this so deserves a picture post, but i didn’t bring my camera. i was supposed to go to the pool today with cordell and ellie and ma henry and sis-in-law henry and lil ryder. but the weather was too iffy and if there’s no sun, well, frankly, i’d rather not go the pool. so we opt for chuck e. cheese. in manassas. virginia.
i have never been to a chuck e. cheese. i think i went to showbiz pizza palace once for a birthday when i really little and ended up turning my tickets in for a “magic wand” which really meant “a stick with some ribbon on it” which to me was still pretty cool because then i was like one of those russian non-gymnasts at the olympics that twirl the pretty ribbon around.
so i pick up cordell and ma henry and we’re listening to my “recently added playlist” on my ipod as we’re driving out to chuck e. cheese’s house and a remix of “lovegame” by lady gaga comes on. i know that cordell likes at least one song by lady gaga so i say “cord, this is by lady gaga.”
and he says “it sounds different.”
and i say “it’s a remix”
and he says “what’s that?”
and i’m like “it’s what you’ll be hearing at cobalt on retro night in about ten years.”
which lead my mother to say, “she reminds me of amy winehouse.”
and i’m like “who?”
and she says “lady gaga.”
and i’m like, “why do you know who these people are?”
and then she says “i like that katy perry”.
i’m assuming she still watches entertainment tonight.
so once at la maison du fromage, i see that it’s crawling with kids and germs and the two are pretty indistinguishable. but i order a pizza for the kids (takes an hour to get to our table btw), 50 tokens for the tots and we go and hit some games.
cord makes me play this one game where you hold both hands on metal grips and basically let a machine “shock” you until you let go. the longer you hold on, the more tickets you get to trade in for treats at the end of the day (we’ll get to that mess later). so i held on until the machine started smoking which i think is like a “ha ha you beat it” kind of thing, but it kind of scared ellie and cord because all they saw was a machine going up in smoke. at least i think that’s what happened. maybe i broke it.
next up was a duel racing video game so ellie and i raced each other. she couldn’t reach the gas and brake peddles though, so i figured i would work her peddles and let her steer while still focusing on my own game.which was fuckin’ hard. so i just mashed her accelerator to the floor and focused on my own game. she kept asking why she couldn’t slow down and i was like, “just steer!” i’m a bad uncle.
when ma henry took over watching the tots, i went to play with ryder who was rubbing every dirty thing he could find with his hands and then licking his hands. then our pizza came and i was starving and i’m embarrassed to say that i thought it wasn’t bad, but i imagine that anything would taste good when you’re starving.
so then it was back to the games with the tots…except ellie was bored of playing “tricky” games, and she wanted to play skeeball.
which leads us to ellie’s addiction to skee ball.
after i told her that it might be better to roll the ball rather than throw it, she whipped out some skills and aim i didn’t know she had. girl was good. no, she was great. and she kept playing, throwing in token after token, like a chain smoking 80 year old vegas booze hound at a slot machine, she just kept playing “one more time”. rackin’ up points and tickets like no tomorrow.and being competitive, i had to play my own game and used up probably half her tokens competing with her (on the inside). i did give my tickets to ellie and cord to share though. i’m a good uncle.
which brings us to cashing in our tickets for trinkets and toys. after splitting all the tickets they racked up evenly, each had about 100 point to trade in for what is essentially junk. no ribbon wands at this mouse house. anything worth value was thousands of points. ridiculous. and poor ellie saw something that “cost” 1000 tix and thought she could get it and i say, “no, that’s a thousand. we only have a hundred. we’d have to play all day!”
and she said “we’d have to play all week!”
see what addiction does to you?
the whole process of allowing children who have no concept of subtraction to pick out their prizes is fucked up. i have never felt more impatient than watching Jon and Kate plus 8 in line ahead of us letting their kids pick their prizes. there were too many minutes wasted and not enough grumpy teenagers behind the counter to make this process any more efficient.when it came time for cord and ellie to pick their prizes, they picked out a couple of rubber worms and some thing else that i don’t remember, which left them with about twenty points each to spend and they had a hard time picking something out. believe me, for twenty points you can get like a lollipop or some pop rocks. (oh, that’s what cord got. pop rocks and i told him to never eat them and drink soda at the same time or his head would explode. i’m a good uncle.)so with these last twenty points, and the kids not picking anything out and my patience wearing thin, i just pointed to something and said to the teen behind the counter, “give me two of those.”
and cord asks “what is this? what am i going to do with body glitter?”
and i say, “you’ll find out in ten years when you’re at cobalt on retro night.”
to kill some time, we left chuck e. cheese and ventured over to a nearby mall to do some shopping. and well, let’s just cut to the chase and declare me the worst uncle ever…so, i took my five year old niece and my eight year old nephew into a spencer’s gift shop. you know, those raunchy, kind of joke gift stores where they have everything from sex toys to key chains and t shirts and fake jewelry to fart machines. BUT in my defense i remember those stores having really cool lava lamps and electro crystal balls and laser machines and stuff like that that i thought would be really cool for the kids and usually this stuff is in the back of the store so i thought if we just sprint through the rest of the store, they won’t even notice the edible panties or the naked playing cards or vomit in a can or the the t-shirt that says “shit happens”. i mean, it’s not like we were browsing around the store or lingering. i knew exactly where the cool stuff was and we went there really quickly.
and then cord picked up a beer bong (a funnel with a tube attached for you uncool cats who don’t know what that is) asked “what is this?”
and i said “uh, er…ask me again in 13 years… but it’s something that uncle matt was really good at.”i’m a great uncle.