When we were children we would visit our farm aunty in Beaudesert. The best thing that happened there was that we would jump on the bed. The worst was that there were frogs in the toilet.
While we dreaded the jumping of our ablutionary amphibians, we looked forward to the sheer joy of jumping ourselves (hopefully with ablutions complete) atop the double bed. In recent years, I told my aunt-who-was-actually-a-family-friend-cum-aunt about the joy of using her posturepedic as a springboard and she looked aghast. Apparently she never knew why her bed would be in such disarray after a lengthy day checking out the cows, the corn, the creek and the cats in the barn while the adults chatted on the veranda about stuff that grown ups talked about.
But having been a bed jumper, I now fully understand the impulse that causes my almost-two-year-old grandson to do the same at what was his and his sister’s first ever sleep over at my place recently. Jumping on the bed is a mighty activity and when you’re two you can do so with abandon, safely knowing that there is a grandmother at hand to catch you.
And so, my bouncing Tigger boy bounded about while I read him copious bedtime stories before he collapsed into his cot. As he and his sister were sharing a room, the plan was that he would retire at 6.45pm and she at 7.15pm once he was asleep and dreaming of becoming a kangaroo.
The plan worked. Granddaughter of four scored an extra dozen or so stories for half an hour before deciding that she too was ready for the bed.
And then the full extent of the previous Woolly Jumper became apparent. She had arranged her various soft and hard toys in just the right order, settled out her blanket, pulled out her hair ties, been given fairy kisses, fairy dust, and good things to dream about when she asked where her socks were.
The socks are a vital part of the bedtime process and need to pulled up equally high on each leg in order to properly sleep. It seemed Mr Jumping Bean had dislodged them from their pillowed place in what could only be known as a socktastrophe of knee length proportion. It took a torch and the removal of the worried child to find them lodged between bed and window sill. Sometimes jumping can sock it to you.
- Linda Muller
