So Little A celebrated her 7th birthday today, at Chuck E. Cheese’s. She had originally wanted it to be at the Science Centre, but changed her mind at almost the last minute – fortunately they were able to accommodate us and we were able to get the location change out to everyone in time.

It mostly went well – she was a little sensorily overwhelmed for a bit, and had a slight meltdown right about the time the whole birthday singing/cake/creepy giant anthropomorphic animals bit was supposed to start, but it ended up OK.

Highlights:

• Seeing some of my goth/punk/decidedly downtown-type friends make it all the way out to a Chuck E. Cheese’s in the suburbs. Now that’s dedication!
• Little A racing off from her own party when he heard that Sabotabby and Axel were just arriving, so that she could hide beside the front door with her new Nerf crossbow and ambush them as they came in.
• My partner and I getting lost in the arcade and completely forgetting how to adult. We were looking for this electric gorilla thing that our friend R had said was the high point of the whole place. Sadly, the electric gorilla was no more, but we decided that the “Deadstorm Pirates” game was the new electric gorilla…

OMG, did we ever get sucked into that one! It had two guns AND a steering wheel, so optimally you really needed three people. We started out with us shooting all the skeletal pirates, vampire bats, flying toothy things, etc., and Little A steering us around obstacles, but eventually she wandered off and we ended up with some random kid who was not ours on the wheel. This in no way diminished the fun. It was like:

Random kid: “BATS! BATS! Look out for the bats! Don’t let them bite you!”

Us: “Holy (word inappropriate for children) – ZOMBIE PIRATES WITH MOLOTOV COCKTAILS!”

Good times.