Milo at the Park

Milo at the park
Originally uploaded by Dread Pirate Robert.

I love Garden Park. Apparently, Milo does too. It's kitty corner from our house and literally two minutes from our front door.

My favourite part of the day is taking Milo to the park after I get home from work. We play in the sand, he spins those yellow and orange cubes, crawls through that tunnel, spins the tic-tac-toe board (you can see it through the tunnel there), and we swing to our hearts' content.

He's starting to watch the other kids too, especially the ones about his size who can walk...

On sunny days, we even get a visit from Mom walking the dog. Whee!


And for you etymology buffs out there:

Kitty corner: The first part comes from the French word quatre, four. It’s actually quite an old expression that first appeared in English as the name for the four in dice, soon Anglicised to cater. The standard placement of the four dots at the corners of a square almost certainly introduced the idea of diagonals. From this came a verb cater, to place something diagonally opposite another or to move diagonally, which can be found in the sixteenth century. Some English dialects had it as an adverb in compounds such as caterways or caterwise. By the early years of the nineteenth century it was beginning to be recorded in the USA in the compound form of cater-cornered. It had by then lost any link with the French word; people invented spellings in attempts to make sense of it, often thinking it had something to do with cats, which is why we have forms like kitty-corner.

(Thank you World Wide Words and The Word Detective for your research help.)