Hanging With Baby In The Wetlands

We used to frequent the Wetlands Park in Tin Shui Wai on occasion, and decided to make the trip back with the baby, for the first time yesterday… It is so “almost China” I get a “Welcome to China” text (you know, the ones you get when you fly somewhere and then switch back on your cellphone after you land in another country)… Entrance is pretty cheap (by HK standards) – HKD 30 per adult, HKD 15 per child/senior citizen…

First child enjoying very local setting and meal…

Second child enjoying very local setting (but no meal)…

There were some small groups of local kids on field trip, quite a few families with babies and toddlers, and it’s so local we get curious glances at English-speaking Rockstar. Our entire 4 hours here we saw one Caucasian/White family with a baby and girl toddler who, by their entire “packaging” also looked so localized we almost missed them. (Thats’ something, because we usually see way more “foreigners” at hangouts closer to home – Peak, Stanley, Cyberport, Central. Even Sai Kung…)

And then Rockstar gets down to business!

It’s the first time Rockstar gets to enjoy the playground next to the canteen – he was either below the 100cm height limit or it was closed, previously. (125cm and above kids aren’t allowed up inside the giant tree structures either – and yes, they really enforce it).

I have lost my child in this thing.

Where is he?

Thought he was coming out here (i.e. no other way out) and waited for ages ok…

Though it’s fairly crowded the wardens, most of whom seem to be teenagers or women in their early 20s except for the odd auntie, are quite conscientious. They seriously work at cutting down misbehavior. There’s these two siblings on an outing with their putonghua-speaking dad and the elder boy is too tall for the 125cm height upper limit, while the younger Rockstar-sized boy whom I’m guessing is under 4, keeps clambering up the wrong side of the slides. I watch a young warden dive for the younger culprit, hauling him out of the chute after he repeatedly dodges round her and up the chute of the slide.

I’m seriously disgusted by their dad – he keeps beaming and paying lip service “don’t climb la cannot la” while other people corral his misbehaving youngsters for him. He does not lift a finger to stop his own kids (frankly if they climb up the wrong side when other kids are coming down feet first on some of the steeper slides his own kids are the most likely to get hurt, and yet… This is why I say the wardens deserve some praise because if I see the parent not caring and it’s for their own child’s safety more than anything then I’m not sure I’m going to care – especially if their kids are such brats. But I guess the wardens do have to keep them away on the off chance they still manage to hurt other kids..)

Rockstar shows me one of his routes around this crazy thing – it’s not in a very big area but there are quite a few intertwining branches and paths overhead, just like the real thing!

People waiting around the various giant child dispensers for their offspring and siblings…

Abruptly they clear the play area “for a cleaning.” Since I thought I saw them cleaning just an hour ago, I ask a hardworking warden who has planted herself firmly at the base of one of the entrances to keep the kids from going up for “one last ride.”

“Normally we’d still be open, but when we reach about 40 kids we clear out the play area for 5 minutes so other kids can come in and play.” And sure enough they do. Rockstar comes back in for a second round with the dad (Kings and I switch kids back n forth – idly I wonder if when Rockstar goes back in the two misbehaving boys and their dad have also returned but I’ll never know since Kings would probably be oblivious), but not before he tries out the arts and crafts:

This time he gets to make decorative soaps (HKD 20 for a “small” cake, HKD 30 for a “big” cake, honestly just get the small one, there is hardly any difference in size, unless they only have the shape you want in a big mold), complete with food colorings and scented oils…

(Obviously he isn’t really “making” it so much as chopping up chunks to melt and pour into a mold, but anyway he definitely enjoyed the chopping bit)

Stirring everything in after one of the college students (she tells us) manning the tables pours the microwaved melted soap in the mold…

Then we catch a screening of one of David Attenborough’s documentaries about mudskippers and gobies (in English, to a very Canton-speaking audience – best show we ever caught here was a conservation play, for kids, by a bunch of high school/college students in Canton)…

Then we bundle into the car for the almost 1 hour drive home. Rockstar falls asleep and flops heavily on me while I’m squeezed in the corner trying to feed the baby…

HANG ON – is he asleep, or isn’t he?? Kings catches our eldest red-handed faking a sleep.

“Look, Ma – No helpers or nannies!” (Like big achievement liddat)

Made it home, walking thru the carpark with no theatrics. I like how both children are caught in “of the moment” poses – Ms Rockstar in another wide-eyed I’m-so-amazed-by-everything moment, Rockstar feigning sleep again, but only for the camera. He tried it when we’d parked the car, so we told him he doesn’t have to pretend, Kings’ll carry him up to our apartment anyway – whereupon he promptly “woke up” and hopped out of the car delightedly…….

And that was our weekend.

Oh, we made it back to church this morning too, to my delight (with Rockstar I was listening online, but we only “physically” made it back to church when he was about 8 months old). We checked Rockstar into Sunday school while Ms Rockstar slept through most of the sermon, waking briefly to worship music.

So it were a good weekend.

Ps: We ended up glossing thru some of the other areas at Wetlands Park that we spent more time at in the past… You can see more of the outdoors and conservation exhibits Rockstar played with on previous visits here and here.