A ball pit is a box of a known size with a known number of balls in it, because every ball is a choking hazard and every ball is counted at close. Ours is counted at close and is at the line. Every morning it is a foot above the line. The extra balls are ours, by the marking, and there are no spare balls in the building.
I run the soft play at a leisure centre, which is a padded room for children under eight, and the ball pit is the middle of it.
How the pit is counted.
Four thousand balls, in four colours, each printed with our centre's name because a ball that turns up in a child's pocket at home is a ball the parent can return. At close the pit is raked level and the level is at a painted line inside the wall. Below the line, balls have gone. They do, a few a week, and we have a box of spares in the store room, a hundred, counted.
Every morning the pit is above the line.
Not by a little. By about a foot, which at the size of our pit is about eleven hundred balls. They are our balls, printed with our name, in our four colours, in about the right proportions.
We have a hundred spares in the store room. They are in the store room, counted, every morning.
The first time, the staff took out the extra balls and put them in bags and put the bags in the store room, and the next morning the pit was above the line again, and the bags were still in the store room, full.
By the end of the month the store room had eleven bags of balls in it and the pit was full every morning.
What has been checked.
The balls. They are ours. The print is our print, the font, the slight misregistration that the supplier apologised for on the second batch. There are more of them than we have ever bought.
The room. Locked at close, cameras on, the camera on the pit.
On the camera the pit is level at the line at close and at about two in the morning the level rises. Not all at once. It rises over about an hour, from the middle, the way a ball pit rises when a child is sitting in the middle of it pushing balls up round themselves, which is a thing children do, and the balls come up in a ring round a space in the middle where no balls are, and then the space fills in and the level is a foot up and still.
Nobody is in the pit.
The space in the middle, while it is there, is the size of a child.
What is done about it.
We have stopped taking the extra balls out. A pit that is a foot above the line is a pit a child can still play in and the risk assessment has been rewritten for the new depth. The store room has thirty bags in it and the manager has asked me to find out who the balls belong to, and I have told her they are ours, and she has asked me to find out who put them there, and I have not told her.
What I do.
I run the soft play.
The pit is for children up to eight and the children do not mind it. They like it deep.
The one thing I will say is about the children. Children in a ball pit talk, to themselves and to each other, about nothing, the way they do, and over the last month three separate parents have asked me who the other child is. Their child has come out of the pit and told them about the other child, the one in the middle, who does not come out, who is cold, who wants them to stay in, and who asked each of them to bring more balls, and I have said that children make friends up, which they do, and I have checked each time, and there has been no other child in the pit, and the pit has been a little deeper by close each of those three days, and I have raked it level, and I have moved the line.