Every day when I get home from work, Joe gives me the lowdown on what he and the child did all day.
Yesterday I was greeted with 'Your daughter wants to be the next Chuck Yeager'.

There are some tricycles that people have left at the park for the kids to play with and Z had been getting on them and trying to make them go. She isn't really co-ordinated enough yet to ride them but she tries. Apparently, yesterday she had a brilliant idea. She dragged one of the trikes into the playground section and dragged it up the stairs of the playground structure - it's a multi level one, and she dragged it all the way to the top. She then placed the trike at the lip of the tallest slide and got on. At this point, Joe decided, enough is enough, and talked her out of actually riding the trike down the slide. She's not even 2 yet.

Joe and I are so conflicted about this. On the one hand, 'Oh my God, my child is going to kill herself one of these days!'
On the other hand, she thought up a relatively complex plan and proceeded to carry it out. She apparently gave her dad a 'That totally would have worked if you hadn't stopped me' look as well.

It's so strange. I constantly waver between thinking that Joe and I are overprotective to thinking that we are totally lax about her safety, especially in comparison to some other parents we know that don't let their kids, who are older than Z, go on stairs by themselves. We stick close to her when she is running around the play structure and we stay right behind her when she climbs up on the chain ladder (or really any of the climbing things besides the stairs), but we pretty much let her go where she will. If she does slip, we are right there to catch her. We do let her have that 'oh shit!' moment though. And afterwards, she is invariably more cautious.
I like the fact that, when we were up at the cottage and she was walking around on the rocks, if she was having trouble, she would blindly reach out her hand and know that I was there to grab it and help her. I like to think that it makes her more willing to push her limits, knowing that we are there to catch her.
But then of course, that leads to things like riding a tricycle off the slide.