Nate and I went for a walk Tuesday evening, and ended up at the playground across the street from our apartment. Oh, what a good time. There was swinging and monkey bars and funny little knobby seat things that you had to balance on. It was tons of fun, I tell you.
Most importantly, the playground gave me my first experience with rubber mulch. At first glance, rubber mulch just looked like regular ol' wood chips - but when I jumped onto it, good Lord! It was springy! It was a super-weird sensation. It was fun to fall off the monkey bars and have the fall be cushioned. But why do we need cushioned falls at the playground? When I was a kid, my school playground was covered in loose gravel, which made for some awesome scrapes if you fell down, but I survived. Is it such a litigious culture that schools have to put down the equivalent of chopped-up rubber mats to protect the children, so parents don't sue if their kid gets a scraped elbow?
rubber wood chips - C
1) I think they used old Firestone tires from the Ford Explorer rollover debacle to make a lot of those playgrounds in Michigan, since they had so many they recalled.
ReplyDelete2) I could be wrong, but I'm fairly certain your first experience with rubber mulch was actually at Timbertown in the MP, shortly before you saw a whole new side of Sue & Mike...
My opinion of the rubber mulch is much like my opinion of anesthesia. I mean, if you can go through something with less physical pain, why not? And it's bouncy. You just can't argue with bounciness.
ReplyDeleteI think that recycling tires and turning them into cushioning for the playground sounds like a fabulous idea myself. Gravel hurts when it gets stuck in a wound, and who likes to hurt?
ReplyDeleteAs far as I know, EPCDS still has that same gravel. I wonder: if you ran a DNA test on it, would we show up?
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