Are your feet in the shoot??

As I watch my grandson Georgie play in our backyard on the slide, I go back in time when Jeffery was 4-5 years old and he was playing on the same slide. Georgie climbs up the slide like a cat taking maybe three steps to get to the top. Jeffery did the same thing but it was much harder for him. He had to grip the sides hard and pull himself up with great effort. To try to encourage him, I would stand next to the slide and beat out a rhythm on the side saying, “Are you tough?” Thump-Thump “Are you Really, Really tough??” Thump-Thump “Are you Super-Duper Tough???” Thump-Thump “Well here we go….here we go…here we go.” By the third “here we go” he was at the top of the first slide. I say the first slide because there are two of them. The straight slide at the bottom and the twisty slide at the top. When we first built the playset, Jeffery would only use the straight slide because apparently the twisted one intimidated him. Eventually, I got him to go down that one by again supplying him with a drum beat. It would seem that slide work is easier to accomplish if you have a rhythm beat…almost like oarsmen on a Viking LongShip. In this case, it was similar to the one I used to get him up the straight slide. “Are you ready??” Thump-Thump “Are your feet in the Shoot??” Thump-Thump “Well its Five-Four-Three-Two- Oneeeeeeeee!” He would then…and ONLY then…launch himself down the slide while I kept up a drum beat. When he reached the bottom, he would wait for my drum solo to stop, clap his hands twice and load up for another run. This became the only way he would do this…as long as I was there to set the tempo. Playing on a swing set is always easier if you have your backup percussion band. 

As time has gone on, he doesn’t play on the slide as much and he is so big, he can barely fit through the twisty slide but he will help Georgie climb up it by being there at the top to pull his”partner” to safety. I can’t help sometimes though as I watch Georgie get ready to go down the slide to ask, “Are your feet in the shoot??”