Nothing happened at the bouncy house today, you guys!
Do you know how huge this is?
We have had to take a month or two off from this place even though we are paying for a membership because just going had become “too much” for Jonah.
Don’t get me wrong, he absolutely LOVES this place. Almost TOO much.
He loves it SO much, that if any little thing is not right about it, it can become a BIG thing.
…a VERY big thing.
For instance, he will no-longer go on the “inter-tube jump” because one time, they forgot to spray the bottom of the inter-tube with water and it didn’t launch him at all. He stopped at the bottom of the ramp. Then, he had a meltdown, and never went on it again.
Then, the last time we went to this place, the zip line on the obstacle course was broken. Jonah got all the way through the course and couldn’t go on the zip line.
“Just go around it,” they said. 😒
Well, you know how that goes. “Oh yeah, sure… Just change your routine a little bit. No problem.” 🥸👍👎
Jojo must have just stayed up on the obstacle course for 45 minutes holding back tears, not wanting to come back down, but also not wanting to “go around the zip line” either. It was absolutely heartbreaking seeing him trying to cope with the situation.
Eventually he came back down, but he was hitting his own face yelling, “ALL DONE ‘SAD!’”
He was upset with his own tears for making him cry. 😢
So today, before we went to the “bouncy house place,” I made sure their zip line was fully-functioning.
We are not doing THAT again.
But neither the zip line nor the inter-tube jump were the biggest reasons we have been avoiding this place.
They have a ball pit…
…And apparently all the balls belong in the ball pit…
…at ALL times. (You see where I’m going with this 😬)
If balls are outside the ball pit, Jonah’s anxiety will instantly skyrocket.
And kids being kids, the balls FREQUENTLY go outside the ball pit.
And then Jonah feels like he needs to clean them all up, and the other kids are completely oblivious to the fact that “the balls must stay together and are to remain in the ball pit at all times.” 😭
Jonah did SO well for a long time in managing his anxiety with this. If kids were throwing balls out, he would utilize every strategy he knew to get them to stop. He would even VERBALLY tell them to “stop it with the throwing!”
But of course there is no real rule about “balls staying in the ball pit,” and half the fun for some kids is just throwing the balls at each other.
And there are literally hundreds of kids there.
Kids would run past him, wouldn’t hear him, or would completely ignore him.
They just wouldn’t acquiesce or accommodate him, and the balls would “keep going everywhere” and we would have a full-blown public meltdown right there in the bouncy house.
We can deal with situational problems okay. Human problems are a different story.
So we took a break from going there… one of Jonah’s favorite places.
But again, we have a membership, and we are paying every month for access to this place.
So when we showed up today, I was nervous. It was mid-afternoon—not the busiest time of day, but certainly busier than opening. There were still a lot of kids.
It didn’t start well.
When Jonah went to do the obstacle course, they were all out of “yellow harnesses.”
He has only ever worn “yellow harnesses.”
So I prepared Jonah to “wait” for someone to be done so he could wear their yellow harness. But then they offered him an ORANGE harness.
This will typically trigger Jonah’s anxiety, especially in this place, where his anxiety can run high with any little deviance in his routine.
But to my surprise, Jonah was FLEXIBLE. He put on an orange harness. 🤯
Then, he played on the bouncy house, and didn’t try to clean up the balls ONCE. There were HUNDREDS of wandering displaced balls that I had to catch MYSELF from cleaning up out of habit.
If Jonah didn’t have a problem with it, I certainly wasn’t going to remind him about it.
But he did GREAT!
He even took 4 or 5 balls with him out of the ball pit to “roll down the big slide!”
Not one meltdown. I didn’t even have to use my timer to get him to transition and leave! 🤩
Nothing happened. It was a day of victories.
I saw all these parents sitting back, relaxing in their massage chairs and playing on their phones, while their kids just had a blast. Not a care in the world.
To the average parent, it must be a nice break to take their kids here.
But I was in full “ALERT” mode the whole time and watching Jonah like a hawk.
And though their kids’ experience and my kid’s experience today may have looked the same…
…it took A LOT of patience and hard work just to make today “uneventful” for us.
#ausome
