Softplay and snogging

This is a guest post from Bea Hope who is writing about her morning at the soft play centre. If you would like to guest post here please let me know.

Yesterday I took my youngest to softplay because it was raining. I haven’t been to our local softplay centre in a long time because they are my vision of hell: scores of grimy toddlers and preschoolers running at top speed, screaming at the top of their voices, always with snot bubbling out of their noses and visible dirt on their hands, both of which get get wiped gloriously all over the ball pit.

But it was raining and my youngest is a terrible two and I had a terrible headache and I just wanted a few minutes respite from my own child, even if it meant spending it with everyone else’s terrible twos child (who never seem as bad as your own screaming banshee, because they’re not pushing your buttons). Emily had wonderful fun, finding a little boy to befriend who was just the right amount of daring to bring her out of her shell without being too rough for her rather girlie self. I had a coffee and chatted with a mum who had come for much the same reason. She turned out to be a bit of a kindred spirit and when we left we exchanged facebook addresses in the mum equivalent of meeting a boy at a party. But without the snogging.

It was the perfect way to spend a rainy Tuesday. Although if Emily starts throwing up today I’ll know there was some ball-snogging going on when I wasn’t watching.

Do you do softplay or is it emergency entertainment only? How did our mothers ever survive without softplay when we were growing up?

Photo: mae.noelle

Tagged as: softplay