It Ain't Easy Being Cheesy

Some weekends ago, my daughter, A, was invited to a Chuck E Cheese birthday party.

Ugh.

My husband and I both hate going in crowded public places. Yes, you can safely assume that my kids miss out on lots of things because I HATE crowds. But she wanted to go to the party, so I took her.

My husband got the unenviable task of staying home with the boy child. I took both my daughters to the party. My oldest daughter wanted me to buy her some pizza. She didn't actually attend the party.

It was in Sacramento. I went to mapquest and printed out directions. May I add here that mapquest sucks? I hope so, because I did.

We had to take an exit off the highway, drive up a few miles, then turn left and u-turn immediately into the parking lot.

Only I u-turned and there was no damn Chuck E Cheese. We were actually quite far from where we needed to be.

No problem. We were on the correct street. I merely needed to drive to the correct address. Ha ha ha.

We drove and drove. Suddenly we were at a freeway and we HAD to get in. At this point, I told my daughter we would probably miss the party. (I was under the impression it was a 45 minute party.)

She began sobbing. I saw an exit ahead for the street we needed to be on. We could go west or east. I chose west.

It soon became apparent I should have gone east. We landed in a neighborhood where I wouldn't want to go out after dark or during the daylight for that matter.

I flipped a u-turn and floored it. There was a pigeon in the road. He wasn't expecting me to be driving quite the speed I was. I couldn't stop. He flew up too late and managed to smash into the driver's side mirror.

Now we had killed a pigeon, we were lost and the mirror was hanging by a few wires. As I began rolling down the window to pull the mirror off, it flew away, into the middle of thick traffic.

"A" was crying and said, "This is the worst day of my life."

My older daughter said that she thought that the pigeon had a bit worse day.

Finally we found Chuck E Cheese. We were about 25 minutes late. It took another few minutes to find parking.

When we got inside, there was A LINE. There was a line to get into the pizza place from hell. It looked like a damn L.A. nightclub, complete with a guy at the front of the line who looked like a bouncer.

Since we were some of the beautiful people invited to a party, we got to go right in.

Do you ever feel like you died and went to hell? Yep, that's where we were.

It was crowded and noisy. Every surface was covered with a shrieking child. Shudder.

The party was actually and hour and a half long. My daughter had a great time.

When it was time to trade in the tickets for cheap plastic shit toys, I saw the line and said no.

She was smart enough not to protest.

Chuck E. Cheeses, where adults can go insane.