Pumping It Up

We have a long weekend this weekend because of Thanksgiving.  I wanted to take the kids out somewhere, and Meghan suggested Pump It Up.  I think Halie has taken the kids there before, but neither Meghan nor I had been there.  They had am open play day today, which isn't very common, because they are usually full with birthday parties.  The first thing we did was the giant dual slide.  My kids all climbed up together and slid down together.  Usually that went fine, and they had a blast doing it at the same time.

              But one time it didn't turn out so well for Hannah, as she faceplanted on the mat, but she was fine.

They also have a series of big purple balls that the kids can jump from one to the other and try to land on it and stay on it without falling to the ground (which was just a soft, squishy mat).  Joshua went first and rocked it.

Clara went across with not quite the success of Joshua.  I didn't think Hannah was going to do it, but she decided she wanted to do it.  And she even made it across one of them.  I was really proud.  That's one of the areas in which she has grown the most recently.  She's so much braver than she used to be.

There is a cool feature which allows the kids to load soft foam balls into guns and shoot them across to the other side, where a similar setup allows the other kids to shoot back.  Joshua was excited to do it,which I expected, but yet again Hannah surprised by wanting to try it as well.

They also had a cylinder with multiple levels of webbing to allow the kids to climb up from the bottom to the top, where they could get in a big slide and slide back down.  Joshua spent quite a bit of time in this.  He wasn't interested in going down the slide but just liked to maneuver around the different levels.

Overall, I was pretty impressed with this place.  There were a lot of different things to do, including many I didn't even take pictures of.  As I mentioned, it's not open for open play as much as I'd like, but it's definitely a place I'd consider taking my kids again.