P.E.I.: Day Seven

Today was an interesting day with a bit of a roller coaster of emotions. First off we awoke to a bright sunny day. Finally!!! It's amazing how quickly good weather can turn around your perspective on everything. We'd been told by various sources that today was supposed to be good so we planned to go to a place called Shining Waters, which is a little amusement type park with lots of water stuff, even for little guys like Ephraim. Have to say that I was a little disappointed in that the kiddie area, which is made up of a really large splash pad with a mini slide and other items, as well as two sets of larger slides. I wasn't disappointed by the area itself - it was pretty awesome, but the fact that it was more or less unsupervised. They had one poor employee monitoring the entire area, and all they could really do was to tell kids to slow down. Meanwhile at the top of the slides there were little kids pushing past each other to get to the front of the line. And when you went down the slide they wouldn't wait but five seconds to go down behind you, hitting you in the back. Part of me wants to blame the kids for being rude, but they're kids - they are at a water park and they're excited and impulsive. Part of wants to (and does, if I'm honest) blame the parents for:
A) raising kids who are so selfish and rude
B) not paying attention to them (seriously, there was a two, maybe three, year-old who was strapped in a life jacket and their parent more-or-less just let them run wild. A life preserver is not a substitute for a supervisor or parent).
But I think I have to ultimately blame the facility. The parents don't know their kids are misbehaving (even though they should) and ultimately the place needed another employee there to monitor the tops of the slides.
So other than that we really enjoyed the park - lots of different areas over and above the water park stuff. Ephraim and I even did a Pirate Paddle Boat. You'll see how successful below. After that we headed to Cows for some ice cream (our goal is to go through all of their 34 flavours before we leave (the trick is getting two flavours in one scoop!), then back to the cottage where I witnessed one of the saddest things ever.
The rest of the cottages in our row have started to fill up and when we returned we saw almost a dozen other kids playing at the little park area. Ephraim was so excited to have what he was calling "new friends". So we got him ready to go and I went down to the park with him. When we got there he saw a toy lawnmower and declared, quite loudly, that he wanted to play with it. So just as he was about to grab it, a seven-year old swiped it away, knowing full well that it had been called for, simply responding, "Too bad!" And when I told him that I'd appreciate it if he'd let Ephraim play with it he simply told me that if I didn't leave him alone that he would tell his father that I "touched him". Wow. But that wasn't the worst part, the worst part was that Ephraim stood there, not understanding what had happened. Why this person who he hoped might be his new friend would do this. Sad indeed.
Luckily tomorrow we're being upgraded to the Summer House down the road (went for a tour tonight - it's gorgeous) so we won't have to be near that kid. And the lady that owns the place told us that we could take any toys we wanted to the new place. So first thing tomorrow morning guess what I'm grabbing?