Jemma descends

We are just back from two weeks in the UK, for Lisa's conference and visiting friends. More photos to follow but I wanted to share the story of Jemma's slide mania.

One day, when Lisa was at her conference and our hosts, Brendan and Annette were busy working, I took the girls to Dairyland alone. Dairyland is a touristy working farm with baby chickens and cows, etc. It was cute enough but I couldn't figure out where all the people were, since the parking lot was jam-packed with cars but relatively few people actually petting pigs or feeding chickens. Eventually, we found an odd-looking building (not a barn) that had a sign on it called "Bull Run." We went inside and.... it was like an Ikea ball room on steroids. There was a huge climbing play structure that was covered in soft fencing and padded all around, so even if a kid falls, s/he wouldn't get hurt. Linden dove into the ball room and I spent about 3 minutes looking for her. When she finally surfaced, I turned around and couldn't find Jemma anywhere. I looked up and....she had climbed two flights of stairs and was crawling onto the sinusoidal slide. I could do nothing but watch as she whipped down that thing, lifting about two inches in the air on the last little bit. She had a mixture of fear and glee as she came down the slide, but as soon as she finished, she stood up and ran back towards the stairs. I decided that if she could handle it by herself the first time, she would be OK the second (and third and.....fourteenth time).

Unfortunately, the camera we had couldn't handle the action but the blur does give you the right idea.