Each weekend, since I’ve been working full-time, I’ve been doing my best to track down something fun for the girls: A day trip to grandma’s, a drive up to the suburbs, a kids’ concert, an outdoor art festival. I pore through the virtual pages of Mommy Poppins and Time Out Kids each Saturday morning, wondering just how we can take advantage of the post-snow/pre-unbearable humidity weather, and all the awesome stuff for families that NYC has to offer.

(Also, it’s the way we city parents justify the cost of living here. But we have museums! But we can get Indian food delivered at midnight!)

This weekend was no different. I was browsing and bookmarking when suddenly Thalia started pecking at my keyboard keys, as she does when she wants my attention on her and not my laptop.

“Can’t we go to the playground?” she asked.

The playground? I was surprised. She goes there nearly every day with her sitter.

“Don’t you want to do something special? We can do something special today! Look, there’s a big festival on Staten Island, and we can take the ferry there and…”

“We never get to play together,” she mumbled to her feet. “We’re always doing something but we don’t play together.”

And here I was thinking that I was doing one better, always trying to track down a drop-in art class or a street fair. Not that she doesn’t love those things. Not that she doesn’t love those things a lot. But I forget that sometimes, to a nearly five year-old, going to the regular old neighborhood playground–just her and her sister and her mommy who leaves early and comes home late every weeknight–is something special.

So that’s what we did.

I didn’t take a single picture. We were too busy playing.