“Kiddy Vegas” or “Circus Circus”
February 23, 2006 by Douglas · Leave a Comment
Do you recall when I said before that no one listens to me? Likely not… cause if anyone listened to me, then they would remember me saying that. And then that would also make me a liar, but that would be fine, my life is full of one paradox after another.
My children love nothing more than to attend birthday parties. And it is a sad day in our home when one child gets to attend a party, while the other is forced to remain home, since they were not invited. My daughters have plenty of cousins, so these sad days are few and far between. The only thing that makes a party MORE fun, is if it is being hosted at Chuck E. Cheese.
My kids have been begging to go there for months. K figured this would be a great way to get them to change some behavior problems we have been experiencing. If the kids could essentially behave for four weeks (28 days) we would take them to Chuck E. Cheese. This was not discussed with me.
Do you have a Chuck E. Cheese near you? Hopefully you know what this place is. If not, let this blog serve as a warning to you, however if you DO know what it is – let this blog serve as my co-dependant and stalwart salute to you. Chuck E. Cheese is the home of Mediocre pizza, mediocre games, and a mediocre large rat walking around shaking hands and giving high-fives.
The chief purpose of attending said establishment is to appease your children, by feeding them game tokens, which will be in turn spent playing a game that will hopefully spawn Chuck E. Cheese Game Tickets! You know what you do with game tickets right? Why you trade them for worthless prizes!
I have never been to Vegas, but I HAVE been to Reno. And all over the casinos, they have these little posters for gambling addiction: How to recognize if you have it, what you should do if you have it. Kind of like self-medicating but on a completely smaller and less-effective scale. Well I say these dens of sin need some of those, or at least a warning… my children were luckily saved from certain destruction by the act of running out of tokens. Sara however was REALLY getting into trying to hit the jackpot on several of the stop-a-light-right-HERE-and-right-NOW-to-get-150-tickets games – that and Skee Ball.
Mind you, Sara is a natural Skee Ball player. She never made it to 450,000 points, thus earning her 75 tickets, but she did successfully show me up. Megan ended up with 95 tickets, which earned her a small plastic race car, a temporary tattoo, and three wrappers of Smarties. Sara clamored up to 93 tickets, which she crammed in her mothers pocket, not wanting to cash them in.
Here is one of the scary things; tickets could be PURCHASED (like if Junior was missing 15 tickets to get his BIG PRIZE) at the damage of ten cents per ticket. Megan’s Smarties were 15 tickets each. That’s a BUCK FIFTY for a wrapper of SMARTIES! Judging the economics of it all: one token is 25 cents, of which, the average token yields approximately 1-3 tickets. Holy Hell! The mere thought of that kind of highway robbery was enough to send me to the bathroom to rocket forth some of the DOOM-PIZZA I had been consuming earlier.
Tomorrow I begin to look for a twelve-step Skee Ball dependency program… just in case.
