Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Bungee Fun, or Not-So-Fun

There was a comic in the paper the other week that made me chuckle quite hard; one of those ones that’s super funny because you see your own experiences in it.  It was from Baby Blues by Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott.  Mom and Dad are in their bedroom trying to figure out why their pajama and sweatpants  are missing the elastic from around the waist.  Hammie and Zoe, their son and daughter, are in the back yard.  Hammie is high atop a ladder with a string of elastic tied around his waist, wearing a football helmet and saying “I’ve always wanted to bungee jump.”

We tried that once, too.  Only instead of stealing the elastic out of our parents clothes – which as someone who sews, I can tell you would be a lot more trouble than it’s worth – we got a bunch of Aurelia's legbungee cords from the garage.  We climbed onto the top of the large monkey bars in the back yard and hooked one of the bungee  cords’ metal ends through a hole for the swing’s S hook.  Then I held onto the other end and jumped.

Monkey bars and S hooks for swings.

It didn’t work.  The bungee cord hook came out of the S hook hole.  *Thud*  I hit the sand hard. 

Luckily, the swing set wasn’t that high, only about 8 feet or so, and we fell and jumped off it so often that it didn’t hurt.  Well, it hurt, falling 8 feet hurts, but we didn’t get injured.

2012_02_05_17_42_140076

Alfred jumping from the swing and missing the monkey bar grab

Next, we tried making bungee swings by putting bungee cords into the swing S-hook holes and hooking the other end of the bungee cord into the swing’s chain links.  That sort of worked but wasn’t nearly as much fun as it seemed it ought to be.  In the end, we decided the swing set was far more fun without bungee cords.  Now I only use them for moving furniture.

 

 

4 comments:

Jeannie said...

Oh my - sometimes it's so much better not knowing what you kids were up to when I wasn't there. I must admit you were resourceful!

munchkinhead said...

at first i thought Alfred was in a skirt with shorts underneath which wouldnt have been out of place.

goldenrail said...

@munchkinhead she did have some outfits like that at that age, but no, the picture's just damaged.

@mommy ;)

Jeannie said...

I was looking at that picture and trying to figure out what the white was, too. Ice? no - there would be some on the other swing set - then I realized that it was damage to the photo itself. ;)