Opinions And Ramblings By Adam Kmiec On All Things Media

When you have kids, you get to experience a lot of firsts.  There’s the steps, words, dates and so much more.  Today, I got to experience another first.  Cora had her first haircut today…just a little trim.

I used some high grain (ISO 800) for this and no Flash.  I just love the how gritty the picture processed and how serious Cora looked.

I’ve always been a fan of the grand gesture. The grand gesture is something so big that it’s completely memorable years later. As I thought about what to get Cora this year for Christmas, I really wanted to ger her something that she would look back on years later and say, “I remember that Christmas when I was 2 and you got me…” Picking a present that memorable is pretty damn hard.

After considering many options, I finally decided on building her a ball pit. I mean seriously, what kid wouldn’t want their own ball pit? This ended up being much more difficult than I thought. The “pit” portion was insanely easy thanks to Amazon.  But, trying to find the balls proved to be problematic.  Based on the calculator on this site, I knew I needed somewhere between 2,500 and 3,000 balls.  So of course I turned to Amazon.  The cost of the balls was cheap, but the shipping was insane.  By insane, I mean we are talking $800.00 for shipping.  Nuts.  That meant I had to go old school.  I went to Target.  They sell balls in 150 pack quantities and the per ball cost was actually cheaper than Amazon.  Awesome, right?  Well, not so fast.

Not every Target carries the balls and the ones that do rarely have more than 4 packages on shelf.  Hmm…well over the course of 4 weeks I hit up a variety of Target stores and finally had enough balls.

So we’ve got the balls and the pit.  But, we need something to blow up on the pit.  I thought I had a blower that would work.  It didn’t.  So, on December 23rd, it was off to Target again to get a blower that would work.  I had tried Wal-Mart earlier in the day, but that didn’t work out.  Can you believe it, they didn’t carry one.  Oh well, there loss is Target’s gain.

It took roughly 30 minutes to pump up the pit and fill it with the balls.  All told we used 2,250 balls.  I’ve got an extra 5 bags of balls just in case we need it at some point.  If you have kids I highly recommend this.  The cost is fairly manageable and the experience will last a long time.  When you see the joy on your kid’s face, you know you’ve nailed it.