Sunday, February 28, 2010

Chuck E. Cheese headache


This weekend we had just the twins at home. It was amazingly quiet. They kept themselves entertained with Bendaroos in the morning. Then, Tim and I asked them what they wanted to do with just Mommy and Daddy. Tim kept trying to steer them towards bowling, but they weren't interested in that at all. I suggested Chuck E. Cheese, and they were all over that. Even though we vowed the first time in 1983, when we took my nephew Josh to Chuck E. Cheese, we would never, ever, ever, enter another CEC as long as we lived, I opened my big mouth and suggested it, being the self-sacrificing mother I am.

We first took them to Chick Fil A with the strict instructions that they would not be playing in the contaminated, germ infested play area. Then, we took them to the germ infested, H1N1 swarming, rat trap of the Chuck E.Cheese entertainment wasteland, so they could touch every nasty surface and waste our good money for an hour and a half of nightmarish kiddie pleasures.

We had a coupon for 100 tokens for 15.00. Tim, not thinking, tried to get them to conserve their tokens by doling them out 10 at a time. He tried to steer them away from the token grabbing, ticket stingy games and to the ones that would give as many tickets for the 1 token they squandered. I watched this for about 20 minutes, and then I grabbed handfuls of tokens from the cup and gave them to the twins and told them to play whatever they wanted. Why would we want to prolong this agony any longer than we had to? Let them feed the tokens in to the games as fast as possible, so we could leave! And, they did. We still managed to get 214 tickets between the two of them and the few games Tim and I played. So, we probably spent as much time waiting in line to redeem our 214 tickets for junk as we did actually playing the games. Abby came away with 3 tootsie rolls (60 points) and High School Musical mini playing cards(40 pts.) which were dropped randomly throughout Costco later. Gabe got some sort of fake Nerf/cardboard shooting thing and one tootsie roll. Tim got a whopping headache which he termed the" Chuck E. Cheese headache", and we both said at the same time, "all I can think about is finding some hand sanitizer!" As we left the building, staring at the long line which had formed snaking outside the building. I wanted to yell, "save yourselves!" but I didn't.

After that, we went to the Palmer Park playground, which was very cold, but the twins didn't care. Tim wandered around while they played, keeping an eye on them, watching them jump, swing, slide, etc, while I sat in the warm van and listened to a book on tape.

We ended the day with some wonderful fluffy omelettes made by Tim and then the horrible movie, "Goonies", which I managed to escape in 1985 when it came out. The language was pretty bad, but the pre-teen Indiana Jonesesque plot entertained the twins quite a bit. It was rated PG, by '80's standards, which we forgot is now PG13. The twins didn't seem to notice the words. Abby thought they said,"shame" when they said,"sh**", and later, when they heard someone say,"dummy", she said, "Mom we promise we won't repeat that bad word". We'll see if that's really all they heard if we hear anything back from their teachers in the next few days.

1 comment:

  1. oh mom, this made me laugh so much! It sounds like you had a perfectly simple and low key weekend weekend with the twins!

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