Quick Before I Get Sidetrack'd

Last Wednesday was the fifth birthday of my friend’s son.  To do something special on his actual birthday, we decided to take the four kids – ages 5, 26 months, 22 months, and 6 weeks – to Chuck E. Cheese for the morning.  This was Little’s first trip to the land of flashing lights, competing noises, and slots for tokens.

We got there early hoping to beat the crowds, and we were not disappointed.  This is the best CEC gets – about 15 minutes after opening – only one other mother and child in the entire place.  Also good was the fact that a game-tester was there checking that all the games functioned properly; he would play, win, and leave the tickets for us to gather.  

We camped out at a table in the little kids area thinking that the younger ones (minus Boo) would enjoy the slide and car ride kind of things.  Tokens were divvied up three ways and off everyone went.  Little and I started off at skee-ball (my fave) where she enjoyed throwing the ball up the ramp, even though none of them made it all the way.  

I really thought she would be pretty uninterested in the games, and I was both right and wrong.  She didn’t really “get” most of the games but did enjoy the ones where you have a single button to press and then it spits out the tickets.  However, the most exciting part for her was putting the tokens into the slots.  

It took quite some work to keep her from randomly putting tokens into games and to confine her token feeding to the games that I wanted/could play.  And even when the tokens went into the games that I wanted them to, she would stand beside me and continue to put more tokens in while I played.  I think there were a couple of games that I ended up playing about five times in a row.

All-in-all it was a fun morning, and I think the birthday boy really enjoyed it.  As for Little, she would have been perfectly happy to sit in one place and feed tokens into a slot all day long.  Better not let her near slot machines!