Tuesday, August 21, 2007

He's getting his own apartment next week.

Aaron loves the Giant Slide at the State Fair - who doesn't really, and this year we tried to convince him that he could go down by himself. Yes I know the kid is only 3 - but he's 3 and 3/4 technically and besides it's $2.50 per ticket so every time he goes with one of us it's $5 and that adds up pretty quickly - I mean that buys a lot of deep fat fried Snickers bars!

I had my misgivings of course but it wasn't really crowded and we'd pumped him up for it: "GONNA RIDE THE BIG BUMPY SLIDE ALL BY MYSELF!" he'd say as if it was the coolest thing since string cheese. And that's pretty damn cool in his book because the kid lives off of string cheese and Diego yogurt - it's a wonder he ever has a bowel movement.

We buy the tickets, instruct him to walk up the steps slowly and carefully, and to wait at the top until the nice man helps him with his mat and tells him it's okay to slide down. Off he went with that burlap mat rolled under his little arm, and he didn't even look back. I had practiced my "reassuring, loving Mom smile" all afternoon, and I didn't even get to use it!

He even biffed it on the second time down and slid the last 10 feet on his face, and he still didn't need me. It was awful. Here I was at the base of the Giant Slide fighting back tears because my baby boy was growing up. I mean first it's the slide and then what? Shaving, dating . . . before you know I'll be pretending to like his wife (because, let's face it, no one will ever be good enough for him).

I got one trip down the slide on video. It's really bad because I used my digital camera that only takes like 60 second videos and is pretty poor quality. Plus I didn't really want to zoom in a whole lot because I wanted to capture the whole scene and also I had turned the camera to catch a portrait view and I don't know enough about videos or have any video editing software that will make this thing rotate the right way. So really the only reason I put it on here is because I was just really proud of figuring this much out. Just tilt your head to the side and use your imagination.



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