Our Swiss Summer: More Playground Fun

We had so much fun today, I'm almost too tired to blog about it! We started our morning at the same English-speaking meet-up at Schutzenmattpark that we first went to last week. Lots of new, friendly faces there today. Layla and Josh played in the sand for almost two hours (well, Josh slept for the first 30....he is finally adjusted to the time shift, which means he is back to crack-of-dawn wake ups....who wouldn't want a 10am nap?!). Eventually we broke for lunch and shifted to the wading pool. And then back to the sand.

This cool sand area had lots of places to build castles
and also a water feature that created a river through a portion of the rocks/sand.

All around the park are benches with small sand areas. Seriously brilliant!
Parents rest and kids play. Simple.

By about 1:30 it probably should have been time to head home. However, I knew that we were not far from another park on our list and I've been wanting to get to that one during an afternoon this week. For two weeks there is special kids' programming going on at the park, starting at 2pm. So we really didn't have a choice. We had to check out Kannenfeldpark.

We first spotted this structure, which was a bit too advanced for our two.

Then we found this area, which was just right for the kids.
But there was so much else going on that they didn't stay here too long.

Part of the special fun included this cool train thingy that the kids got to drive around a small track.
There were also crafts, a bouncy house, face painting, a pizza making station,
and a one-act play (we tried to watch but couldn't understand anything!)

These are some envelopes the kids made out of calendar pictures. Hers is a horse and his is a tractor.
You wouldn't know it by their faces, but they enjoyed this!

Even though I thought we were done with water for the day, there's no way I could keep the kids from this great splash area. You can't quite tell, but there were various cement mounds that kids were
climbing on and sliding down. Every 15 minutes or so, 10 giant sprinklers would spray out all over.
I don't think I've ever seen happier children (all of them, not just mine).

Here are L and J sliding down.
I loved watching how they played so well together and Layla really watched out for Josh the entire time.

As I'm typing all of this I am thinking about how beautiful all of these parks are. Back home I typically take the kids to playgrounds. These parks are playgrounds and so much more. Do they have playgrounds that are just playgrounds? Of course. But so many of these public spaces are real multi-use facilities - parks, not playgrounds.

BONUS!
A few shots from this morning.