Yesterday late afternoon, as our last stop before heading back to the hotel to pack for the second leg of our trip to Cusco, we spent 5 soles per adult (that’s less than $2 USD each) to go into Circuito Magico del Agua, a water fountain park in Lima. I wasn’t exactly sure what a “water fountain” park would be, but it became very clear once we entered that this was meant to be like a water park (without pools) for kids and a clean, fun, water-infused park that is publicly subsidized for locals. It’s basically a place where you pay a small fee to have access to clean and safe outdoor space… and where young couples feel they can safely get away from the watchful eyes of their parents and make out with no end.

Funnily enough for us, while Chris originally planned for Kaia to run amok here in the water fountains and sprays, she ended up passing out on our way to Circuito. So for the first part of our time here, it was mostly just us walking around and taking in the scenery, and running under water fountains and seeing how wet (or not wet) we got. When Kaia finally did wake up, we gave her some time in the kids play area, where you pay a small additional fee to enter and your child gets 20 timed minutes to go crazy. We let her go into an up and down maze of a ball pit area, which necessitated shoes off, plus the purchase of socks for both of us (kids under age 4 need to be accompanied by a paying adult). And alas, I finally realized with this experience exactly how dirty ball pits are — with very visible evidence. In just 20 minutes of jumping, running, crawling, and sliding through an endless rainbow pit, the bottoms of both our socks were almost completely black colored. It’s no wonder some parents keep their kids away from ball pits like they are the plague.

And this morning, Kaia woke up with some boogers and a stuffy nose, and Chris credits the nastiness of the ball pit for her tiny illness.

At the airport today in Lima, Chris and I discovered first hand what “free public babysitting” can look like. We were sitting near our gate, and a girl maybe a year or two older than Kaia is jumping around. Kaia sees her and they immediately “become friends” and start playing and jumping together. They start mimicking each others’ sounds, hand motions, and jumps. They giggle and run around (in our area) together. They need very little supervision other than when they try to get too far away from us (and the girl’s dad/younger baby sibling). My concept of time is poor, but it felt like a good 45 minutes of them playing together and us not needing to shoo her away from some store, from touching something she shouldn’t be touching, or us telling her to use her “indoor voice.” It really was like free babysitting even for that short time, and it felt a bit liberating!