25-02-17 Nessa’s JumpBoxx Birthday Party

Saturday 25th February 2017

A birthday party for Kingsley to attend this morning! Old Meraas colleague Salona’s first child, Nessa, turns 6 and for her celebration a big group of kids, mums and dads all get dressed in sporty attire for two hours of jumping at JumpBoxx Indoor Trampoline Park.  It had been a year since Kingsley spent any time with Nessa and her 4 year old brother Kai and with all our travels abroad, I hadn’t seen Salona for that long too.

Our champ loved the vibe…but didn’t take instruction at all. So many competitive games he was a part of and he was so distracted by the colour and movement of the trampoline park that he could not (would not?) hear the team leaders give directions. Still he was the happiest child at the party bar Nessa.

At one point the dads and kids got on either side of a rope and after the count of THREE were to begin their tug-o-war. Erroll became The Hulk while Kingsley enjoyed the chaos. Team Hartley lost; Erroll took it hard. Kingsley just jumped away from enthusiasm.

Toward the end of the birthday party we sang Happy Birthday and all the bad junk food got served up: pizza, ‘chicken’ nuggets (questionable), french fries, sugary “organic’ apple juice. Kingsley became dizzy from anticipation to taste it all. All the kids were left in one room with the helpers and all the parents were reluctantly ushered to another room (would our kids eat enough? miss us? make a mess? start a food fight??) The helpers shushed us and shooed us along; they’d done this a million times before. Erroll relaxed the instant someone handed him a steaming cup of coffee; Kingsley was forgotten for five minutes and we actually had an adult conversation.

An exceptional day all round! Happy birthday Nessa!

Mates Kai and Kingsley in the line up to the competitive games

The line up of boys compete against the girls (girls won all games)

Ba-Bah taking the tug-o-war very seriously