Slippery Rock, American Samoa

I'm not sure who thought sliding on a big hard rock would be fun, but apparently, it's a popular place here in American Samoa.  Another family here (with older kids) invited us to go exploring with them on Saturday to this infamous "slippery rock."  After a long discussion with the bus driver and an even longer ride, he dropped us off by some water with a lot of rocks (very pretty water, very pretty rocks).  We had six kids and 5 adults and off we went in search of the slippery rock.  Well, they were all pretty slippery at first, seeing as it was raining and the tide was going out, but then we hit the mother load.  Every kid that stepped foot on it, fell.  Then the older kids got pretty good at running and sliding.  My worry wort of a self had stomach aches the entire time and lucky for me, my kid fell early and didn't think it was all that much fun.  We found a tide pool instead and eventually all the kids came to the tide pool to play.   They put on their masks and explored every crevice.  Rhett on s/v Solara found a few baby eels that occupied their time for a while.

That's Jake flat on his back on "Slippery Rock".  Looks fun, huh?
The big kids loved it, but I'm pretty sure this place would be
roped off in the States.

See the little guy jumping?  Imagine him
in that same pose  with a butcher knife.
Unfortunately, I missed the photo op.

There were some locals a ways away that were fishing and their kids were playing in a much smaller tide pool.  You could see them slowly inching their way closer, curious about our kids.  Eventually, they were right there and the kids invited them in to play.  At first it was kind of cool until we moms looked up and saw a little guy, about 4, on top of a big rock about to jump into the tide pool, that was all of 2 feet deep.  As if that wasn't enough to give us a heart attack, he was holding a foot long butcher knife!  No, I'm not making this up.  And away he went off about a 5-6 foot drop with all the gusto you would think a 4 year old would have, butcher knife and all.  I'm guessing he had the knife because his parents were fishing and someone was going to use it to clean the fish, but they had about 8 kids and apparently, it's easy to lose track of where the knife goes.  After a few jumps and hearing the crazy white people yelling "Knife!," the sister or mother or someone came over and took the knife away.  All was fun again and the kids played for another hour or so.  They jumped, they played 'Marco, Polo,' and basically had a great time.  Once the sun proved to get the best of us, we decided to head on back to Pago Pago for some ice cream.

All in all, it was a wonderful day and I'm so thankful there are other kids here and other people who like to explore.  Today is Jake's actual birthday so after chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast and time to play with his new toys, we're going to head into McDonald's for lunch and a nice swim in the local hotel pool (for $5/person they let you use the pool) with Dharma and Rhett.

Daddy and Jake putting together his new Hero Factory character this morning.

Jake with "Meltdown."

A few of the parts we had shipped in didn't quite work out for various reasons so we'll be here another week waiting on some mail.  I can think of far worse places to be :).