Boating and Bribery

When Doug volunteered as our ward coordinator for Parks Appreciation Day, he got a "Metro Parks Volunteer Familiarization Pass," which includes one-time passes to various Tacoma Metro Parks sites for free or at a discount. One of these was half-off a boat rental at the Marina ($30 instead of $60). We hadn't used that one yet, and Saturday was nice and sunny, so we decided to go do it.

The problem was that Kate, for some reason, decided that she did NOT want to go for a boat ride. When I told her what we were going to do (trying to get her ready to go) she ran into her room and hid in her bed, hollering, "NOOOOOO! I don't want to go! I'm not going to do that! Not ever!" All the regular cajoling ("Come on! It'll be fun! You'll have a good time!") did no good. She couldn't give us anything like a coherent reason, either--she'd just got it in her head that she didn't want to go, and she wasn't changing her mind. And lines like "Sometimes it's good for you to do things you don't want to do" really don't work on a six-year-old. (I know, shocking, right?) Doug said, "She's just going to keep this up--are you sure you want to do this?" I considered, and decided, yes, I do want to do this. She's going to come along and she's going to have a good time, and then we'll be able to use it as an example the next time she thinks she doesn't want to do something.

Well, in the end we bribed her with McDonald's (ice cream and playland). Perhaps this was not the most effective lesson, but she did come, and she did have a good time. She was pretending the boat was a baby sea dragon named Yoshi.

It was about 59 degrees, and windy on the water, so we had the kids bundled up. Andy really didn't like having the life jacket around his neck and just sat stiffly in my arms until he fell asleep. (I think he had a good time but it was hard to tell.) It was kind of funny because I had just commented to Doug that it was nice not to have to schedule things around Andy's nap, and then he fell asleep anyway. (Just this week we decided to discontinue his daily nap, after he stayed up until midnight two days in a row. Bedtime is going much better now.)

We went out by the Vashon Island ferry landing, and saw lots of cormorants, and another bird that looked an awful lot like some kind of puffin. I'm not sure what those were. (Anybody know?)

I decided not to take my camera (it would have been rather awkward, anyway, with the way I ended up holding Andy) but we did get the video. It was a nice little ride. I'm glad we got to go out and enjoy the sunshine!