Boys will be boys....right?

Look at my handsome little ham hock! Those great big eyes... oh what color will they be??

WARNING!! ABOUT TO GO OFF ON A TANGENT! I took the boys to Edinburough Park today to let Nico blow off some steam.. We met Grandma Corky there.. Nico is and always has been my little daredevil. He will usually try anything once (unless it is food related).. he loves to jump and climb and bounce and test himself and his limits. Does he get hurt sometimes... YES, but would I ever stop him....NO! Some parents look at me like I am crazy when he is teetering on the edge of a wall with a 5 ft drop off. I know he is only 2 but we always say "be careful, you could fall and get hurt".. then we let him make his own decision. Of course he has gotten hurt and had his share of bumps and bruises but I would have it no other way. I don't want to generalize because I have met some pretty woosie boys and some daredevil girls (I was one)... but Nico is ALL BOY. We were at Children's Museum yesterday and there was this little girl with her mom about to go down a slide. She had to be about 1 1/2 maybe a tinch younger and this slide was no big thang...possibly 7 feet long and not a steep incline. The mother literally held onto her hand at the top of the slide and was reaching down holding onto her about 1/2 way down the slide. My mother in-law Gina was at the bottom ready to catch her and her mother looked TERRIFIED. Both of us just wanted to scream "LET HER GO".. she slid down about a foot and a half and started crying... LORD. Meanwhile Nico and his cousin Geno start wrestling down the slide headfirst laughing and screaming the whole way.

OK so pictures to make my tangent above make sense... There is this wall in the gym area of the indoor park and it has two LARGE steps. When I say large (tall) I mean like over half of his height. It takes him quite a bit to crawl up them. So he is standing at the edge with his little toes hanging over the side and looks at me and raises his eyebrow as to say "Can I jump Mommy?".. I say "Go ahead, be careful".. so as you can see from the first picture, he is jumping down rather timidly..

"Oh ok... I got this. Let me crawl up and try it again"

"I better get a running start"

"Yeeeehaw"

"Weeeeeeeeeee"

"Alrighhhy then"

OK by this time I was practically peeing my pants laughing. Those three mothers in the picture below were looking at me with the most judgemental eyes for letting him catapult himself off the steps like that. They each had little girls, playing nicely, quietly...