bounce house mania

Eli & I have a new found joy. The Bounce House. There are no less than 3 of them here in Knoxville. The one we go to has "open play" on Wednesday nights from 6:00 - 8:30pm and costs only $7.00 per child. It's such a blast!! They have 3 of the standard "bounce houses" where you just go inside and just jump up and down. There's an obstacle course just for kids. There's an "adventure course" that he and I both go on, a 24-foot tall slide, basketball hoops, and they offer very inexpensive and healthy snacks.

After about 90 minutes at the Bounce House, we are totally exhausted. My joints hurt, my knees are burned, Eli is sweating like crazy and making multiple trips to the water fountain. It sort of causes me to realize how spoiled our son is when the things that he gets to do on almost a monthly basis (dollywood, bounce house, chuck e cheese, the zoo) are things that I may have gotten to do once every 1-2 years when I was growing up! Heck, the only time I ever remember seeing Bounce House type stuff was at yearly state fairs or carnivals. And then they were so crowded with kids you were lucky to make it out without an injury!

So we'll continue bouncing each month. And I'll continue mentally griping about how I didn't get to do all these things as a kid. Then I'll just make up for it all by doing it now. And then one day my son will make fun of me for griping about all the things I was deprived of as a child. Just like how my dad had to walk a mile to school and back every day, regardless of the weather (this is actually true), and that was after getting up at 5am to milk the cows, and how he never went ANYWHERE - vacation, ocean, amusement park, etc - until he was in his 20's. And then 30 years from now Eli will gripe about how he never got to travel cross-country in 2 hours on a hovercraft when he was a kid, and how he actually had to brush his teeth and scrub his body with soap before the 24-hour-entire-body-clean chewable vitamin came out in 2019.

And I will laugh.