Bouncy Castles are Evil

Sabrina survived a series of bouncy castle adventures two Fridays ago without incident, despite being inside one with four or five other children of similar age at least four different times. If you've never seen a group of two-year-olds in a bouncy castle, it's basically a NASCAR race without helmets. Wait long enough and someone's going to get hurt. Sabrina and the other tykes managed, how I still don't know, to avoid head-butting each other over a total of maybe 10 minutes, only to learn a painful lesson the next day.

On Saturday, Mommy took Sabrina to Texas Jumping Beans, a kiddie gymnasium with a number of different fun activities for kids, and one of them was a bouncy castle. At some point a little boy bounced up into her chin as she was coming down and she bit the heck out of her tongue. Mommy was very cool and collected as she picked Sabrina up, strapped her into the child seat and got me on the phone to find out where the nearest ER was. I, despite having seen a fair amount of gore, death and misery and feeling pretty much nothing about it, and being able to function well in such situations, lost it. Deirdre had to calm me down, which is pretty pathetic considering she was driving around with a screaming, bleeding baby at the time. I finally chilled enough to be helpful and started North to find them.

At the ER, I found that Sabrina was pretty calm and had bitten two large holes in her tongue. She cooperated nicely with the doc, who said no stitches were necessary and prescribed her Amoxicillin to ward off infection, and then warned us not to give her sour or salty foods. She immediately insisted on Cheetos and a lime popsicle, being the tough little thing she is. Yeah, they hurt, but not enough to keep her from eating them.

I had to ask the nurse what she thought about bouncy castles, and she said her kids don't get to do anything fun in the first place because she's an ER nurse, but that bouncy castles were particularly dangerous in her estimation. I asked what kind of injuries they cause, and she said "broken bones, concussions, terrible cuts, eye injuries, teeth knocked out by impact and ripped out by the safety netting" whereupon I told her enough, I was boycotting the bouncy castle too. Sabrina may have other plans, but the only way I'm letting her back in a bouncy castle in the nextg 18 months is if I get to go in with her and hip-check all the other kids away from her. I'm sure that will go over well with the other parents.