"Chuck E. Cheese" is "Spawn of Satan" backwards

When I was a teenager, a neighbor paid me to help chaperon a group of five-year-olds for a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese's.  When the evening was over, it took two hours for me to stop feeling like I was being pursued by a six foot tall gray rat with mange, two days to get the echoes of shrilly-screaming kids out of my ears, but only two minutes for me to resolve never to go back.

But . . .


now I have a toddler.  And sometimes nightmares of rodent pursual are better than another morning stuck at home telling Mr. C -- for the eighteenth time, please, Pooksie -- that putting Mommy's car keys in the electrical socket is a no-no.  So, when I saw a Check E. Cheese coupon that got us 90 game tokens for $15, I pounced on it, and invited another of the playgroup mothers along.

Oh my God, you can get into Chuck E. Cheese's for free!  Of course, once you're in, you'll have to pay for all the games, but there is a climbing structure better than the one at McDonald's, and they don't charge you to use it.  If you're anything like me, though, you'll be paying with humiliation as your child insists on you shimmying up the kid-friendly platforms on your adult-friendly ass and then blowing out your knees in the hard plastic tunnels.

Since pretty much all the games were just a token, and we had NINETY of those, we had great fun running from brightly-flashing machine to brightly-flashing machine and randomly throwing tokens at each.  The kids enjoyed the little ride ones a lot, and they didn't seem too upset when the other mother and I elbowed them out of the way so we could play skee ball ("Look how many points Mommy racked up, bee-yotches!").

Then there were my favorites, the photo booths, which were specially set so that the kids' pictures come out adorably, whilst adults inevitably look like deranged psychopaths.  Still, what a special memento of our time together!

We came at a time when there weren't many kids there, so we had the run of the place and could steer clear of the animated organisms up on stage.  There were several staff members cleaning and checking the machines, and they quickly fixed rides with glitches and refunded us our hard-earned tokens without us having to ask.  Yes, we caught the salad bar lady restocking the olives with her bare hands, but there was no way we were going to eat there, anyway.

So, when our tokens were gone (which took approximately one minute per token) and we were ready to go home, not only did we have our photo mementos, but -- thanks to our awesome skee ball skills -- we won enough tickets to get a packet of Smartees, a temporary tattoo, and a tiny rubber frog pencil topper (if your pencil is about the size of a toothpick).  Score!  Oh, not to mention the amazing matching blacklight-read stamp on each of our wrists so someone else doesn't walk out with my child.

Sigh.  I guess I'm going to have to rethink my policy on children's play places.