Staycation Day 5: Sky Zone

TGIAO! That's Thank Goodness It's Almost Over, with the "It's" referring to both our staycation week and my blogging about our comings and goings. Yes, those are two things, so "It's" should probably be "They're," but TGTAO is a bad acronym because it could also stand for "Twerking Grandma Throws Ass Out."  In case you hadn't figured, I am really trying to get back into blogging and recapping our week was an easy-ish way to get back into writing daily. Hopefully, once I'm into a routine I'll get back into writing more high-concept posts about dog people and imaginary telephone calls with Dora the Explorer.

To briefly recap earlier events in our staycation; on Monday night I discovered that the two Sky Zone trampoline parks closest to us did not open until 4pm. This was a major disappointment for the kids, particularly the Boy who didn't want to do anything other than visit Sky Zone and play Minecraft for his week off. Turned out that there is a third Sky Zone location in Kennesaw, which is even farther than the other two locations. But, the Kennesaw location was opening at noon because some schools in the area had the same random break week that we did. Hallelujah! I bought hour long jump passes for noon, because Google Maps was predicting a trip time of an hour and we had to book it back to our natural surroundings by 2 pm for the Boy's 9-year-old well appointment at the doctor. Delicious box lunches would be served in the car. With our 60-minutes of physical activity and flu vaccinations, staycation day 5 was unofficially sponsored by the CDC.

Getting a jump on National Handwashing Week and realizing that
I've been washing my hands wrong for my entire life. And that was
the one thing I thought I was doing right!

Driving anywhere turns into a big production for us because I have a horrible sense of direction and must Google Map nearly any destination outside of our neighborhood. To make matters worse, my bottom-of-the-line minivan doesn't have GPS, and my ancient iPhone doesn't hold a charge for very long, especially if I use Google Maps. As a result, my center console has a pile of directions that serves as an archive of every place I've driven since I last cleaned the car. On the plus side, the big kids get to read me the directions, which is possibly educational for them and definitely amusing for me. The Boy is an especially entertaining direction-reader because he adopts a computerized voice and says things like, "In 400 feet your destination is (pause) on the right."

The Kennesaw Sky Zone is tucked away in a nondescript industrial park and you would totally miss it if you weren't looking for it. ("In 100 feet turn left on (pause) Airport Boulevard.") We pulled up at about 11:45 and waited in the car for a minute because I wasn't sure that it was open. Then a school bus pulled up in front of the building and I went into frantic panic mode, rushing the kids out of the car so we could beat the bus full of kids into the building. We hustled in and flew through the line. (Note: If you ever go to Sky Zone, buy your passes and sign the waivers online before you go because it saves a ton of time at check in. Also, you can reuse your Sky Zone socks if they aren't ripped.) I snapped this picture of the kids waiting for noon so they could begin jumping:

The bus full of kids was on a school trip and my children were incredulous. "They're going to Sky Zone for a class trip? It's not educational! They aren't learning anything!" I suggested that maybe the class could learn something about physics, but the kids didn't buy that explanation. Unfortunately, the majority of the kids on the school trip were wearing their P.E. uniforms which were grey shirts and blue shorts...exactly what the Boy was wearing. At Sky Zone, you see your kids before they start jumping and then they're off in three different directions and you spend the rest of the time trying to find them to make sure they haven't dislocated anything or gotten kidnapped. This is difficult to do when there are 40 kids dressed just like your kid.

Sky Zone has several different areas set up with different trampoline-based activities. There is a free jump area, a basketball area, a dodgeball area, and a foam pit area. The kids jumped happily for about ten minutes and then the Boy found me to complain:

Boy: Mom, the referee is being totally unfair in dodgeball. He's making the worst calls ever.
Me: Well, he's not really a referee. He's just a college kid there to make sure no one gets hurt and to tell kids to leave the game when they get out.
Boy: (outraged) But, he's so bad at it! He's terrible. He said I was out and the ball didn't even hit me. It's so unfair.

The Boy has an overdeveloped sense of justice and one of his most common complaints is about the unfairness of the world. He's right, life is unfair. It's so unfair that there should be no expectation of fairness in certain areas, and one of those areas is at a dodgeball game in a trampoline park. He'll also complain about the unfair calls during soccer games at recess, during which the calls are being made by the eight and nine year old players. Of course, they're making bad calls. The surprise would be if they were making honest calls. I've tried to explain this to him, just to cut down on the shear volume of times he complains about something being unfair. It doesn't seem to matter, and he demands fairness in all realms at all times. You won't be surprised that he is constantly disappointed.

I suggested that he play something else that wasn't so fraught with the possibility of injustice. He stalked off grumbling to find his sisters. After about 30 minutes, they all came and found me.

Baby: This is boring. I want to go home.
Boy: Yeah, and the dodgeball game is super unfair. It's supposed to be for three to nine year olds and there was a kid in there who was as tall as Dad.
Girl: We should go and trick him. Ask him what year he was born. If it's before 2004, you know he's lying.
Baby: I want to go now!

This was the one thing that they all wanted to do on their week off and we drove an hour each way so that they could jump on some trampolines and now they wanted to leave with ten minutes of jump time left on their passes. What to do? I didn't want to guilt trip them by telling them the trouble I'd gone to getting them to Sky Zone, but I didn't appreciate how ungrateful they were being.

Me: You need to go jump for ten more minutes and then we can go. We are driving an hour each way to get here, so we need to spend at least an hour jumping.

I'm not sure that this taught them the correct lesson, but they did learn that lesson that we all learn about building something up in your mind to be impossibly perfect, only to be disappointed when reality smacks you in the face. Kinda like how I had expected that everyone would have a good time at Sky Zone, when in reality they complained like they always do. Ah well, apparently the kids were wrong. You can learn something at Sky Zone.