... and this little rodent here is largely to blame.Yes, it was one of those "Daddy takes The Girls to Chuck E. Cheese" days.
Chuck. E. Cheese. I think Dante wrote about it somewhere.
The only thing which separated this adventure from previous ones is that I didn't end up playing any games ... at this point both of The Girls are self-sufficient (well, unless you're looking at total ticket haul ... I'm a bit better at strategizing optimal ticket-to-token returns) in the games department, so they're less likely to want to have me there "helping". This means that I sat in the booth with a book and doled out the tokens a half a dozen at a time to each. The little one is actually quite an ace at ski-ball, so she spends most of her time on that, and her big sis won a 150-ticket card from the pinball machine (see, some skills are inherited!).
The saving grace of Chuck E. Cheese is that there is OK food ... their pizza doesn't suck, and I'm able to get unlimited salad bar trips, which keeps me amused. They've been adding interesting stuff to the menu, but I don't think it's ever going to get to the point where one would venture in there for the food despite the mobs of frantic children, but it's nice to not have to dread eating there above and beyond being there.
One other big change is that The Girls also cashed in their tickets on their own and picked out their prizes without my coaching. There is a sense of a "life stage" passing there, but being it's a Chuck E Cheese milestone, I don't think I'm going to waste much emotional capital on it. Still ... one more thing they don't need Daddy for (although I do seem to come in very handy when they find they've blown through our initial buy-in of tokens within the first hour!).