COSMIC (Mis)ADVENTURES
I will admit to being a pre-children ball pit snob. The playrooms at MacDonalds or Chuck E Cheese gave/give me full body ‘ick’ shudders. No amount of signage promoting cleaning schedules could convince my OCD self, or even my pig pen self, that those balls (and handles and slides and ramps) aren’t coated in decades of accumulated spit, snot and pee. It is a scientific impossibility that even a minimal level of disinfection could occur. It is a statistical likelihood that impetigo outbreaks are commonplace. Before I had kids, I would avert my eyes from the IKEA ballroom, lest acknowledging its existence would make me guilty by association of child abandonment. I was certain that any parent who would entrust their offspring to this Squid Game for toddlers, should immediately be turned into Children’s Aid.
But “Desperate Times call for desperate measures”. Everyone has had the experience of weaving through the never-ending hellscape of the IKEA maze. Ten hours (days?) later you emerge into the 10-hectare parking lot with a scrap of paper covered in Turing machine codes (A54, D29b) for the out-of-stock items you came for but didn’t get. Instead, you have a cart filled with candles, throw cushions and cookie cutters that you don’t want, but that you bought because the only thing more crushing would be to leave empty handed. Add children into the mix, throw in a bonus hour of spent spinning a miniature moon chair in the kids’ room section, top that with a stomach-ache from a mid-afternoon “dinner” of horse-meat meatballs. Suddenly the ball room no longer resembles a gigantic Petri dish of parental neglect. It is Swedish for ”Ball pits aren’t THAT bad.”
Now take the IKEA ball room, multiply it times…I don’t know…one billion zillion trillion. Add a five-story maze of ropes, tunnels, obstacles, and slides. Layer on excessively loud ear worm music played through low quality speakers. Top that off with neon strobe lights and a psychotic symphony of BINGS!, BONGS!, BOINGS!, @%!*#@s! and the screeching of an inconceivable number of children.
Now make everything sticky.
And criminally overpriced.
Combine that all into a rainy Saturday afternoon and you have the indoor “amusement center” experience. (TA-DA!!)
As noted in the “BETA BABY” story, M & I were firm adherents of the ‘learn from one’s mistakes’ approach to parenting. In this vein, we naively booked the Supersized Ball Pit in our town, “Cosmic Adventures”, for one of our daughters’ birthday parties. For the sake of self-preservation, I have blocked the bulk of that day from memory. But the culminating event cannot be tucked away into dissociative oblivion because it had ripple effects. Birthday parties at Cosmic Adventure are capped off by sequestering “guests” in an unventilated 10x10 party room (read: “cell”) to be force fed cold pizza and preservative cake. The purpose of this imprisonment is to open the gifts that have been lovingly selected by the guests’ mothers (aka stuff made of pink plastic and/or synthetic “fur”). Except that, in our case, there were no gifts. The 14-year-old “Cosmic Host” had delivered our daughter’s gifts to the birthday girl reigning over the sweatbox next door. This Birthday Diva, in full oversight of multiple adults, had openned all her gifts, as well as all our daughter’s – even though half the cards are addressed to a child whose name shared zero letters with her own, and that there were oddly more than double the number of gifts as there were friends. One can only assume the mom was a criminal, or a lawyer (‘nine-tenths of the law’), because they refused to give the presents back. After a series of animated sidebar discussions with the 17-year-old “Manager” we were given a gift certificate to return to the Cosmic torture chamber - now the site of the biggest calamity in our daughter’s life and the last place she wanted to revisit.[1]
But revisit we did. This time it was a special outing with our two oldest daughters a few days before Kid#3’s the birth.[2] An extra special treat to create positive associations with the arrival of their sister. This is important, as it goes to the fact that I was really, really, REALLY, pregnant. I am there as solo parent. (Why, oh, why?) Predicably, one of the kids gets themselves into a pickle in the furthest-most reaches of the obstacle course skyscraper.
“MUM-MAAAAAAAAYYYYYYY!!!! I St-UCK!”
The 3’ kid is stuck, but the stay puffed marshmallow mom will fit? A dubious solution, but I had signed the entrance waiver which definitely had a clause entitled “your kid – your problem”.[3] So up I go. At one point I get stuck in a tube much too small for someone who can’t bend at the waist. I become convinced that I am going to go into labour and give birth on an aggressively colourful version of the set of TRON. I have broken into a cold sweat. The crotch of my elasticized preggers-pants is down around my knees making it near impossible to straddle the up and over padded bolsters. By the time I get to the upper most turret – my kid is gone (of course).
At this point I am in a state of … many things…none of them positive. I am also trying to crawl across a Jacob’s ladder rope bridge with my belly as a fifth point of contact. And it is there that I come face to face - as in inches away/shared breath space - with my teenaged self’s “what was I thinking?” summer fling. He clearly recognizes me. I watched his face go from blank, to ???, to !!!, and then … and then I averted my eyes and race-crawled away as fast as a beached whale could. Wrapping my unborn child around a firepole, landing in the good ol’ ball pit, I grabbed my kids, high tailed it to the minivan and spun out of the parking lot like a scene from Dukes of Hazard meets Bad Moms. I vowed I would never return to another ball pit establishment again.
But return I did.
In my defense, I was tricked.
We were invited by work colleagues to go on a double date to an Escape Room. M gets on the highway and starts driving way out of town, and then (ironically, given this story’s start) into the IKEA parking lot. He pulls up in front of a gigantic leering happy face with google eyes and lolling tongue: “FUN HAVEN”. I am not fooled by the name. I know better. My ball-pit-PTSD is kicking in.
Me: “What’s happening?”
M: “I was scared to tell you.”
Me: “This can’t be right.”
M: “They had a Groupon.”
Fun Haven is to Cosmic Adventure what Cosmic Adventure is to the IKEA ball room. It’s a bright blue SUPER-sized Slurpee versus a No Name juice box. Into this sensory torture chamber we go to “enjoy” an adult evening out - I can’t stress this enough - WITHOUT our kids. Suffice it to say that I have never decoded, puzzled or team-worked so fast. This was perhaps the most diabolically clever Escape Room scenario ever. This was the real deal – because I was literally desperate to ESCAPE. As I received dagger eyes from my “teammate” for rushing through the wordfind challenge while being pegged by nerf balls, I thought: “Yup, I was right, nothing good can come from a Ball Pit” (except maybe a story or two).
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[1] This was the point at which we officially started to wean the children off birthday parties.
[2] For the special event before our second daughter’s birth I took H to a pottery painting place. While there, sporting a bright red apron over my Goodyear balloon belly, I was videotaped by the local news station. This clip was brought out to fill time gaps between ad spots for the next three years (or until I dropped cable) – immortalizing my Bonhomme period.
[3] As well as many clauses absolving them of any and all liability – including the loss of birthday gifts.