Taller than it looked

For all his bluster, Jackson is not exactly adventurous. We had corralled the kids into the car and headed over to Destin Commons for a festival that was raising funds for Riley’s school. There were arts and crafts booths and bouncies for the kids. Riley is an old pro at the bouncies, and zips up and down them with barely a second thought (although, this was definitely not always the case!). I keep forgetting the Jackson’s bark is worse than is bite, and so after a few successful laps on the little slide, I let him go up the big one with Riley. It was very cute watching her help him up, holding his hand the whole way. Once they got to the top, though, it was every kid for herself. Riley was so excited to slide down, the she left Jackson at the top.
And the more Jackson looked at the slide and thought about his prior experiences with gravity, the less convinced he was that this was a good idea. He kept wandering back to the way he came up, but apparently that looked scary from the top, too.
After a tense few minutes, the teenager working the slide scrambled to the top (she actually needed very little encouragement, I suspect she’d been itching for an excuse to get to slide down herself) and tried to talk Jackson into going down the slide. Jax, however, looked upon this as an opportunity to talk the teenager into carrying him back down the steps.
No dice. This was apparently one no-nonsense teenager, and she was not about to give up her chance to slide to the bottom for one little 2 year old (squirmy, slobbery and possibly wet on the bottom half, too... can’t blame her for not wanting to get too close). She deftly flipped him to his belly and dropped him down the slide to Jackson’s shouts of protest... which morphed into shouts of “Do it again!” in the 2 seconds it took for him to get to the bottom.
Hmm. So THAT’s why the ride said 3 and up...