Stuck at the top
We’re two days away from a big launch, and it feels like it did back in March. Not quite as nerve-wracking, but I’m starting to get butterflies and having trouble not obsessively checking the site and my email every few minutes.
Thankfully, the weekend arrived and forced us to get away from the office for a while to take the kids out. We went to one of those temporary pumpkin patches that pop up on El Camino, the ones that will in two months’ time turn into suburban Christmas tree farms. For us, the attraction wasn’t so much the pumpkins but the bounce houses. Last week we visited one that had 5 different bounce houses, and the price of admission was only $8 for a half hour - plus the baby gets in free. I don’t see how they can make enough money - the energy cost for those bounce houses has to be pretty high, and there never seem to be very many people there. Of course, we don’t go at peak times. This morning we showed up at 10am, and the tarp covering the ground was wet from last night’s rain. The guy who runs the place told us that he had wiped down the bounce houses prior to deflating them last night, but the water seeps in once you blow them back up. Sure enough, if you looked at the seams of the jumpers, there was water bubbling in through every crack.
The water made the younger one kind of nervous, but our son still had a blast running around and jumping. He spent most of his time at the bottom of one of those giant slides, jumping around and watching the older boys climb the stairs and slide down. He would occasionally make an attempt at scaling the steps, then change his mind after 10 feet or so. Finally he plucked up enough courage when there wasn’t anyone else around, and made it all the way to the top. At which point he started calling out for one of us to come up and get him. We waited a while, calling encouragement to him, but he just kept pacing back and forth at the top of the slide. He was so far we couldn’t actually hear what he was saying, but we got the meaning. The pumpkin patch rules prohibit parents from getting on the slide so we had to send the guy manning the checkin to go rescue him. You could see the expression on our son’s face as this friendly stranger made his way up the steps, from wary curiosity to hell no, get away from me! The man did succeed in getting them both down the slide, to the cheers of now a small crowd. On the way home in the car, we just told him how brave he was for climbing up the big slide. Maybe next time he’ll decide to come down on his own.
Posted by Erin 
13.Oct.07
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