By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

Sunday, we paid for about 40 minutes too many. That’s because I told my husband that my granddaughter needed a full hour, not a half hour, of time at Skyzone, an indoor trampoline park. This is the same spirit of overkill that moves me to have two quarts of leftover chicken soup at the holidays. Truly, sometimes people are better off with less.

That was the case with my granddaughter anyway. She didn’t need an hour to decide that she should back off when pushing piranhas, aka older kids, infiltrated and wrought mayhem in the toddler trampoline area. It reminded me of the chaos that ensues when I take my 23-pound mutt to the small dog park and there’s a bull mastiff there.

My first instinct was to swoop in and save my granddaughter from the elementary school marauders. But I stood back. I’ve made my own kids anxious enough for more than 25 years; surely I don’t need to inflict my neuroses on another generation.

Skyzone, an indoor trampoline park, seems like a more raucous version of a Bounce class that I sometimes take at my gym on Thursday mornings. Raucous is right. Ultimately, there were as many as 10 non-toddler sized people in the area where my granddaughter was jumping. As best she could, she shied away from the bruisers and brutes, including 10-year-olds who moved like speeding bumper cars between mats, happy to take down an unsuspecting three-year-old.

Parents and grandparents have a defined role at Skyzone. They’re there to watch and wave, not jump– or jump in. Incidentally, another useful thing that grandparents can do at Skyzone is run after granddaughters who move with startling and unexpected efficiency between areas of the ginormous gym.

In keeping with the expedited jumping plan she’d devised, my granddaughter dashed over to the foam block pit. There, she and another under-4 engaged in the Sisyphean task of throwing Styrofoam blocks in and out of a pit, counting blocks (or throws) out loud as they went.

After about 10 intense minutes in the pit, my granddaughter wanted out, and the next logical distraction she chose was a vending machine that allowed kids to use a metal hook to grab seedy-looking toys.

Play until you win, the sign on the machine said. It sounded scarily like a lottery for toddlers.

“I want a ball,” my granddaughter told us. To be clear, Grandma and Grandpa often say yes even when they know it’d be better to say no.

Apparently with this machine, you could take as many grabs as you needed to “win” a ball as long as you were willing to fork over $5 in tokens.

This is just what I wanted to do: pay $5 for a ball that would have cost 99 cents at Target. My granddaughter stared at us with a look that communicated stark need, the same one I get when the new Nordstrom’s catalog comes in the mail. And what a grandparent does in this heartrending instant is comply, right?

My husband and I looked at each other.

“This is a good time for you to learn the value of a dollar,” my husband said to my granddaughter who didn’t look especially convinced. “We are going to continue to say no even if you choose to get upset,” my husband continued. Who was this man I barely recognized? In grandfather-hood, he’d finally grown a pair of balls.

The truth is one of the reasons we were at Skyzone to begin with is that my granddaughter usually makes our job easy. She listens to us. She can be convinced to move on from a display of glittery pocketbooks — that was last weekend in Nordstrom’s– or from this Sunday’s ball-hawking vending machine. At 11:30, at my suggestion she gave up on the ball for good and settled for a $2.37 bag of popcorn. I know, I know. It was kind of close to lunchtime. But we’re grandparents after all.

When I was a kid, I used to watch old home movies of myself at age 3 with my grandfather at a Brooklyn amusement park called Buddy’s. My dad both filmed and watched me as my grandpa sat on a bench with a cane and a cigar. As I strap my granddaughter into her car seat, it’s hard for me to believe I’m only a few years younger than my dad’s father was at Buddy’s. I smile. I wave. I give my opinion sometimes, even when it’s not wanted. Why not? Even if I don’t have my own grippy socks for Skyzone, I’m not ready to be banished to the bench.