Benjamin and I did a father/son thing this morning and we went to the Charleston Kids Fair at Gaillard Auditorium. Picture the sights and smells of 900 kids covered with face paint and pizza cheese being pursued by 900 bored and exasperated parents. I guess you can't picture the smells. Never mind.
The fun activities included bowling for empty 2-liter bottles. Benjamin knocked them all down with 3 balls; better than the 10-year-old that bowled before he did. Sweet: my kid is athletic.
The day was fun-filled and chock-full of learning activities. He learned how to make a hand puppet out of paper with this nice lady.
He also learned about nutrition. I may have said "Don't tell Mommy" when I was handing him this chocolate and sprinkles covered Krispey Kreme doughnut. In my defense, I ate half myself.
He got to learn two lessons from this lady. He learned that 1) you should always take care of your teeth to prevent tooth decay and gum disease, and 2) you should try not to look like a complete dork in public.
But the prime attraction was the bouncy houses. Kid loves bouncy houses. We can't utter the words "Monkey Joe's" (which has no less than 10 bouncy houses) in his midst without him going completely ape shit. Check out this grin:
Some bouncy houses have ladders that lead up to slides. One of my proudest moments as a father was when Benjamin climbed up a 20 ft. ladder at Monkey Joe's. This was about a year ago, and he was still a pretty tiny kid. But he was fearless. He was also fearless when he went down the huge slide a few moments later. (Perhaps fearless isn't the right word. Maybe oblivious is better. Whatever.)
He loves bouncy houses! Look at the air this kid is getting!
The great thing about bouncy houses is that they are totally safe. It's got to be nearly impossible to injure yourself in these huge, soft, puffy, air-filled gas bags. Try jumping on Rush Limbaugh's face sometime and you'll get the feel for the bouncy house experience. They are like those padded rooms that they put crazy people in (Which, if you think about it, is totally appropriate for children).
They are completely safe, that is, unless they begin to catastrophically deflate while your kid is inside.
"Benjamin. Go to the door. Go out the door." I tried to give my voice a little bit of urgency without any hint of panic. I figured, if necessary, I could always crawl in the little door, wriggle inside, and extract him before he could get crushed and/or suffocated. But he made it to the door and flopped out. Once he was safely out, I backed off a few steps and took this picture. You never know when a lawyer is going to need something like this.
There's a lot going on in this photo. In the commotion, Benjamin is seen briefly grabbing the jeans-legged man nearby, who is not his Daddy. In his defense, I was just standing there a second ago, wearing blue jeans, and there was some yelling and confusion. The little girl in the pink shirt has just emerged, newborn-like, from the bouncy house, and is seen scrambling out of the path of the woman in the pink shirt, who has flailed onto the porch of the bouncy house and is desperately attempting to extract her own small child from the netted wall as the structure continues to succumb to gravity. Benjamin's "Dad" is lending a hand. Meanwhile, the little girl on the right is bearing witness to the unfolding tragedy. Oh, the humanity! And the little girl on the far left is wearing a really stupid hat.
We should have suspected something when we saw the logo on the bouncy house. It's a rabid dog chewing up a baseball bat. Or a kid's leg bone.
