Let’s go to the playground! The kids made this request frequently the first couple of months after we arrived. Ingrid claimed she never saw kids her age around our neighborhood, much less played with any. As far as I could tell, this was pretty accurate. Where were the kids? In August there was a good chance they were off on vacation, spent most of the day at grandma and grandpa’s house, or just stayed inside during daylight hours due to temperatures in the upper nineties. We found the stress and irritability level of the younger set—and, consequently, our own—was proportional to how often we got them out where they could be amongst their own generation and, try as we might (why was it so hard to try to get used to eating dinner at 8:30 or 9:00pm and head into town with the family after?), our late night outings with Ingrid and Niko worked out only perhaps once every week or two. So, when we had a sort of stir-crazy, everyone fighting, out of routine family explosion one hot day in July, we decided to promise at least one trip to the parco giochi per day.
But which one? Part of the fun early on was seeing if we could find a new playground, or, after we found them all, discovering when the ideal time was to visit. The first we saw, located just inside the walls and next to one of the main gates to the historic center, sat across from an elementary school and preschool. Easily accessible and visible, this playground tended to be the busiest. But not when we went. The first couple of times maybe one other kid, usually one or two years old, toddled around the seesaw and the springy horse and motorcycle. Eventually Ingrid had it figured out: little kids in the morning, big kids in the evening. We tried again and sure enough found the place teeming with kids scampering about, parents standing nearby ready with a well-placed boost or reprimand, grandparents sitting on the benches watching it all in amusement. 
Another playground we located, much larger and, in addition to a little train, slides, climbing structures and swings, featured...grass! Surrounded by a chain-link fence and open from sunrise to sunset, this playground was located about one hundred meters outside the walls encircling the town. Niko and Ingrid beamed when they saw how big it was and that there was grass to run around on, not just dirt or stones. We’ve only been there maybe five times but we’ve never seen more than two other families. Go figure.
Then there was the smaller playground hidden in a courtyard, replete with fountains at ground level for running through, trying to block with your foot, sitting down in and beating the heat. Or the playground on the far side of town, just inside the walls, which the kids tended to prefer not, I think, because it was the farthest from our home, but perhaps due to the comfortable morning sunshine (well, I guess that must’ve been us) or the right combination of monkey bars, climbing structures and swings (more likely).
Lauren found these trips to the playground very educational from a linguistic standpoint. Here was real language, kid-directed language, language you need every day as a parent. Yes language students, I’m talking about the Imperative. The Command form. ‘Come here, go up, come down, be careful, stop it,’ and the like. But also, of course, there was the magical world of kidspeak, fascinating enough when you hear young children talking with buddies—or by themselves—in English, doubly so when they’re using a foreign language. Enchanting to my ears, practical for Niko and Ingrid. One of Ingrid’s favorite expressions that a girl taught her on the playground when she saw her hanging upside-down from the monkey bars was ‘fare la pipistrella’ or ‘to do the bat’ (it sounds so much better in Italian).
The kids get plenty of time with other four year olds and nine year olds now that they’re in school. The days are shorter, too, and so our trips to the playground tend to be limited to the weekends. Still, I don’t know where we’d be without these places. They helped us through the summer and are a highlight of every weekend. As any parent of young children knows, we need all of the help we can get. Imagining the plethora of suggestions (demands) my kids might come up with for activities to do when bored I’m always slightly relieved when the question turns out to be not 'Can I take all of the food out and mix it up with dirt and put it in the refrigerator?' or 'I'm going to show you how many ways I can annoy my brother/sister, 'kay?', but instead a simple ‘Can we go to the playground?’ We're tired or have x, y, z to do, sure, but parents, let's nod our heads--it starts there--and with that kids have the answer they're looking for. We don't need to say anything else but, uttered more to convince ourselves, more to get ourselves up for it, not sure where it will lead us this day but some form of adventure guaranteed, we say "Okay, all right. Get your Coats."
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