Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Brilliant Spontaniety

Today a friend and I took our kids to the park for a picnic. It was a moment of spontaneity. The kids played, we ate, we chased the kids around the park and it was a relaxing, fun time. As I was sitting relaxing, I realized that although I like our neighborhood, It would be great to live somewhere with a nicer park within walking distance.

That- however is the wrong way to look at it. Instead I sat there with Katie and we talked about what I could do to change the park so that I and our kids could enjoy it more. My list looked like this: add mulch to the play area, clean the equipment (especially the obscene pictures and profane language so the kids don't ask- "What's that, mommy?"), and a park bench for the mommy's and daddy's, trim the trees and generally weed/clean up the area.

Often times when I have a good idea, I just sit on it and nothing gets done. My friend Katie told me, today- go home and just get contact info and then tomorrow go from there. So today I wrote a comment (on the website) for someone to contact me about the park. It looked somewhat like this:

Living within walking distance of a park is wonderful and our daughter loves to spend time there. We even celebrated her 2nd birthday at the park. As a parent, I am concerned about the condition of Oak Grove Park.
I am not writing to complain, but writing to see what I can do to make the park better. The toddler play area (near the tennis courts) is my main concern. This play area is perfect for toddlers and I would love to see it kept up. Adding mulch to the play area, having the play equipment cleaned (i.e.removal of profanities and inappropriate drawings), adding a bench and trimming the trees around the area would help drastically.
Please let me know if there is anything I can do to make this happen. Some ideas I had are: Organize a neighborhood park cleaning day and finding sponsorship. Hope to hear from you soon. Thanks!


If you have any great ideas or would like to help see this get done, please post a comment or contact me.

Here's to making a safer, more enjoyable park for our kids to play!

6 comments:

bobbi said...

cool i went for a picnic and play date at the park today as well!! =) let me know what i can do.

Sarah Anne said...

Tell me as soon as Park and Rec. calls with your 1million dollar grant.

:)

Happy to have been the friend at the park when you conceived your brilliant idea!

KLB

WICK said...

as a good husband, I probably should've told you....they gave out grants for this earlier this year. The city gets $50,000 a year for them, and you can apply early Spring, using forms found on the city's website. I found out too late this year. But next year let's totally help do it.

Monogenes said...

I remember that park as if it were yesterday, err, well at least 5 days ago...

Ethiopianmomma said...

I made chocolate bread today in the bread machine. Got to share the recipe with you. YUMMY!
Kate

Anonymous said...

Sarah - thanks for the compliment on my background. It's a Leelou blog. I LOVE all of her blog layouts!

Here's a link (there's also one on the left sidebar of my page if the link doesn't work): www.leeloublogs.blogspot.com/

Jessica :)