The Cheese

All of the birthdays in the house are done for the year, except for mine. It's hard to believe that the kids are getting so big. Mason turned nine the other day, so we had a evening out to celebrate. We had dinner at the families favorite restaurant, McDonalds. Just kidding, it was Carlos O'Kellys, which sounds like a Irish/Mexican restaurant, but turns out, just Mexican. Mason always eats well there, but the other two just want chips and salsa, cheap dates. We try to get them to eat something else, every time we go, but we usually just end up taking it home, to throw it away later. I'd say 90% of the time we take anything home from a restaurant, we throw it away because nobody will eat it. The evening was topped off with a trip to Chucky Cheese. I'm not a big fan of The Cheese, but the kids love it, and as a parent, you do tons of stuff you have zero interest in. They do have skeeball, which I like, but everything else is either so easy its boring, or just not my kind of fun. Makiah got in this 4-wheel drive truck that started rumbling and lifting. He asked me to get in, but there wasn't a chance in hell I could squeeze my legs into that thing. It didn't move a whole lot, but I found a lever that when pushed, made this thing do a wheelie, which scared the hell out of Makiah. That was fun. Makiah also decided that he wanted to play this semi truck driving simulator. Lets just say he is know where near being able to drive a real car. He wasn't talking on the phone or anything and he still spent 80% of his time, not only out of his lane, but off of the road. I fear for the people of WDM if he doesn't improve in the next 7 years. The whole time he was driving he had a scary laugh, he was really enjoying driving through the mall. We use to have one kid get sick every time we went, mainly because they crawled through the hamster habitrail thing, which every kid in a 50 mile radius had coughed and sneezed in. Now that they don't really get in that any more, we have been germ free. I also learned that 7pm on a wed. night is a pretty good time to go, the crowd was thin. I did see several adults getting angry at the amount of tickets they were winning at the games that are designed to just give tickets. If you've been, you know what I mean. If you have never had the privilege of running around, dodging kids and phlegm, at a Chucky Cheese, there are certain games that are for ticket whores. You flip a coin in a basket and it gives you a ticket. If you happen to get it in the thimble, it gives you 100 tickets. Kids can walk up, flip the lever and the ticket machine will spew tickets for an hour. I go up and try this and I spend $20 to get 20 tickets that buys a small sucker, hardly a fair exchange. Some of the kids walk around with hundreds of ticket, I have 7 in my pocket and I'm out of cash. You can't buy anything with 7 tickets, especially not a smile from the girl behind the counter when you try to trade your 7 for one of those 20 ticket suckers, not going to happen. Everyone tells me that I will miss these times when the kids get older and don't want to have anything to do with their old dad, but I'm guessing the Cheese won't be the thing I miss.