There are many skills you learn as a parent…patience, tolerance, crafts, baking, maths, sports, and countless others but one skill I learnt that I never imagined I would need was how to make an elastic band ball due to my son’s new elastic band ball obsession.

This happened a good few years ago when my daughter asked me to make one. Back in 2019, we bought loads of elastic bands and painstakingly built a ball out of them. It took forever, but I was quite proud of it.

…Here it is…

Fast forward a few years and now, apparently, if you need elastic bands you can only buy them already made into a ball. Well, I’m sure you can buy them loose somewhere, but Amazon and B&M both seem to sell them in ball form. I think I missed a trick there. I could have made my fortune in elastic band balls!!!

I discovered this because I needed some elastic bands, so I picked up a pack from B&M. When I got home, I took a couple off the ball and my son spotted it immediately. He was amazed. Truly. He stared at this elastic band ball like I’d just performed a magic trick and then announced:

“Let’s take it apart and start a new one.”

Oh.

OK then.

So that is exactly what we did. Except he also wanted to count the elastic bands first. Counting everything has become second nature in our house. The box said there were 180 bands, so we carefully counted them all. There were 190. Ten extra elastic bands – oh how exciting!!!

My son absolutely loved this discovery. It was like we had uncovered some sort of major conspiracy in the elastic band industry. Once every band had been separated, counted, and discussed in detail, we then began rebuilding the ball. I wasn’t too worried about this part after all, I had previous experience!! But once the ball was rebuilt, my son did what he always does. He deep-dived into elastic band balls.

Now, this isn’t unusual for him. This is how his brain works. He becomes completely fascinated by something. Sometimes it’s a person. Sometimes it’s something significant. Other times it’s something as simple as a packet of tissues….

Now, this might look like a perfectly innocent packet of tissues, but when my son had a cold, I handed him one of these little packets and he looked at it like I’d handed him a £50 note.

To be fair, if you had to rank tissue packets, these ones by The Cheeky Panda would probably score highly. But my son was mesmerised by them. So mesmerised that he carried this particular packet around with him for days. He read every single word on the packaging. He counted the tissues, ten in each packet. He wanted to know everything there was to know about them.

Something captures his attention and suddenly it becomes the most important thing in the world.

What also happens, though, is that I become invested in the obsession too. Before long, I knew far more about The Cheeky Panda tissues than I ever expected to. I bought more packets because, well… he loved them, and when you see your child light up with that kind of joy, you want to recreate it again and again. The problem is that he drops obsessions just as quickly as he finds them. And then I’m left trying to work my way through hundreds of packets of tissues.

Now the elastic band ball didn’t stop at the first round of elastic bands we had. Naturally, after rebuilding our elastic band ball, my son wanted to know what the biggest elastic band ball in the world was. Because of course he did. He always wants to know who is the best at something. Within twenty minutes we had somehow gone from sitting on the living room floor to researching a 9,000lb elastic band ball in Florida.

The largest rubber band ball ever made was created by Joel Waul in Florida, USA. It weighed an incredible 4,097 kg (9,032 lbs) and was made from around 700,000 rubber bands. The ball, named “Megaton,” measured about 6 feet 7 inches high and officially set the Guinness World Record in 2008. Crikey, that’s a lot of rubber bands.

And so this is why I found myself back in B&M the next day buying more elastic bands. The process followed the same pattern…we took the ball home, took it apart, counted the bands…235 this time… even more than last time, then added to our ball. And this is how I spent a random Tuesday night: wrapping elastic bands around a ball.

And I was fully invested. Properly invested. Sat there like it was the most important project of the year, carefully looping elastic bands around a growing ball like I had absolutely nothing else going on in life.

The thing is, he’ll probably wake up one morning and decide elastic bands are no longer interesting. Just like that. And I’ll be left with a giant elastic band ball wondering what on earth I’m meant to do with it… and whether B&M do returns on 235-count emotional investments.

And I suppose that’s parenting really suddenly finding yourself deeply committed to something you never planned for, fully invested in something you didn’t expect, and quietly hoping it doesn’t end before you’ve figured out where to store it.