Roaring Springs Water Park

     Yesterday we went to Roaring Springs water park for Simon's company picnic.  For those of you who are not Boise natives, Roaring Springs is the summertime mecca for Southern Idaho thrill seekers who don't want to travel to a larger town with more elaborate theme parks (Salt Lake's Lagoon, Anaheim's Disneyland).  Or for Southern Idaho natives who crave the turquoise glimmer of the Caribbean but have neither the time off nor the disposable income to go there.  Or for those who grew up swimming in the frothy, organic stew of the Snake River and improvising algae-covered irrigation chutes for water slides.
     I belong to all of the above categories.
     Clara, in her flowered bathing suit with tri-level ruffles across the bodice, was so gob-smacked by the park she didn't know where to start.  There was the kiddie lagoon, with a giant faucet that gushed water, and a big plastic mountain from which sprawled tunnels and slides, and which was topped with a dolphin that squirted water over everything.  There was a snaking kiddie slide that you went down in a tiny inner-tube, and two others that you went down on your bottom.
     She circled the kiddie pool area, running into and out of the water, her head swiveling to try to take it all in.

     "Come on Honey, let's go down the slides!" I yelled, swinging her onto my hip and hustling up the walk.  Kids were bunched all together at the top, waiting their turn for the slides.  Clara, who is still rather fuzzy on the concept of waiting her turn, started to thrash.
     "'Ide! 'Ide!" she hollered, pointing at the slide and trying to snake out of my grip.  Attempting to keep my post-pregnancy paunch sucked into my bathing suit's control panels, I rolled her to the front of my torso.  She reached down and yanked on the curly brown mop of the kid waiting in line in front of us.
    "No, no! This me!" she yelled.
    The kid, bless his heart, winced stoically but didn't say anything.  He was held firmly in the grasp of the slides' powerful magic.
     "I'm so sorry," I murmured. "Clara, we do not pull other peoples' hair.  Especially not strangers' hair.  Well, anybody's hair, really."
     "Mommy! Mommy, Mommy, Mommy," she moaned, arching her back.  "Down, down. Nope.  Me down! Ai down!"
     We finally got to the top of a big, yellow slide.  She wanted to run down it.  I had to force her to sit down and was rewarded by her squealing giggle as we shot to the bottom.  The water down there was rather too shallow for an adult.  As my hind end hit the rubber padding at the slide's base, I felt an unpleasant sprong-ing sensation in my lumbar spine.  It registered only briefly.

     After we finished at the kiddie pool, we did the "Lazy River" on inner-tubes.  Clara was under the impression that she was riding her inner tube the same as the others around us, with her tiny body in the middle and her arms grasping the inner-tube's sides.  She giggled and kicked, ignoring the fact that I was awkwardly draped over the side of the tube, one hand supporting her under her swim diaper and the other arm under her armpits.   Those around us could probably barely see her pigtails over the side of the tube. We came to a raging set of waterfalls.
     "Daddy!  Daddy!" she said, looking around frantically.
     "He's right there," I said, swiveling her tube so she could see Simon safely bobbing alongside us.
     "Oh Daddy!" she said.  Then she pointed at the falls. "Pool.  Me pool."
     Though it was three years ago, it seemed like only yesterday that Simon and I were here in the "Lazy River," him pretending to be a professional kayaker who lost his purchase in the rapids and was hurtling to a certain death under the falls, and me the awesomely-muscled female park ranger who would ultimately catch him and drag him to the surface in the crook of her arm.
     After the "Lazy River," Clara started to get tired and very hungry.  She let herself become absorbed in the decorative basalt rocks that abutted the sidewalks.  She tried out several of the hundreds of lawn chairs set out around the various pools.  The chairs had flexible plastic slats that her legs kept slipping through.  She found one she liked and tiredly ate a box of raisins on it.  

    Simon let me go do one of the grown-up rides with his co-workers while he watched Clara.  Though we had been at the park for more than an hour at that point, I was still so excited that I kept repeating myself.  Simon gave me the look he reserves for when we go to parties with mechanical bulls and buffet-style Chinese restaurants with soft-serve ice cream dispensers.  The look said: "I'm going to need you to take it down a notch."

    At the picnic part of the festivities, Clara sat on my lap and feasted on barbecue chicken, pasta salad, cantaloupe and brownies. By the time the day was done, and I'd cleaned all the baked beans off Clara's face (after she delicately kissed me on the lips), and gotten all the rotini pasta out of my cleavage, we were all exhausted.