The Bouncy Place

I took these pictures about a month ago, right before my camera died, and hadn't gotten around to processing and posting them yet. We went up to The Bouncy Place in Kent with some friends from church (the Carters, who have a little girl just a little younger than Kate) and I took along the camera. I don't think this had anything to do with the camera dying. I wasn't actually bouncing with it or anything.



Kate's favorite thing at The Bouncy Place is "Baby Dino Lake" with the animals. She always has to go see the animals first thing, and say goodbye to them when we leave.



Tuesday night is "Family Night": $5 per kid for an hour and a half. Adults are welcome to bounce too, though not many do. I don't know why--it's great fun, and quite the workout. (And it's easier on the knees than crawling around in the tunnels at Odyssey.)



(Nice expression there, Doug!)



Here are Kate and Daddy on one of the slides. Motion blur!



Here's one of all three of us at the top of a big slide. Wheee!



And here's Kate climbing all by herself! It's been so fun to see her do more and more each time we go. The first couple of times she was pretty cautious. When we went down the big slides she would sit on my lap and cover her eyes (which was awfully cute). Now she's just bouncing and climbing and sliding all over the place.

There's a hazard to working on photos like this--Kate looking over my shoulder, and saying, "Look! It's me! At the Bouncy Place! We can go to the Bouncy Place tomorrow?" We told her we can go on Tuesday. It's hard to explain what "Tuesday" means at this point. Heck, I'm not sure if she really understands what "tomorrow" means. She's pretty clear on "today" and "not today." I have a feeling we'll be hearing about The Bouncy Place a lot for a while.

Boing! Boing!

Today we went to The Bouncy Place in Kent. One of Doug's co-workers told him about it recently, and we've been wanting to check it out. It's basically a warehouse of bouncy toys. Those big inflatable things. (We call them "The Bouncy Tottington Hall," after watching Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.) It was a hoot. Kate was a bit hesitant at first (she tends to be on the cautious side), but she had a blast. She especially liked the animals in the Baby Dino Lake. We also took her down the big slides (we had to hand her up the ladders to each other, since she couldn't get up them herself). She was a bit frightened by the biggest slide, which is very steep and fast, but then later she wanted to go down it again. She sat on Doug's lap and put her hands over her eyes. Wheee!

We were there for a one-hour drop in session. (Most of their business is party rentals, but they have drop in play times too.) It's $5.00 per child and parents are free. We got some good exercise, climbing around. I was feeling pretty hot and winded by the end.

We found a cool Vietnamese place where we had lunch, then came home and Kate and I crashed for a while. Now she's got Doug chasing her around the house, pretending to be an alligator.