Abbies Bounce

Abbie’s latest favorite game is bouncing. I’m not really sure where she picked this up, but it probably has something to do with her love of being roughed up. While she’s on the bed, she loves it when we tackle her flat on her back and (gently) dribble her chest like a basketball. Instead of, or possibly in addition to, having her brains scrambled, she giggles uncontrollably, which is a welcome change from the biting she often tries to do while on the bed with us. I guess eventually she tied of having to rely on us to bounce her, and figured out how to bounce on her own. So it’s good to see she has a head start in ruining her first bed.

She usually bounces from the queer sitting position she devised. She will sit with her butt on the floor, both knees in front of her, and both legs bent to the side and pointing back. She looks like a baseball or softball catcher blocking a ball in the dirt, or possibly a very brave hockey goalie with a lot of trust in his cup blocking a 5-hole shot, except those sports figures only stay in that position for a couple seconds at a time, while Abbie will leave her body in her joint-popping posture for minutes at a time to read several books. I’m sure she does more damage to her knees sitting like that than I do in any jogging session or battle with my stair climber.

To bounce from that position, she starts to stand up enough to lift her butt off the floor, or at least to lift her head a couple inches. To encourage her, I’ll say “bounce, bounce, bounce,” and she’ll dutifully bounce three times with the kind of grin that most children reserve only for Elmo.

Her favorite place to bounce is our bed, though she also enjoys bouncing on the neighbor’s trampoline. Of course it was erect all summer while the weather was beautiful, or at least warm enough to go outside, and she hated the trampoline. Every time we tried putting her on it to bounce she would almost immediately cry like we just did something extraordinarily heinous like lock her out of the bathroom while we use the facilities in private. Now that the days are growing shorter and colder,* she decides that maybe the trampoline is an acceptable form of entertainment.

Of course it’s not just enough entertainment for her to just bounce on the trampoline. Yesterday I helped her climb onto the trampoline, watched her take a few bouncing steps into the center and back, and helped her climb down. Then I helped her climb back up, watched her take a few more steps, and helped her climb back down. This continued for several minutes until I decided that I’d tweaked my back enough picking her up and down, and collapsed the folding stairs used to climb up and down. Abbie then cried on the collapsed steps, frustrated that she couldn’t climb a vertical step no matter hard she tried to bite it.

We moved back inside because she wanted to do nothing outside but go up and down on the trampoline, plus it was cold out there. We moved to her room to read. Eventually we moved to “Sunny Day in the Hundred Acre Wood,” a Winnie the Pooh-based book about spring. Why a children’s book exists that focuses only on the subject of spring is beyond me. Presumably three other Winnie the Pooh-based books exist somewhere about the other season, but those aren’t in our book collection so in her mind Pooh will simply live in a land of perpetual springtime.

We flipped through the pages, eventually arriving at the magic pages: “Spring is just right for flying kites … (page turn) … and bouncing!” On cue she will bounce up and down with that huge grin. I usually stay on this page for a while, encouraging her to “bounce, bounce, bounce” while she giggles away. She likes this so much that she usually flips past the previous page before I’ve finished reading to reach the magic pages extraordinarily quickly. She enjoys the bouncing and recognizing the pages and words, and I enjoy watching her have fun and getting a little exercise. Plus we’re sitting on the floor so she’s not ruining her bed with her bouncing.

* It almost froze here this morning. Whee!