November 12, 2006 - Sunday
I took Harry to another birthday party this (oddly Sunday) morning, this one for Ethan. Last year Ethan's party was at a gymnastics kind of place with jumping things and crawling tubes and this party was at a similar kind of activity place. This place was a little more basic in that they didn't move the kids from one area to another in groups to do different activities, but that was a good thing. This place had a two-story warehouse ceiling and three air-inflated amusements: the smallest and most familiar was the classic moon walk/jumping castle thing. The other two bigger ones were a two-lane obstacle course and a two-story tall inflated slide. (There was also a basketball hoop thing in the middle but Harry never did that.) Just running around on those things for an hour was all Harry and the kids seemed to need to have a great time. But the thing that made it really fun for me was that parents could go on the stuff, too. When I found that out I chased Harry through the obstacle course (I saw couple of fathers racing their sons because the obstacle course had matching parallel runs, but I didn't do that with Harry) and went down the slide with him and did the moonwalk. I didn't do it the entire time (I don't know if Harry would have liked that or not, but I thought he ought to socialize with his friends, too), but it was fun for a while.

This afternoon we saw Ethan again. Ethan's dad is the Den leader for a group of Cub Scouts in town and, now that Harry's done with baseball on Sunday afternoons, we've been thinking about having him join scouting. This afternoon's den meeting was a special "Go See It" visit to the local police station where one of the officers showed the boys around the facility. The big hit, of course, was the cell area where, surprising, the stereotypical metal bars have been replaced by very heavy-duty Plexiglas. Of course, they got to sit in a police car, too. Harry only seemed to know one or two of the other boys, plus Ethan, but he said he wanted to join. We'll go to a pack meeting this week on Thursday and see if he still likes it without the spectacle of the police station, but I think it will be good for Harry.


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