Review: Jump Park #chattanoogajump

I know there are naysayers and other negative nellies out there who will tell you that trampoline parks are huge liabilities to your back and are super spendy and are just incubators for Peter Pan Syndrome. And they are probably all right. For a funaholic like yours truly, though, I just cannot get enough of a Whole Warehouse Space Full of Trampoline. I had been to one before in Boston where you had to wear ghastly jumping shoes (yack!) but I'm so excited that we now have one in our Chattytown. And at Jump Park #CHA you can go barefoot!

My little man and I mounted a Friday morning trip last week and we had so much fun. The facility is clean (should be, they just opened), spacious, and nicely lit. The staff was quite helpful and friendly. There were about 20 people there at 11a on Friday and there were two "referees" on the trampoline floor, which seemed adequate (though I am not versed in the Tennessee Trampoliner Safety Guard per capita rules and regs).

This was my favorite ref guy:

Trampolining begins at the top of the hour when the refs go over the rules (Thou shalt only be one person on one trampo-square at a time). You have one hour until they call you off and it's pretty much plenty of time for the wee people in my life to get adequately trampo-cised.

Here's the pricing model. I like that they're not trying to punish parents of small children since they know we are going to spend most of our time taking crappy smartphone photos of our kids in mid-jump. Wait, what?

There appeared to be party rooms and there is a little cafe and a cubby/locker room area. Parking is on street (about a block from Finney Stadium) for now and was free but there appears to be some more lot space coming soon.

Before you go, be sure to sign the waiver online. Then you'll be all set to go and throw out your back when you get there with no one to blame for it. Hahah. Jokes.

Let me know if you go!

Tennesnow Day #CHAwx

It snowed in East Tennessee today, and the accumulation totally eluded the weatherpeople and their crystal balls. So we had an impromptu mid-day snow day and it has been delightful. The jaded Northerner in me set my irritations aside and relished the opportunity to frolic and play the Eskimo way, wondering if Eskimos would actually look outside and say, "Meh. Let's go binge-watch Dexter on Netflix."

I thought I was just changing the sheets

Ya think about changing your sheets. Whether you do it as a disciplined thing or you wait until the sheets peel themselves off your bed and beg you PERMA PRESS ME, STAT, you are so glad when change comes. The clean sheets feel so crisp and fresh. But then the cycle repeats itself and you are rolling around in bed wishing the Snuggle bear would just do you a favor and toss you some new linens. Change happens again, exchanging the dirties for the cleans.

The thing about moving from Boston to Tennessee for me was that I naively thought I was just changing a set of sheets. It was time. The city living, I was ready to wash ourselves clean of the endless traffic, the population density, the high priced everything, the pollution. And so we did. We not only changed the sheets, we moved the whole bed and caboodle to the South wherein we were no closer to family and were now without friends. The soft scent of the new sheets wore off quickly as we battled real estate woes back in Boston for well over the first year.

Had we not experienced what we believed was a very specific calling to change our sheets at the appointed time and to come live with some new ones in an appointed place, I think the experience would have been much more fraught with doubt and fear.

And now, here we are. We have changed so much more than our sheets. My children pull bricks from their driveway to find potato bug colonies, they sing sabbath school songs in the car, they know about cherry limeade at Sonic, they chase butterflies on our acreage like a couple of Smurfs for crying out loud. They are Southerners. They have no concrete memories of the urbane streets we strolled everyday in their former city, splashing in the Frog Pond on the Boston Common, riding the T from Shawmut Station to Harvard Square.

These memories are becoming faint for me, too, like illustrations of someone else's enchanted life who was able to do the unthinkable: walk to get a chai latte on her way to work.

I thought I was only changing the sheets, you see. I thought I got to retain all the things I still liked about my life as I traded the excesses of the city for the simple pleasures of the country.

Not so. I just exchanged all the maladies and woes of my former geography for a new set in my new geography.

I am still uncomfortable in the South. I am still the weird girl in social circles. I am still too direct in most settings, and totally uninterested in pleasantries. I am intense, honest, generous, clumsy, and self-deprecating. I have a flair for brightly colored fabrics. I am a product of a Midwestern upbringing, a MidAtlantic education, and a New England professionalism. I cannot disinherit these sheets that have wrapped me up for twirtysomething years. I can only clean them and make them presentable.

My one comfort, other than the amazing Mr. Loverpants who should win a best supporting role in the play about my yammering, is the promise from Psalm 46:

God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved; God will help her when morning dawns.

Can I get a li'l 'Bless her heart' from y'all?