Sunday, January 14, 2007

Sammy is Eight

We held Sammy's birthday party for his friends (all fourteen of them!) at a "soft play world" in an industrial estate. The basic business concept is that you pay a small fortune to let the kids go berserk for an hour or two, jumping around in the equivalent of giant padded cell. The theory is that they can throw themselves into walls or jump off inflatable climbing frames without causing themselves any harm. This is all very well, but clearly the guy who designed this had envisaged only one kid running around at a time - when there are hundreds of them the "safe play" concept quickly falls apart at the seams. While the kids' heads may bounce happily off posts and floors wrapped in rubber - this is most definitely not the case when their heads bounce off each other. How we survived two hours without any broken bones is a miracle on par with the turning of water into wine. In the end we got away with only one loose tooth, one scraped nose and one attempted strangulation (the dramatic denouement of a fight over an inflatable banana). As if this wasn't bad enough the volume level inside these places is like standing next to a runway at Heathrow watching planes take off. Even Motörhead were never this loud.

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