The Saviour that is Soft Play

Fitmumclub - 23 Jan 16

Soft play, this has to be by far the best invention anyone has ever come up with. Somewhere that kids can play, mums can sit and drink coffee, knowing the kids are safe, occupied and in view. More often from all the excitement and running around, by the time we get home Arabella is ready for a nap (if she hasn’t already fallen asleep on the way home) so refreshingly there is no battle about nap time, which is a welcome break after regularly spending about 40 minutes every day listening to her protests about being put to bed. Winner in my eyes.

I do quite a lot of my blogging whilst Arabella is running riot at soft play mainly because at home I’m riddled with guilt because I should be playing with her (being an only child) and I’m not sure the dogs make a good enough substitute. There are certain days in the week where we make an effort to get out and do activities together without the interruptions of technology and social media, but with a lot of work deadlines and very little in the way of childcare I do find myself on the computer a lot at home feeling like the worst mother in the world (I’m sure a lot of you can relate).

So we go to a soft play centre in Portishead which is in a town just outside of Bristol, I have tried a few others but the sheer size of some of them leaves me panicking like a rabbit in the headlights with the amount of screaming over excited children you are faced with, it’s also not somewhere I would feel remotely inclined to write.

So The Play Port is our local and now our regular. I guess we’ve been coming for about two years in spats as and when we have time. It is much smaller and more intimate than some of the bigger chains which I personally love for my sanity, they have nice cakes and snacks (and hot food which we must get round to trying) amazing coffee, and they even deal with my ridiculous half shot requests. In my experience it has never been too loud and there is always plenty of space to grab myself a table and spread my work all over it.

I find that with writing blogs based on mums and mumlife I get real inspiration sitting amongst others of my kind (I’m talking about mums here, not some rare breed of tortoise) there is comfort knowing that we are all in the same boat having the same battles with our kids on a daily basis and most probably all functioning on at most five hours of sleep and a lot of coffee.

So mums I can’t recommend anything better if you’ve had a bad nights sleep (which is most nights for me) you need a nice warm cup of coffee and a little bit of time sat in relative peace on your own whilst your children use up all of their energy running round in the safety of what in simplistic terms is a brightly coloured padded cage.

Thanks for reading, and find your local soft play for some sanity xx

Fitmumclub

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