A Trampoline | DogDogFish

A Trampoline | DogDogFish

I didn’t want to buy a trampoline. It wasn’t the money. It was the<br>fact that just about every trampoline I’d seen in somebody’s garden looked like<br>a sad, weather-beaten thing. And I never saw children playing on them. I<br>reasoned that the novelty factor was pretty strong for a trampoline - you love<br>them for an hour the first time you get one…but are you really going to spend<br>hour-after-hour, day-after-day on them? And then they’re there - permanently<br>cluttering up your garden, reminding you of the fact that you thought it’d be a<br>good idea to get one. Throw it away? Good luck. Of course the kids think it’s<br>the best thing ever when you want to throw it away. And so you’re stuck with<br>it. Forever. A rotting husk of a trampoline - a monument to your own bad<br>decision making, your kids’ impulsive nature, and your indulgence of that.

Except it didn’t happen like that at all. My six-year-old and four-year-old<br>spend every morning out there doing “gladiator training”. While they flail<br>around with foam swords, my one-year-old crawls around between them squealing<br>with delight. The big one throws a large bouncy ball on to act as an oversized<br>football and yet more chaos ensues. As I put the baby to bed at night I can<br>hear the faint squeaking of springs as the eldest two bounce away the last of<br>their energy.

Now the trampoline serves as a reminder. A permanent reminder that I am a bad judge of what we should buy: an irrational economic actor. A reminder to buy the kids things they say they desperately want. I gazed up to the sky. I had won a victory over myself. I had learned to love big brother trampoline.

Except now my wife wants to buy the kids a big play-frame and surely they’ll<br>just grow bored of it and the park is nearby and what’s wrong with climbing<br>trees or the trampoline?