The ball pit from hell

I've mentioned before the babysitting gig Meelyn, Aisling and I have at a local church's mother's group, right? And I've mentioned about the ball pit in the room Aisling and I are assigned to, the one no doubt put in that playroom by some SADIST who set it all up and then left, never having to lift a single brightly-colored ball up off the floor and if I knew who that person was, I would go up to him and slap him repeatedly until he fell unconscious to the floor.

I took this picture early on, before any children were even in the room. As soon as they burst through the door, they barely took the time to hang their coats up on the little pegs before shrieking, "YAY!! BALL PIT!!!" and flinging themselves in there. Whereupon, as you can imagine, the balls fall out.

Boy, do they ever fall out. They fall out everywhere. They fall out in places that you wouldn't really have expected them to fall, such as by the toilet in the little bathroom that is a good twenty feet across the huge playroom. It could just break your heart, the way those things fall out.

But it could break your back, putting them all back in again. Because, you know two and three year olds? They are not really much on helping pick toys up. I mean, they can pick up one ball at a time and throw it back into the little car and half the time they'll miss and it will roll under the snack table in just the place that will require you to practically have to stand on your head in order to fish it back out.

"Uh-oh!!!" says the child, pointing.

"#$%&!!!" you think, bending over and feeling your middle-aged muscles and spine strike a chord of misery.

Then the child loses interest and goes off to play with something while you're occupied with retrieving the ball and then standing upright again in stages, so you're left there with a ball in your hand and one hand on the small of your back, calling feebly, "Hey! Come back here and help pick up the balls!"

"DON'T WANNA PICK UP BALLS!!! WAAAHHHHHH!!!!" they scream. Like, you know, they're being disemboweled by a rhinoceros. Which, come to think of it, might be an apt punishment for the person WHO THOUGHT THIS WOULD BE A GOOD IDEA.