Test Blog; Please Ignore

Category: Parenting

Resources and posts for parents in the audience.

  • Quick Takes Nº 1

    Quick Takes Nº 1

    I have some thoughts and a lot of gripes, yet many of them don’t need their own post. Here are some of them:

    Picasso Tiles instead of Magnet Tiles

    Magnetic tiles are great toys, easily tier 1. They are fun, promote creativity and fine motor dexterity, are durable, and best of all they are easy to clean up. Who doesn’t love the click clack of a tile stack coming together in moments?

    But, these delightfully colored pieces of plastic and magnet are expensive. At my house, we have basically a single 100 piece set (not even sure it’s 100?) of Magnet Tiles that we bought a few years ago and so far have rebuffed requests for more. However, in the last year or so I’ve become more familiar with Picasso Tiles. Just another brand which I have always assumed was somehow worse or not compatible with our existing Magnet Tiles. But lo, they are the same dimensions, still very durable, still magnetic, still fun, and they are about 40-50% cheaper than equivalent Magnet Tile sets.

    If you are bemoaning Magnet Tile prices, check out Picasso Tiles instead.

    Driving “5 over”

    Don’t do it. Particularly in residential neighborhoods. In Minneapolis, the unposted speed limit is 20mph, which applies on most residential streets.

    When my wife was pregnant with our first child my perspective on this came into very clear focus: If I were to hit a kid in my neighborhood, do I want my defense to be “but I was only driving 5 over”?

    Current Causes of Death among Children and Adolescents in the United States – www.nejm.org

    Ask About Guns

    I wasn’t going to mention it until I saw the above graph, but my perennial suggested topic for Early Childhood Family Education (ECFE) classes is that we talk about gun safety and kids. Specifically, be aware of guns and ask people if they have guns, where they keep them, and if they are locked up. It’s sort of an awkward question, especially if it’s not been asked until the moment you are at the door. And keep in mind that just because their kid might know to not touch them, it doesn’t mean yours understands that.

    If you have guns, keep them responsibly locked up (not with the key in the lock) and please be upfront about having them. Go a step further and invite the visiting parent to check it out if they want to.

    Guns are the leading cause of death for children in the U.S. There are a lot of reasons for that (which is tragic), but feeling shy about asking is not an answer.

  • Washington Park

    Washington Park

    Washington Park is a normal community park in Richfield in the northwest corner of the Cedar/77 and 494 intersection. An old friend mentioned it as some place they were hoping to check out and I guess I beat them to it on an overcast day. My overall feeling was that there wasn’t any one particular thing that I would recommend about this park, and assessed as a whole it is “fine”. It looks new in the last 5 years, is a GameTime setup, and has play equipment for both the 2-5 and 5-12 year old groups and a few swings. The playground is centrally located in the park, which also has 6 pickleball courts, a basketball court, a small picnic shelter, and some wide open grassy fields.

    The playground

    The one thing that stood out about the play equipment is that the 5-12 year old structure is actually more challenging than I feel I typically see. It’s largely “unstructured” climbing, with a bunch of different pieces packed tightly together. There is a hanging chain set of steppers, which I normally see made of ropes. The use of bare chain actually made it difficult for me to make it across, but my five year old managed so I guess middle-aged men are not the target demographic. The spiral slide also stood out, as the ladder up to it inverts, with the ladder sloping backwards as the climber ascends. These kinds of challenges felt unique and interesting.

    The structure for the younger age group had less going for it, but still completely fine. Stairs up to a few slides, an additional climber, some colored panels. Not a lot to speak of here. My young toddler spent most of her time attempting a climb on the older equipment.

    Washington Park does have a set of unique swings, but with one drawback. One swing bay has a baby bucket + strap swing combo, and a inclusive seat + strap swing combo. These are fun and always appreciated at a playground. The second bay of swings is just two strap swings (the stiff plastic kind) but they are situated very high off the ground. Sometimes this happens due to wood chip decomposition, but that didn’t seem to be the case here. It feels like a bad install, though I can’t know for sure.

    Everything else

    The biggest strike against Washington Park is the complete lack of trees or other shade. There is a shade umbrella poking out the top of the younger play structure, but it’s so high from the ground and small that the shadow cast by it is only help for probably a few specific hours a couple days of the year. We enjoyed it on an overcast morning, but I would never visit this park in the sun.

    For the moments you want to sit, parents have a single installed bench which barely faces the playground. There are a few metal picnic tables around that look like they could be scooted around by two people, as well.

    One bright note is that there was a water fountain, but I didn’t take the opportunity to confirm it was functioning (and if it wasn’t, I couldn’t be sure if that was permanent or just due to the season at this point). Speaking of plumbing, there was also a port-a-potty available as well.

    To reiterate the point made at the start, this is a fine playground. But I would probably stop at half a dozen neighborhood parks in Minneapolis between Washington Park and Longfellow before I came to this one again.

  • Linden Hills Park

    Linden Hills Park

    Linden Hills is a quirky neighborhood with a lot of amenities, but yesterday was the first time I had ever stopped at the community park there. Set a few blocks from the Linden Hills “town center”, the park stretches across a couple city blocks and packs a lot into the space. Four tennis courts, two basketball courts, two bocce ball courts, four baseball diamonds with space for a soccer field, a traditional Minneapolis rec center, a circular pool and a play area, to be exact. Everything in this park has the feeling of being new in the last ten years, and has excellent shade trees and green grass.

    The Pool

    As usual, I’m here for the playground and pool. The pool is interesting because it has a typical shallow wading pool, 15 inches deep, but a secondary “lobe” that comes off it that is only 10 inches deep. This tot pool is separated from the larger pool by a low wall– easily climbed, but a barrier nonetheless. I haven’t yet come across another Minneapolis pool that has this kind of separate shallow pool, though I imagine that the newer zero-depth entry style supplants the need for these tot wading pools and I don’t expect to see any new ones to be built.

    Despite that interesting tot pool design, the general feeling about the pool as a whole is that it is rather featureless. There are no sprayers/fountains, no slides, nothing beyond just the shallow splashing about. That doesn’t mean it can’t be fun, but it’s something to know ahead of time.

    Linden Hills Park pool, with a separate 10″ deep wading pool. The other portion is 15″.

    The pool does have shade trees around it, and at various times of the the day the shade hits different parts of the pool such that you can either stand in the shady part or the sunny part. There are a couple of benches under some shade structures, as well, so it’s a pretty comfortable pool for parents to sit around.

    The Playground

    The Linden Hills play area spreads out under towering shade trees, and doesn’t feel constrained to some small area by geography or design. It is a Landscape Structures play set, and has the full range of 2-5 year old and 5-12 year old composite structures as well as some swings, a younger tot structure, and a dedicated sand pit (the rest is EWF mulch).

    Composite play structure at Linden Hills park.
    Composite 5-12 year old structure.

    With only two trips to this playground under my belt, I haven’t noticed anything particularly missing from it. It’s got the standard stuff: swings, monkey bars, spinners, rockers, nets, slides, ladders. I did note that this playground does offer fairly good accessibility in terms of points where poured-in-place rubber paths reach from a paved perimeter walkway. The structures aren’t fully inclusive (no ramps) and it’s still a mulched playground, but it doesn’t suffer from paths that go nowhere or are otherwise unusable.

    A set of swings at Linden Hills park, featuring two accessible chair swings (with a rubber path) and two infant bucket swings.

    My littlest one enjoyed the small tot house. It’s a small “house” but also a fire truck, featuring a drivers seat and steering wheel. On the other side is a small slide. It’s nice to have the play area work for such a broad range of ages, all together.

    Between the play areas are curved paths that wind around trees. It seemed a likely spot for budding bicyclists to practice and a bucolic scene for parents to enjoy from one of the benches.

    Overall, really nice park to spend a day at. The local area also has a lot to offer. A few blocks away on the main street you can easily walk to the small Linden Hills Library, Sebastian Joes Ice Cream, Wild Rumpus children’s bookstore, Pinwheel Toys toy store, and a number of upscale restaurants. A little further you run into the west bank of Lake Harriet, which can connect you to the Minnehaha Creek parkway all the way back to Longfellow. Or, head north along the lake and head to the large playground at Lake Harriet Bandshell.

    Playground at Lake Harriet Bandshell. Large, multi-story, has accessible ramp.
    Playground at Lake Harriet Bandshell

  • Luxton Park

    Luxton Park

    Recently I was out on the bike and decided I had some time for a playground. Being a few miles from home I checked the map for parks nearby and headed to Luxton Park in the Prospect Park neighborhood of Minneapolis.

    I’m glad I did.

    Luxton Park play area is tucked away behind the park’s rec building, and sandwiched against a high interstate sound barrier, so it’s easy to miss from the street. It also has mature trees nearly all the way around it, providing great shade and woodsy scents, and adds to that cozy feeling of being away from the city, even if you can still here the traffic on the other side of that barrier.

    The play area was rebuilt somewhere around 2019 according to a staffer I spoke to, replacing an old style wooden playground (the sliver tweezers are still available at the staff desk though they see much less action today). It’s a Landscape Structures play area, featuring composite structures for both the two to five and the 5 to 12 age groups, a set of swings, and a sand pit. The older age set has a roughly linear flow, from a tiered net structure that branches off into a rope course and terminates at a freestanding slide. The toddler area is a small standard structure with a few steps, play panels, and slide, a pretty common pre-made unit. This area also has the bulk of freestanding ground pieces like rockers and seesaw. Finally, there is a set of swings.

    Immediately next to the play area there is a unique pool. Like most Minneapolis park pools, it is a shallow splash pool about 16” deep and without a zero-depth entry. Uniquely, this pool isn’t just a square or circle. It’s something like a semi circle, with a tall concrete wall on the east side, a central fountain jet, and an interesting waterfall (slide?) feature in one corner. It’s clearly a considered design, not just a plop-in-place piece.

    Overall, this park shines for its shade and variety of equipment. It’s easy to pass up since you’ll likely never just happen upon it, but it’s worth a trip up.

  • Fuller Park

    Fuller Park

    Often I associate St. Paul with sand playgrounds featuring community provided sand shovels, trucks, and other toys, but I recently headed to Fuller Park near Nicollet and 50th and discovered much the same in Minneapolis. Happily, it still has the classic Minneapolis staple, a wading pool and rec center.

    Fuller has Kompan play areas for the 2 to 5 group and the 5 to 12 group, typical sling style swings as well as baby bucket swings, a ropes structure, rockers, seesaw, spinners, and slides. The younger area is entirely sand, the older all EWF wood chips.

    Between the play area and the pool is a well shaded picnic area, with 4 full picnic tables and a couple of standalone benches and grill.

    The picnic area also has the entrance to pool, which conveniently gives you easy access from the playground and any base camp you set up at a table. Unfortunately, it does mean a full hike around the pool fence to go from pool to the bathrooms at the rec center.

    The pool itself is closed right now, part of renovating the rec center (reopening this month) and resealing the pool (reopening next season). But from the pool side depth markings, this pool seems to be a bit shallower than most other pools I’ve been to even by Minneapolis wading pool standards at 15” deep.

    A big boon for this park is shade, particularly in the morning. Large mature trees on the east side of the park and amongst the picnic tables provide lots of cover. Especially the older age play area, and the pool which supports the use of sun shades on the west side for afternoon shade. According to a local mom, the picnic area will be expanded and with it more shade infrastructure in the future. The shade on the younger play area does start to go away in the summer afternoons, so that’s a good time to get into swimsuits.

    Notably, I think this park shows good attention to accessibility. The PIP (poured-in-place rubber paths) extends from a perimeter paved path and reaches the transfer points and slides easily, as well as a good number of the freestanding ground equipment like spinners, rockers, seesaw and swings. It doesn’t have that feeling of being performative but functionally useless, in my opinion, which is appreciated.

    Overall, a good playground, easily enjoyable on a summer morning or afternoon if bringing a swimsuit. With a picnic lunch you could easily spend several hours here despite the parks overall small size.

  • Urban Family Biking with Kidical Mass

    Urban Family Biking with Kidical Mass

    Yesterday we stopped at Mattocks Park in Saint Paul with the kids between running a bank errand and heading to Lunds, and I’m glad we did because we ran into a bike assembly that I’ve long been curious about.

    A year ago I briefly had a conversation with some parent about biking around the cities, and safe biking behaviors for kids, and they mentioned something called Kidical Mass. I remember shortly after I tried searching the web for more information, but I wasn’t really able to get any more clear information. For a year I’ve had the itch to stop at the MN Bike Alliance office in Longfellow to ask if they knew anything about Kidical Mass. I never did make it over there and eventually I started to wonder if it was just something that was always going to elude me.

    Well, yesterday at Mattocks I ran into the organizers of Kidical Mass St Paul as they prepared to start a group ride from the park to Lake Monster Brewing. Drawn in by their cool Urban Arrow with a custom DIY sunshade, not to mention the front bench seat and rainbow decals on the front bucket, I was finally able to get all the info I had been missing, here is what I learned…

    Urban Arrow e-bike with a DIY sunshade and rainbow decals on the bucket.

    Kidical Mass

    Kidical Mass is inspired by a larger organization called Critical Mass, which aims to push forward pro-bike (and other urbanist ideas) issues via community engagement in the form of large group rides.

    A Kidical Mass group ride consists of families riding via their own bikes, cargo bikes, e-bikes, trailers, kid’s bikes, tag-alongs, etc. They generally start at one park and end at another, though as demonstrated yesterday they terminated at a brewery (with a pizza restaurant next door) and for September the St Paul group was considering finishing at a Saints baseball game. Rides are a few miles, and they stick mostly to side streets, bike paths, and protected bike lanes. Parents ensure that someone is always present at intersections and no one is left behind.

    The group I saw was about 15-20 bikes and was described as a “good number”. From what I can tell from a quick skim of media presence, it seems like the Saint Paul group is a little more active than the South Minneapolis group, though both have one ride a month. Ages for kids were from toddlers to late elementary from what I saw.

    Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make the ride with them, but here is a recent Streets.MN blog post about it. I wish I had pursued this harder since last year, as it definitely feels like my kind of crowd. Regardless, I have the September 13th date on my calendar for the next ride.

    More Biking Resources

    If you are interested in connecting with a wider biking community, I also came across another family oriented biking group, hosted by Perennial Cycle near Lake Bde Mka Ska. Every fourth Saturday at 9:30am, with similar route planning as Kidical Mass, though that wraps up in September.

    Also, the bike skills course at Lake Nokomis has been removed and will be replaced by new tennis courts at that site (which prior to the skills park was previously tennis courts). A new bike skills course will be installed further east along the creek bike trail at 34th Avenue where another set of old tennis courts has been torn out. Project summary is here (pdf).

    Other Biking Resources