Jumping Pillows

I had never heard of a jumping pillow until I moved to Australia and started working in a holiday park.  Someone once asked if we had a jumping pillow and I pictured a bedroom style, bedroom sized pillow.  After initial confusion I confirmed that we did not have a jumping pillow.  I then set about finding an Australian to explain to me exactly what a jumping pillow was.  As it turns out a jumping pillow is almost like a bouncy castle, though without the sides and roof.  It's a massive inflatable pillow that kids can jump on.  I encountered my first real life jumping pillow when we went camping last weekend.  Exciting times.  There were no rules to say the jumping pillow was not for adults and we figured that as long as there were no children using it then there would be no harm in us having a quick bounce.  And bounce is what we did.  We bounced high, we bounced low, we bounced sideways.  We bounced for less than a minute before becoming utterly out of breath and exhausted.  My God!  These things are so easy when you're a kid but put a grown woman on a jumping pillow and she becomes an exhausted mess.  Then of course there's the acrobatics.  You know, cartwheels and back flips and what not.  Apparently, once you hit your twenties, your body doesn't want to bend and flex in the same way it did when you were ten.  And it gets really cross with you the next day and shows you how cross it is with very achy muscles.  Jumping pillows are exhausting.  We were shown up by a young boy who turned up and started doing back flips.  Unable to do back flips ourselves we then started encouraging the boy to up his tricks.  One back flip.  Two back flips.  Three back flips.  After eight back flips in a row the kid seemed a little dizzy so we gave him a round of applause and then retreated back to our camp.  He probably went back to his mum to tell tales of a bedraggled group of adults demanding a show of back flips.  But that's the jumping pillow.  It brings out your inner child.  And whilst your inner child is demanding you leap around like a lunatic, your outer adult is screaming at you to stop.