Bounce Time

I'm always on the lookout for places the kids can run around, particularly during the winter. Both my kids, but especially Jared, are pretty physical and they need to have a lot of space to move. Otherwise, it will be a day full of jumping on beds, couches, coffee tables, and running full speed through the house. Not that it's not ok most of the times, but they want me to run with them, and I'm not great at keeping up with them at all.

So, when I found out about a place near my house, the same place they now take gymnastics lessons, that had a soccer field length room filled with inflatables, I was so excited. I asked my friend and her son to come with one Thursday morning, and the kids had a blast.

I have a picture of Alexa climbing up this huge slide, but I realized that I never took one of Jared going down the slide. I was really proud of him. He's always been really good at climbing and pretty fearless about heights, as well. Alexa wouldn't climb all the way up the slide or go down it, but she came a lot closer to climbing up to the top as the morning went on. She had a pretty bad tumble down a flight of stairs a couple of months after she turned two, so she's very, very cautious about anything to do with climbing or heights.

They stopped briefly for a Triscuit snack, and then they were off running again. During the last twenty minutes we were there, a group of boys, probably around the ages of 4-7, played with the kids, too. It was nice not to feel like I had to keep an eye on whether my kids would be too rough with the other kids, since these kids were older. In fact, it was Alexa who had the most fun shoving down the older boys. She even found a little friend, a boy who kept following her around. When it was time to leave, he put his arm around her and told her he loved her!  I still don't know whether to think that was cute or just plain creepy.

My friend and her son came over to our house afterwards to eat lunch, and then the kids played for a while. Even though J is only twenty months old, he speaks pretty well for his age and is very extraverted, so all three kids play together very well. J seemed to like looking at all the new toys, kind of like how my kids feel when they get to play with J's toys. We decided that this really should be at least a monthly thing, and we're going to try to get my sister and her son to come next time, too.