I survived Chuck E Cheese...

and I want the t-shirt to prove it!! I never go to Chuck E Cheese. The kids know it, my husband knows it and so it has become unwritten law in our household. We need to post it on a sign:

Mom Shall Not Cross the Threshhold of Trashy Pizza Joints With Junky Games and Too Many People With Conflicted Souls

It's the law, it's not to be broken...UNLESS...your neighbor who you have been desperately sharing the love of Christ with for years in hopes that she will get her heathen little butt to church sometime and make herself right with her Maker asks you to go for her 3 yo's birthday party and your family makes up most of the guest list...well, I guess we can break the law for that...

Lucky JT somehow wheedled out of it by snatching up an offer from his neighbor friend to go play tennis for the afternoon. The rest of us loaded into the van, dropped Adora off at her friend's house (all the while singing, "It's beginning to look a lot like adolescence!") and urged the big red dog up the road toward THAT PLACE. I had warned the hostess that there was no way our children were going anywhere near that artificials-infested food and cited the case of the Terrible Hives from several years ago to punctuate my point. She obliged us by ordering just enough pizza to congeal on the table after the 3 people who ventured to eat it quickly gave it up for a non-food item.

I did my best. I threw my heart and soul into it for about the first hour. I especially enjoyed whacking the little moles over their shiny plastic heads with the mini punching bag. Now, THAT'S fun and when someone else is springing for the Chuck E Coins, why not play again?!...er, I mean, why not help David play it a couple of times? And then there was the 3 yo crowd favorite, the mini carousel - whoo whoo, could I ever stand and watch that for an eternity! Of course Philip was in Stim Heaven. On several occasions he checked in stammering something about motorcycles and squishy things and going boom boom boom to knock the other guy off (We discussed in the car on the way home the possibility of Philip one day inadvertently leading a life of crime simply because we pretended to know what in the world he was talking about when he asked us quite sincerely if he could go rob a bank...uh huh, sure honey, have fun with your friends...). The girls spent quite a bit of time stomping on spiders which closely resembled glowing red circles on a soda-sticky floor. That earned them a whopping 5 tickets for about 15 minutes of laborious foot-waggling. Oh the tickets, did I mention the tickets?! I have to say the most fun we had all day was feeding the tickets to the ticket chomper machine. Whoever invented that puppy is a sheer genius! After he ate all our tickets, he spit out receipts which net us a total of 491 points. The pain of it, the agonizingly difficult decision of *which* color plastic ring each girl wanted and how many spiders the boys got to take home. It seemed to be the toughest decisions any of them had made in their short little lifespans, all for the privilege of carrying a pile of stuff from the PLACE to the van, which would then immediately be lost and broken and buried in the bottom of the sofa.

Well, I may not have gotten the t-shirt but I can't say I didn't get anything out of the deal. I did agonize myself a bit and decided on the green ring...looks good on me, doncha think?!