this is a verbatim quote from SpazMonkey right before he shattered the shatterproof backboard on the skeeball lane at chuck e. cheese. just keepin it real.
so. we usually go to chuck e. cheese once or twice a year, and hadn’t been since i was morbidly pregnant with MonkeyBeef. a lot of parents can’t stand chuck e. cheese – and honestly, i’m surprised i’m not one of them. i hate crowds, especially crowds of poorly supervised children. EvilGremlin’s friend DayDreamer’s mom says her kids get so overstimulated there that DayDreamer shuts down, eyes glazed over, and his younger brother just runs in circles screaming. others are understandably annoyed by the barney-like characters and bad kid-music that plays non-stop. (then there are the pain-in-the-ass bitches who hate the fact that its not even *gasp* EDUCATIONAL. but luckily, we here at loser headquarters don’t give a flying fuck at a rolling donut what the competitive type-A fuehrer-mommies think, and neither should you.)
anyway, the pizza is actually really good – it scores points for the crust actually tasting like yeast, being really light on the sauce, and having a ton of high-quality cheese on it. i like it, my kids like it. MonkeyBeef REALLY likes it; i think he ate as much of it as his brothers. 
if you print out every reward chart and coupon on their website, and bring in report cards for additional free tokens, it winds up being a pretty decent deal: i usually go for the $40 pizza-soda-180-or-so-tokens deal, but splurged this time: for a total of just under $60, 5 of us stuffed ourselves on pizza, got 4 sodas, and 315 tokens, and some ice cream sandwiches and popsicles out of the $1 vending machine, AND got 3 hours of playtime. the place always opens at 9 am, so you can have the whole place practically to yourself, even in the middle of summer vacation, just by showing up for a pizza breakfast, and we’re out of there in time for naptime. the security is actually really good – i’ve never lost a kid in there, not even for a second; visibility is good, and the one exit is monitored by an employee at all times.
look at them not throwing feces! i cannot explain it, but magically, my children do not get overstimulated by chuck e cheese. (okay, so MB spent the last half hour running in a circle screeching, not even stopping to look at the games he was careening between. but hey, we’ll just go ahead and chalk that up to “wild abandon” rather than “overstimulation.”)
my kids also spend 75% of the time on non-video-game-like, non-ticket-dispensing pursuits, like the hamster-tunnel playground and air hockey:
they can also drop several dozen tokens on making funny faces at the “sketch your face, or the back of your head should you choose to smile sweetly at the camera until the last second when you jerk your head around” photo booth:
so, there are a lot of things i like about chuck e cheese, but the most important is this: i fucking ROCK at skeeball. my usual trick is to play several dozen games of skeeball to earn lots of tickets to make sure my kids get to pick out at least one modest prize each. they usually manage to average 1 to 2 tickets won per token spent; i can consistently clear 5 to 8 tickets per token i spend on skeeball. i once heard a mom complain that the prizes you can buy with the tickets you won are “cheap.” yes. when you spend 10 cents per token, and earn a minimum of 1 ticket per token spent… you’re not walking out of there with an xbox for 1000 tickets. on 200 tokens, we can usually clear 500 tickets, and the exchange rate seems to be roughly that 100-ticket value = $1. so we walk out of there with pirate eyepatches, stickers, play-doh, and a few pieces of candy.
this time, however, we found a game that must have been broken… it was one of those “aim the coin” variations; in this one, you turn the coin release platform to aim the coin to roll down a slope at any of a dozen holes, most of which are worth one ticket. in this particular game, the platform’s default position was aimed directly at the 10-ticket hole. if you didn’t touch it, you got ten tickets. as soon as i discovered this, i just started plugging coins in it and watching the tickets mound up on the floor. when the kids were ready to go, i had them come over and plug their remaining tokens in; you should have seen their faces light up at the piles and piles of tickets they got. when we were out, i showed another little girl how to do it, and she and her sister took over the machine with squeals of delight.
of course, i didn’t figure this out before playing many, many rounds of skeeball. MB loved the skeeball. the blinking lights, the different beepy pattern for each point level, and most of all, of course, the flying balls. he’s just learned to clap, so he got to clap a lot, pull out my tickets and stuff them in my backpack for me, and occasionally throw a ball really badly. for the most part, though, to keep him out of the way after he decided he was going to lebowski it up and run his ass up the ramp to personally deliver the balls to the holes, i held him on my left hip. so, 30 pounds of fatass in my left arm, leaning waaaaaaay to the right to keep my balance as i threw a skeeball a few hundred times, thus putting most of my weight on my right leg… i wound up with my left arm and right leg so sore i could barely move them for a few days. then, as i was getting the kids in the car, making sure everybody was out of the way before closing the back hatch of the van, i forgot to make sure *i* was out of the way, and slammed it down onto my right shoulder, thus taking 75% of my limbs out of commission. ow. the bruise is impressive. so’s the nerve damage!
i’m sure the machine will be fixed by the time we go back, but for once, we made out like carnie superheroes: 1400 tickets. the twins had both announced that they wanted a 300-ticket spiderman pouch at the outset, and i had told them we probably wouldn’t get enough tickets for two of them, even after EG offered to let them use his tickets. not a problem after all! after two spiderman pencil pouches, some playdoh, sticky hands, and pirate belt pouches full of jewels, the kids ran out of shit that they wanted and i had to pick out the last few hundred points worth of craptaculous plastic diversions.
so, awesome day out, the only casualties being 3 of my limbs, and my dress. i should have taken a picture. two soda spills, an ice cream smear, dozens of orange-cheese-grease smears, and some tootsie-pop-drool jackson pollocking. i actually made a point of getting changed before the neighbors saw me, because damn. they’re already working pretty hard to convince themselves i’m not smoking crack for lunch.
