils party coming up on Saturday and Grandma Kathy & Grandpa Marc arriving tomorrow.  My Mom and I have a lot of party prep work to do tomorrow so I decided to put Lily's birthday swing set together last night.  When I saw this on Amazon, I knew Lily would love it and she proved me right today.  She was off and exploring almost immediately.
 
After she was done with the initial exploration, she surprised me by going up the slide all on her own.  I figured this would happen after a few months, not the first day.
The swing isn't quite as good as the ones at the park (see below if you're interested in a digression on a recent trip to the park), but Lils seems to like it:


So the park story:  I have some very cute Cookie Monster & Elmo cupcakes planned for Lily's party, which require Snoball snack cakes.  The Hostess outlet is all the way out in Chatsworth, so Lily and I took a drive yesterday afternoon.  She was great the whole way there but on the way back she got a little antsy.  We were driving down DeSoto, about 10 minutes away from home, when I noticed a park with some baby swings.  

Figuring we'd stop and swing for a few minutes and Lily would be ready to get back in the car, I carried Lils to the baby swings and started pushing her.  But as anyone who's pushed a baby on the swings knows, you inevitably end up doing a lot more than pushing; you end up laughing, making funny noises, jumping around and doing anything else you can to elicit little baby laughs.  I was in the middle of some hysterics, much to Lily's amusement, when I started to look around the park.  What I saw was, in a word, frightening.  I realized there was only one other parent with kids in the whole park and there were men watching over the park from trees.  It was at this point that the rest of the pieces started coming together to form a complete picture:  the men in trees at lookout, the dudes in jean shorts & white t-shirts standing at one end of the park with their tiny bicycles nearby, the dudes at the other end of the park, splayed out in post-drug use bliss.  Basically, the rest of the park-goers seemed to fall squarely into the stereotype of drug dealers or drug users.

I had two thoughts at this moment, in this order: (1) we need to haul ass out of this place, and (2) this is just like that Ann Hathaway movie Havoc except I'm old and I have a baby, none of these guys iare as cute as Freddie Rodriguez and I am not rolling any dice to join their gang (you need to see the movie to get that last part)!

After I got home, my Mom confirmed that I was, in fact, in the middle of gang-land.  I can only imagine what those guys must have thought of me, screaming and making a fuss with my baby in their park...  I'm just glad they saw me for the naive and somewhat lost Valley Girl that I apparently am.

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