Tonight, my wife was hosting a Bunko party at our house with some friends so I needed to get the kids out for awhile. It’s easier to leave so the kids (and I) don’t bother my wife and she can enjoy herself. Besides, I’ve got fantasy football drafts coming up and I’m going to want to be without the kids so it’s only fair.

We typically go to Chick-Fil-A in situations like these but I thought I’d mix it up a bit and ask the kids what they want to do. They responded in unison that they wanted to go to Chuck E. Cheese’s. My immediate thought was that it would be too expensive to eat and play video games there so I agreed to go to Chuck E. Cheese’s after we grabbed dinner at Chick-Fil-A. They do know us by name there and we have our own reserved table in the corner. Okay, they don’t know our names and we don’t have our own table but we should. 

After dinner, we headed over to Chuck E. Cheese’s to play some games. I bought 100 tokens for $20 (only $0.20/game) and then divvied up the tokens between the four of us. You better believe I played.

People typically complain about Chuck E. Cheese’s because of all the kids running around, the lousy pizza and the expense. I think it can be a little expensive (as I said above) and I do avoid the place during cold season. The pizza has gotten a lot better and I feel like the place is somewhat safe for my kids. Where else can you play fun video games for only a token each? Most arcade places make you buy a rechargeable card and load points on it. At the end of the night you end up with unusable points.

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Ethan had enough tickets to get some really cool inflatable boxing gloves and a bag of cotton candy.

My only complaint is more related to my kids taking forever to figure out what prizes they want to spend their tickets on. You’d think they were making a life-changing decision picking out toy spider rings, slinkies and silly putty. I think I could pick out a new car before they pick out their prizes.

Tonight was a little bit different. Ethan won over 1,000 tickets and he picked out some sweet inflatable boxing gloves. He talked Camden and Maddie into doing the same (although I did have to chip in $2.50 for Maddie because she didn’t have enough tickets). I will say that the boxing gloves are my all-time favorite prize. I’m not sure how we never picked them out before.

Once the kids picked up their inflatable boxing gloves, we returned home to briefly interrupt my wife’s bunko party. Then, I inflated their boxing gloves using my compressor in the garage (who’s got time to manually inflate six boxing gloves?) and we headed out to the family trampoline for a no-holds-barred boxing match.

Other than a few cheap shots between my younger son/daughter and the kids all attacking me at once, it was a lot of fun.

Tonight was a success.

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The kids were locked and loaded for a free-for-all boxing match.

While I won’t be heading over to Chuck E. Cheese’s every week, it can be a fun activity to do with the kids. If you can win enough tickets, you’ll even have something to show for it.

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