It's all fun and games 'til someone loses an eye...

The critter went to a birthday party today for our neighbors' daughter. She turned 5 today, and in addition to the neighborhood kids from the farm, they invited her entire class full of children. Which made our critter about the youngest one of the 25 or so kids there.

To pacify this barbaric passel of raccoons soon high on cake, candy and tiny sausages, our neighbors rented one of those inflated bouncy-castle things. This always seems like a good idea, doesn’t it? It's inflatable fun, with walls of bouncy air-filled rubber. Somehow, how well the party is planned, these things always seem to be set up on at least a 20 degree tilt towards one corner, but that just makes the whole thing more fun, right?

Ella enjoyed herself thoroughly. Being the smallest of the lot, she was content to belly-crawl through the masses of bent, crying bodies that had been small children in pretty party dresses. She naturally adopted a WWI style elbows & knees crawl to both keep herself stable as the two oldest boys in the lot did belly-shattering drops from the inflated walls onto the floor of the bouncy castle, doing their best to imitate artillery shells falling on Flanders. At least two kids vomited, and more were crying before the day was done. The interesting thing was that the kids didn’t stop bouncing for any of this, they just cleared a space around the vomit and kept right on going.

Ella has informed us that she has to have a bouncy castle at her birthday party this summer.