Saturday, November 24, 2012

Black Friday 2012, minus shopping

Every once in awhile on a no-school morning, for years now, my friend J and I have been taking our combined six kids on outings to Chuck Ee Cheese (spelling that wrong on purpose). We've got the routine down pretty well now. Using e-mail coupons and math on a napkin, we can wring two hours of fun, a couple slices of pizza per kid and a couple rounds of basketball shooting out of twenty bucks each.
The adventure we had today was pretty standard, with these twists:

N wasn't interested in prizes and therefore didn't collect tickets at all

M was terrified of ChuckE

The by-the-book, slim, bespectacled Asian girl working at SBux inside of Barnes and N Books had to know exactly how many ounces of coffee J's travel mug might hold. 16, which is a grande

and finally--
after J and crew (not to be confused with JCrew) left for home, we stayed and played for a few minutes. I was pleasantly surprised that the kids were interested in token-less play. And less surprised when, just as we were about to leave, M expressed an (intense--do I need to say this? all of her feelings are this way, she's three and a half....) desire to be photographed while riding in ChuckE's car. I didn't have, well didn't THINK I had, any more tokens. Later I found three in my pockets. At that moment, though, I was sure I didn't have any. A women happened to see M's longing and kindly gave us three tickets. When we were done photographing and traveling to nowhere in a plastic vehicle, we gave our kind patron all the tickets we have. She was thrilled and said something like, "This is a great trade! We should really blog about this!"

Ha ha! I said back, doing that thing I sometimes do where I pretend I know what you mean but really I'm pretending.

But I couldn't stop thinking about the moment all day, so here I am, blogging and telling you about it.

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