Yeah, so the party is done with… and it was surprisingly much better than anticipated. However, I attribute the positive experience to the fact that the party began at 10am when the place opened rather than later in the day. It really helped to get there while it was mostly empty, rather than when it was packed an hour later. I’m pretty sure it would have been overwhelming had we walked into the loud chaos. Also, as far as I could tell this Chuck E Cheese didn’t sell alcohol so that was a plus for adults not getting too obnoxious. My take aways were:
[ul]
[li]The pizza and cake were fine. Except for the teenage employee serving the kids molten hot pizza slices. The pizza was on par with Papa John’s, so not particularly good, but certainly better than frozen pizza.[/li][li]A lot of the games were really short-- where all you do is press a button and you’re done.[/li][li]My son was too young and/or short to play most of the games well.[/li][li]There was no ball pit full of germs or any slides, so I was way off on expecting those.[/li][li]My son sucks at skeeball-- I’m mean he’s astonishingly bad.[/li][li]The place was much more open and well lit than I was expecting.[/li][li]The best part was the Ticket Muncher.[/li][/ul]
My kid had fun and enjoyed his arcade experience. A little bonus, for me anyway, was that he’d never been there before and didn’t realize the tickets could be redeemed for anything so I was able to avoid the tears of him wanting something that our modest 67 tickets wouldn’t buy us. As far as he was concerned the tickets simply needed to be deposited in to the Ticket Muncher machine and we were both content with that.
Surprisingly, the party that turned out to be much worse was the one we went to yesterday at a firehouse. First of all it was annoying that someone had a kids birthday party on President’s Day, considering not everyone has off on that day and that it was tacked on to the same weekend as party for another kid in the same class (the Chuck E Cheese party). However, this kids dad is the fire chief; so I figured it would be a fun time for my kid since he loves fire trucks. Unfortunately, most of the party was in the fire hall and felt more like a sweet-sixteen party meets a gym class for a five year olds. There was even dance/pop music playing faintly in the background. They did get to go on the fire truck for about five minutes and briefly have an opportunity to spray a hose, but most of the party was in the banquet hall (that was kind of setup for a wedding reception) and they had gym class style scooters on the dance floor that the kids could sit on and be annoying. I always hated scooter day in gym class because it meant everyone was going to act like an ass that day. Just like his old man, my kid also wanted nothing to do with the scooters. They also had that “parachute” thing that all of the kids hold onto and try to navigate a ball through a hole in the middle and some other other activities.
Shockingly, I would take a 10am Chuck E Cheese party anytime over the fire house party.
