Best Indoor Fun

Last week Lucy & I headed 30 minutes north to try out an "indoor park" for the afternoon.  I'd seen it advertised with bounce houses (our favorite) and had been interested in going for a while, so we finally bit the bullet and hopped in the car.  As promised, there were five separate bounce houses along with a McD's-like climbing playhouse, and it was toddler heaven. 

Unless I was missing something major, I have no idea how this place stays in business.  Tuesday was a two-for-one day ($8 admission), and there were maybe 15 kids there total.  Though the bounces houses are clearly big enough for a bigger kids crowd, it appears to cater to the net-yet-in-schoolers, open only Monday-Friday 10-4.  One thing I have come to appreciate in staying home with Lucy is the ability to bring her somewhere on a Tuesday afternoon and not have her fight for space with all the big kids.  But back to the business - where do they make their money?  Busy vacation weeks?  The cafe that sells hot dogs and pizza?  They were open for us to enjoy so I guess it really doesn't matter, but it did make me think about opening a similar business in Ames which is severely lacking in childhood fun sites.

The first bounce house Lucy tried was the giant slide.  From the floor, it looks kind of intimidating, but that didn't slow her down at all.  Every trip was the same progression: climb, slide, jump with joy at the end.

 

 

Bounce master Lu here.  This is the kid that week after week amazes the other parents at gymnastics with her trampoline ability.  She bounces high and hard.

The playground also had a ball room with specific instructions to not remove any of the purple balls.  Carrying both of these not-purple balls here made it near impossible for Lucy to do anything but stand at the bottom of the bounce house slide and wait for a friend to share a ball with.  There was certainly no way she was putting one of those down.

We were there for almost three hours, and the pictures I took don't really reflect the amount of time Lucy spent in the stationary play structure at the end.  The bounce houses only really lasted her about an hour, and after lunchtime most of the kids migrated away from the bouncing.  (Hmmm, maybe kids really do know it's bad to eat junky food and then bounce around like crazy.)  The pictures also don't reflect the family with two four-year-old boys that kept on doing things like hitting Lucy in the back of the head with a ball and lifting up the end of a bench to try and dump me off it.  It's kids and moms like that who have made me realize I'm not a particularly tolerant person when it comes to the behavior of other people's children.  Thankfully, at two, Lucy still has few enough social conventions to allow anything like that to spoil her fun.

Finish off with the best shot I was able to get of the two biggest bounce structures and a video of Lucy up and down one of the slides.  A truly spectacular experience.