After our water-filled day nearly a year back, we had another eventful day dominated by water yesterday.

When we woke up on Saturday morning, the rain that spanned across most of the night was beginning to stop. Seeing that Darius was looking bored at home, Catherine and I decided to venture a little further (instead of the same old neighbourhood playgrounds) to another park and playground which we had not been to for quite a while.

Reaching there after a 15-minute walk, we headed for the nearest playground we came across at the park. Due to the earlier rain, the slides were expectedly wet but having prepared for this, we had brought along a dry cloth. Catherine then helped to wipe dry some of the slides so that Darius could slide down without worrying to end up with a wet bottom. ^^

DIY cleaning to make sure Darius had dry slides to play with

Wheee! No more wet bottoms!

After Darius played for some time at this current playground, we brought him to another playground beside it so that he could have more variety of play. However, instead of rejoicing over having more slides and stuffs to explore, Darius started to break down in tears while struggling to return to his previous playground. He had this habit of continuously wanting to do the same stuff over and over again so anything that could disrupt his ‘routine’ would upset him. *sigh*

Tears kept flowing down his cheeks

Not wanting to spoil his and our mornings, we made an exception and gave in to him and he ran back towards the original playground quickly, though stopping and looking back at us a few times along the way.

While in the playground he was loving so much, he started to explore other parts of it and soon came across a rubbery bridge which was a little wobbly (intentional). Darius wanted to go across it on several tries but every time, he would back off just when he was lifting up his leg towards the bridge. Even when I offered to lend him a hand to get across, he simply whined and refused to take the first step onto the bridge. Not how a brave boy should behave, yay? *sigh*

It was after I carried him and placed him on the bridge, carrying him up and down to replicate the jumping motion, that he started to feel it was fun being on the bridge and that got his phobia eliminated. From then on, he was no longer afraid of stepping across the bridge and did so on several occasions, though he would still need to hold on to one of my arms for stability.

Darius finally taking the courage to cross the wobbly bridge

Darius then started exploring the lower parts of the playground, keeping his head low while moving under the structure of the playground. I took the opportunity to reinforce the under concept which he had learnt in his Go,Dog,Go book by voicing out sentences with the word under whenever he went under the structure.

There was a big circular hole at the bottom and when we tried to encourage or help him through it initially, he would once again become very resistant and whiny. Darius is often afraid of trying new stuff so we knew we had to be firm with him, else he would never be able to pick up new things. Catherine then managed to guide him through the hole once and true enough, he started to cross through the hole himself several times later on. ^^

By then, we had already spent more than an hour at the playground. It was time for his his lunch and nap and we headed home.

Later in the afternoon, we left home again, this time to Sembawang Shopping Centre for grocery shopping and dinner. On the way there, we decided to bring Darius to its splash park for some fun water play, confident that he would enjoy it like he did last time. As we had spare clothings and towel that we often brought along, it was easy to just leave him in his top and training pants and play in the water.

Nevertheless, when we walked him towards the splash park, Darius stopped abruptly and started to whine again, refused to get any closer to the water splashing area. He would struggle forcefully to break my grip and after our several firm attempts to get him to feel the water or get close to them, he continued to struggle against our advances.

We suspected that his reluctance could be due to him seeing many children running around and splashing water all about. Despite getting sufficient socialising time with other children at his cc, he would still get wary of other kids at times. Seeing that it was soon time for dinner, we decided not to persist on and called off his splash park activity.

Darius looking at the splash park cautiously...

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