Chuck E Cheese!

On a whim and as a break from cleaning the house, we went to Chuck E Cheese for the first time with Drake. Drake had a great time, we couldn't get him to sit for more then 3 minutes and he would eat a few bites of food at a time. There are tunnels on the ceiling that Drake LOVED to climb in. The down-side is that he got lost three times and since I'm small I had to go in the tunnels and lead him out. No biggie, but I can't see most parents being able to do that. He also enjoyed playing the different types of games, riding on the rides, getting tickets, the ticket muncher machine, and picking prizes. Oh yeah - you don't go there for the food! The salad bar was good, the mozarella sticks were ok, but the pizza tasted blah. An interesting thing we noticed was that all of the big expensive prizes were for girls. You would think boys were the main audience and they would have big expensive boy prizes.

My memories of Chuck E Cheese are a bit different. I used to love the ball pool; I also remember there being more gymnasium-sort of stuff, and those annoying animatronics. There was no ball pool or animatronics at this one. I remember it being skewed toward older kids, like 10 year olds. This Chuck E Cheese was definately more for 4-6 year olds. We speculated it was because most 10 year olds stay home to play video games.

Sorry the pictures are so fuzzy. We took these with our phones because we didn't bring the digital camera. Like I said, the trip was a whim.

I really liked the way this restaurant ran a few things. 1) All of the games were one token. It didn't matter if you wanted to play the silly duck-shooting game or the roller coaster simulator or have your picture taken in black & white. It was one token. 2) Everyone in the same family is stamped with the same number, in ink detectable by ultraviolet light. 3) You could upgrade your prize by paying 1 cent per ticket. At other places where you turn in tickets for prizes, I have seen kids having temper tantrums or whining because they don't have enough tickets to get the toy they want. This place was great because the employee at the prize counter isn't the "bad guy", and parents can shell-out a few extra bucks to get the toy their kid wants.

Laters.