Happy Kids

This weekend we decided to get Maddox out of the house and take him to one of the indoor child play houses in the area. There is one called JumpInn and one called Happy Kids. This came up in a conversation I had with Ben's 1st SGT's wife and she persuaded us to try Happy Kids. Apparently, JumpInn is in a huge building and targets more of the older children. There is a play area for toddlers, but there is a lot going on and she said we would most likely be chasing him all over the building. So today, Sunday we piled into the car, joined by the Dukes' family, and headed to Eppelheim. We picked a good day to go because it's rainy, cold, and an all around gloomy day.

Eppelheim is a small German community just minutes from Heidelberg. I guess it would be like a suburb, but it is just a couple blocks of housing area (mostly apartment buildings several stories high) a little downtown/business district, and surrounded by farm feilds (OH - they started plowing and fertilizing the feilds around our housing area this weekend and BOY does it stink like cow manure!) Since we invited friends along on the journey we drove around yesterday to make sure we could find the place. It is in an industrial area, with drabby looking buildings and grafiti, but the inside turned out to be much nicer. There were beautiful murals on all the walls with tropical flowers and birds.



We walk up to the register and I asked the lady "Sprechen sie english?" "No," she replies shaking her head. OH no. In anticipation of this I had looked up how to say "two adults and one child" in german, but choked under pressure and couldn't remember how to say adult. So, I turned to her and said the german word for two, then pointed to Ben and myself, then said the german word for one and pointed to Maddox. That worked well enough, we paid the fee and entered the play area.

There were two seperate play areas, one for chidlren under 4 and one for older children. The older section had a giant blow up slide in the shape of an alligator. You cimb in through the mouth, then slide down it's back. Every couple of minutes the mouth closes and it looks like the kids are getting eaten by the alligator. It was entertaining to watch.

Maddox's section had a ball pit with a slide that went into it, a bounce house, a bunch of little cars and trikes to ride around, and several other things to play with. He had a great time mostly riding the cars around and ramming into something every once in a while. He pulled his typical bully behavior by chasing a little german girl around and tried to steal everything she played with. Once we noticed that we put a stop to it. So, he found another little girl to chase and made her cry while she was going through the tunnel.

Ben was in the feild with Maddox most of the time while I took care of Carson in the table section.




He had fun playing with the toys too.


You could tell we were American by the Red Sox sweat suit Ben had to dress Maddox in. The German children were definitely dressed differently. They wore very tight pants and most of the time I couldn't tell which was a girl and which was a boy. Cultural differences I guess.








And Carson was chilled out most of the day. He's such a good baby :)