7-12-11

back in may, matt participated in his first chess tournament in irvine. we drove by this park, which looked very cool. since we had some time, we decided to make the special trip out. it's actually a little closer than pretend city, so not that far...unless there's traffic. which there was this morning. =/

northwood community park, irvine

• location: 3 stars (tough to get to with traffic. took us 40 min to get there, but only 20 min to get home; nice area, some serious tai-chi'ers behind us, a soccer camp in the background)
• fun-factor: 5+ stars (this place was uber-cool...read on)

rubber ground cover under the playgrounds themselves, while there was sand everywhere else. the sand was the nice kind of sand; very fine sand...none of the other parks had sand like this.

three really big playsets, the one you see in the picture below, one to the left of it, and one right next to where i was standing to take the picture.

behind the above-mentioned playset, is the 'northwood castle', which has 3 levels...each level had sand, so basically a giant sand castle ;p

dashiell enjoyed climbing up the rocks A LOT (i was a bit surprised...he was quite daring climbing it, too!)
this is up on the top level of the castle; only one way up (unless you consider the fireman's pole to get down on the the other end a way out for these little ones!)

dashiell posing with the sign on the 2nd level

on the far end of the 2nd level, which has steps leading down (or you could just jump down, like brenny was doing)

more climbing...
brennan joins dashiell in climbing across the rocks
tire swing (although not a real tire!)

in addition to the 3 large play sets, there were several other smaller ones, like this one below.
finally, after more than 2 hours there, we left for home. it was nearing 11am, and we needed to make sure we were able to get matt at 11:45.
not sure what this is...it's just beyond the playground, on the hill just to the right of where the boys are in the picture above.

a giant tomato in two pieces? two pieces of orange chalk? what do you think?!

in the collage below...from top left, going clockwise:

-dashiell's sitting on a tire swing

-brennan is playing in one of two sand-stations (never seen anything like it before) it had two basins that had a hole in the bottom, and an attached container that could be filled and moved to the top then dumped out--that's what brennan's looking at

-dashiell playing on the rocks some more

-brennan climbing through one of many tunnels

-brennan sitting on one of the rocking horses. there were 7, and he made sure he tested all of them out. =) one after the other...

-playing on another of the small play sets

-brennan going down one of the bigger slides

the only few things this playground didn't have were (1) a see-saw (or similar), (2) balance beam, and (3) rock climbing wall.

the second playground (not pictured here) was for the bigger kids, i think. it had lots of the monkey bars, where you have to 'walk' across. way to hard for the boys, obviously.

this park was totally fun. so big, in fact, that there was no possible way you could sit/stand in one spot and keep an eye on BOTH boys at one time (unless they are joined at the hip). so it was a good thing there are two of us watching the boys.

i think this is a good place for matthew to come with us -- he'd really enjoy it too, i think. dashiell and matt would definitely have a lot of fun playing hide and seek here!