When the kids have birthdays, we set aside the entire day for them to plan. They pick breakfast, lunch and dinner, the activities we'll do, the places we go, and occasionally something we'll buy. The whole day is under their control, although we had to make it clear last year that they do not get to control the actions of other people (namely, their sisters) after C decided it would be fun to turn her sisters into her own personal puppets for the day.
So, A's day started with one of her favorite breakfasts, Pillsbury cinnamon rolls from a can, she loves the orange frosting ones in particular, which are a little harder to find sometimes, but we got lucky and found them at the first store we went to. Yum!
She already had lunch and dinner planned out, and had chosen to go to Chuck E. Cheese and bowling for her activities today. I guess I know them so well that there's really no surprise in what they'd pick to do for the day, or maybe the choices are just burned into my brain because they each ask to do them constantly.
Since we always go to the Chuck E. Cheese's by our house, I thought it would be fun to checkout the giant two-story Chuck E Cheese that we haven't been to in years and is much less familiar to us. I was surprised when we pulled up to the place at how many people were there at 11:30 on a Thursday morning. But after having been there for an hour or so, I totally get it - that place is amazing! I remember liking Chuck E. Cheese as a kid, but the places went way downhill after that. The smaller one got a face-lift a few years back, but last time I came to this one it was the typical run-down arcade where half the games are broken and everything looks three decades old.
This time I was shocked! The games were so cool and so fun that most of the adults were playing them, too. Some adults were even ignoring their kid's pleas for tokens because they didn't want to be interrupted. One man actually asked a total stranger walking by to take his $20 and get him some more tokens because he was on a roll and didn't want to walk away from the machine. Wait a minute, are we at Chuck E. Cheese or a casino in Vegas here?
But don't worry, the place is definitely made for kids. The music is loud, the colors and lights are blinking and bright, and Chuck E. himself makes an appearance every 20-30 minutes or so and runs around the building throwing tickets in the air like a giddy flower girl. The kids scramble behind him like they're chasing a moving pinata, grabbing all the tickets they can off the floor. The place is so dynamic and exciting that I didn't even realize quite how loud it actually was until I got a phone call and my poor Aunt was yelling at me and speaking slowly like I was someone's great-grandpa who's hard of hearing.
A huge touchscreen Fruit Ninja game. It was fun to watch all the kids play this one. They can move their arms so fast!
A giant Connect 4 game (I heard C won both times they played)
A's haul from a couple of chases after Chuck E.
Games, games, everywhere! (note: this is less than 1/4 of the upper floor)
After spending more than 4 hours at Chuck E. Cheese (and hearing "Slow Ride" a few too many times from the Guitar Hero game behind me), I told them we had to go. Not only was I afraid of ruining the meal schedule (we had people coming over for dinner after all, and 3pm is a pretty late lunch indeed), but I was hungry and I was also afraid we'd run out of time to go bowling before we had to head home and greet guests. Amazingly, my crochet pattern gave me a bigger headache than the arcade games did. Had it been a different day, I wouldn't have minded staying longer at all, and I'm sure we'll be back very soon. Armed with my tablet and my library book, combined with the entertainment of people-watching in this zany place, I was pleasantly distracted the entire time.
C and K had been exchanging their tickets for paper receipts periodically while we were there. At one point K had hit the 500-ticket jackpot, spurring an immediate exchange. But A wanted to wait until the very end, and we were all surprised when she took them down to the machine to be counted.
Wow!
I remember way back when I was a kid, we didn't have these handy receipt printers. If you won 1100 tickets, you had to carry around 1100 tickets. And if you decided you didn't want to spend them all today, you had to haul them all home with you and bring them back each time until you had enough to get what you wanted. I also remember sitting at home as a kid and hand-numbering my tickets on the backside. Why in the world I did this is anyone's guess, but I actually wrote a number on the back of each one of the hundreds of tickets I had, and I had huge rubber-banded wads of them. I think I might still have a few of them somewhere.
At some point between then and now, they instituted the highly error-prone method of weighing tickets, where you would place all of your tickets in a little basket on a scale and the scale would tell you how many tickets were there. I never quite trusted that system.
This new machine reads each ticket as it passes through the rolling wheels and the number counts up for each ticket. When you're all done, you hit the "Print" button and a little receipt comes out. But the more I watched the machine, the more I realized that I think this thing is rigged, too. Not severely, mind you, but I did notice quite a few times that a ticket would go through and the number would not go up. A couple of times, the number actually went down one. It's impossible to count the long rows of tickets as they go in because they go so fast so I only noticed the onsie-twosies, but I found easy solace in the fact that most of those tickets had been picked up off the floor from the generous man in the mouse suit, so I guess Chuck E. gives and Chuck E. takes away. No big deal...
This Chuck E. Cheese location also has tons more options for prizes, and much cooler prizes, too. A decided to spend the 126 tickets, but she wanted to keep the 1000 extra tickets for next time. No idea what she wanted to keep them for, but I recognized the look in her eye as she said it, and I was suddenly glad that we didn't have those paper receipts. She'll never know better, but it was so much more gratifying somehow to walk out of there with a wad of tickets in your hand. You feel so much more accomplished than just holding a little slip of paper. At least she won't have to secretly worry about being mugged in the parking lot this way, though.
I did notice this one prize that seemed a little ironic to me...
C and K happily enjoyed their cotton candy while A 'shopped', and for some reason K decided to make it "flat candy" instead. She actually squeezed it so much that by the time we got home it was a bag of little sugar balls. At least that's better than when it briefly resembled recycled newspaper.
We headed off for a quick lunch at Wasabi, one of A's favorite places to eat. They have yummy chicken teriyaki rice bowls there, but I think she likes it best because she gets to have sushi (actually, California rolls) with her meal. C and K both love the Udon soup, and I'm glad they both do because the bowls are monstrous and even both of them put together can't finish one.
It was almost 4 by the time we were done with lunch and we were quickly running out of time. The grandparents were going to be at our house at 6:30 and we still had some bowling to do (not to mention a quick trip to the grocery store, and hopefully some last-minute house-cleaning ;) Although I would normally take them to the cheaper bowling alley a little further away, we had no choice but to go to the pricey one closer to our house. It's the fancy bowling alley that keeps your credit card when you come in and doesn't tell you how much things cost until you're ready to leave. The one that has a waiter or waitress that comes by your lane every so often and offers you drinks and food, hoping to hike that final price up a little higher still. Ya, that one.
Having my own bowling shoes doesn't save me much money here, but what I can I do? It's the kid's birthday! We settle into our lane and of course A wants to go first. K decides she doesn't want to bowl, so she assigns herself the job of ball-holder, grabbing each of our bowling balls from the return chute and holding it in her lap, handing it to us just before our turn begins.
And just as an added birthday bonus, the very first ball A throws on the very first frame is a STRIKE!
She won the first game easily and was super excited to play one more. We had (kind of) just enough time to play one more game real quick, even if K wanted to join at the last minute, so we set up to go again.
This bowling alley was actually pretty cool, with a huge supply of bowling balls already distributed at each of the lanes (so no hunting around or arm-wrestling the day camp kids who have all the kids' balls tied up). They also had a bunch of different themes for the scoreboards that you could choose, changing up the animation and color schemes of the TV screen, and they had another cool thing I'd never seen before - they called it the Sparefinder. Unlike the bowling alley we usually go to, which will show a picture telling you which pin to hit and where to hit it, this one actually showed a little video telling you why and showing you what happens after you hit that one. Here, take a look...
Neat, huh? The girls were able to actually see what was going on back there, and they started to notice patterns of where the ball hit and how that changed which pins it hit (or which pins hit other pins). Not that it improved their game at all, since they still subscribe to the 'run - stop - heave the ball' method of bowling they've used since they were little. But it was still pretty cool. And I got an extra chuckle at the animation for the 7-10 split which told you to hit the 7 pin on the left side, and then told you that if you got a lucky bounce it might come back and hit the 10 pin. I guess that's the best strategy you're going to get at that point.
A was not happy that she didn't do as well in the second game. The alley had actually moved us to a different lane between games because they had a birthday party coming in, so at least she had something concrete to blame it on, but somehow she had gone from a dominating first place to a dead-last place game. (And as a shameless plug, I'll go ahead and point out to you that I nearly turkey'd the 10th frame that game :)
Notice the names: "AJ", "PythonLover", "Mommy", and "GuineaPigLover". I'll leave it up to you to decide who was who.
Jessey met us at the bowling alley to watch the last couple of frames, and then we all headed to the grocery store and back home as quick as we could. Typically our family goes out to dinner for birthdays, but A decided she wanted to have Little Caesars this year, a place with no indoor seating. I was actually relieved to be having it at home. It would be a lot cheaper this way, we'd have leftover pizza, and we'd be freer to hang out as long as we wanted. A decided she wanted to watch a movie, so after serving herself pizza and getting her drink, she sat on the couch and promptly ignored everyone in the room. So, she pretty much invited everyone in the family to come over to our house and watch her watch a movie. Yep, sounds about right!
No, actually we did have a great time together. There was much silliness (including watching parts of the movie again in French), much yumminess (with lemon-frosted yellow cake and 5 different flavors of ice cream), and 3 1/2 hours of hanging out and talking with the family. It was a great night!
Happy birthday, A!!
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