As the meteorological nether-region between the end of
February and the first of March drew near, Amy and I began readying ourselves
for the onslaught of want. Remembering
the lessons from last year, we were both determined not to be the same shell-shocked
parents with the thousand-yard stare as last year.
This year we were prepared.
This year we had everything planned way ahead of time. The invitations were out. The lists were made. The decorations and most of the presents were
acquired. We had venues and plans with
time frames and hard deadlines. No more
of this amorphous “let’s just see how it goes” nonsense. We had this.
We were god-damned ready for anything.
Because this wasn’t any time for weakness or self doubt. This was the time for a battle-hardened parental
warrior. One who keeps order with
unwavering consistency and is unafraid to mete out justice with a fair yet firm
will. Anything less would mean a dark
journey to the depths of madness.
It was Birthday Season. That wonderful time of the year where our
little “Irish Twins” were both, for a fleeting eight days, eight years old.
Given their previous situation, I imagine Mo and Shay
relied a great deal on one another, with Mo playing an almost motherly role to
her “much younger” sister of eleven months and three weeks (Mo swears up and
down that she used to change Shay’s diapers).
But now that they’re getting to be actual children, that unfair burden
has been lifted, and they are thus developing and growing on their own. Not apart, because their roots are as
intertwined as a tangled ball of Christmas lights, but still very much independently. They are vastly different kids now. Both from who they were when they first came
to us, and from one another.
This is evidenced by their choice in birthday
parties. We began prodding in mid
January (again, to get ready for this trying time) for an idea of what they
wanted to do for their birthday party.
Both had vastly different ideas that changed almost daily, but they
never could agree on one single thing.
Shay is still very much a little kid and still enjoys little kid
things. She’s not in much of a hurry to
grow up. She’s used to being “the baby”
and often acts accordingly. Mo, on the
other hand, can’t grow up fast enough (which is often troubling) surely due to
the fact that she has always felt a duty to be older than she actually is. And even though they are both growing up and out
of those previous roles, these tendencies are still deeply engrained in them.
Shay wanted to go to the University’s swimming pool
for a pool party.
Mo wanted to have a makeover party with her friends.
Shay wanted to go to Chuck-E-Cheese.
Mo wanted to have a sleepover (again).
We briefly considered having a mash-up of these
parties, but Mo was pretty adamant that her friends would think Chuck-E-Cheese
would be “too babyish.” And besides,
considering last year’s fourteen-hour marathon of a birthday party (see “Birthdays
n Such” for backstory) and how it had taken Amy and me a solid week to recover,
we decided that two separate parties on two separate weekends would be best. The girls agreed and were excited to have their
“own thing” going on for their special days, which is completely understandable.
There
isn’t a lot to say about Chuck-E-Cheese other than it is, as a friend of ours
put it, a very deep circle of hell. We
had the party on a Friday night, from six until eight. All I really remember of that frenetic jumble
of children is the constant breathless begging for more coins (no, damn it, I
just gave you a cup of twenty tokens, sweaty-kid-I-don’t-know-and-may-not-even-be-part-of-this-party);
that modern animatronics are just as horrifying as they were in the 1980’s (why
do the damn things still twitch and jolt even when there isn’t a program
running them? I DON’T LIKE IT); and of
course, the almost immediate gastro-intestinal distress after ingesting doughy
pizza covered with a thin film of greasy mystery cheese (hey kids! Whoooooo’s ready for some diarrhea! Yaaaaay!)
Toward the end of the party some teenager in a mouse costume came out
and started parading the kids around toward the “ticket machine,” all the while
the nightmarish animatronics jerked and shuddered their way through some hellish
rendition of that song “Wagon Wheel.”
The whole thing was like a Rob Zombie video.
Once
they got to the ticket machine, Shay, grinning ear to ear, got inside and they
closed her in. The hairs on the back of
my neck began to stand up as I kept thinking of that scene in Gremlins when the
lady put one of the little monsters inside the microwave.
Dark, I know, but I can’t help it.
The power was turned on, and the tickets, which had
been sitting on the floor, began to shoot up all around her under the power of
some fan in the floor. The point was to
grab as many tickets as she could in sixty seconds. Well, when the timer started, she just stood
there grinning wildly against the forty mile an hour wind in her face, unable
to really see because the goggles were pushed up too far and were squishing her
eyes shut. So instead of jumping around
and trying to catch the tumbling tickets, she just began to slowly open and
close her hands like a drugged lobster, hoping she would miraculously catch the
1,000 point ticket. Seeing this, I
forgot my fear that the ticket machine was really a giant microwave to make
kids explode, and began banging on the window telling her to jump! Grab the tickets!
But
she still just grinned back at me, opening and closing her little pincers in
midair. It was about that point that, as
if by divine providence, the 1,000 point ticket stuck squarely on her
face. “Grab the ticket! Shay!
Grab the ticket! It’s the big
one! It’s on your face! Grab it!
GRAB IT!!!”
Well,
she didn’t. She actually actively swiped
it away from her face, sending the miraculous gift back into the jumble of
floating paper, lost forever, so she could see what I was trying to tell
her. Then she began to laugh, and continued
to grasp blindly in midair.
The
timer clicked off and the tickets all settled back to the floor. When she emerged she held a single 20 point
ticket in her little hand. The teenager
in the ratty costume took her goggles off and she looked down at her hand.
“Oooh! Dad!
Look! I got a twenty! Is that good?”
Aaaaah!
No, you lost the 1,000 ticket! It
was on your face! All you had to do was…
“Yes, honey, that’s really, really good. Good job!”
“Yaaay! I’m going to get a stuffed animal with this!”
Uh huh.
Good luck. Those things are like
20,000 points. Might get a Laffy Taffy
though.
“Well, we’ll see hon. May need
to get a few more points though.”
“Okay!”
she squeaked.
Then they all ran off, leaving me alone beneath the
cold, dead gaze of the singing robots.
As I was staring at those freakshow monstrosities, the teenager in the
mouse costume tapped me on the shoulder.
“Hey,”
came a muffled voice from somewhere inside the head.
“Yeah? Hey!
How you doin’ in there, bud?”
“Okay
I guess. This thing kinda stinks though.”
“Ugh! Oh, man!
I bet. How many of you have to
wear that thing?”
The
kid chuckled. “I don’t like to think
about it.”
“Yeah,
well…what are you gonna do.”
“Not
much I guess,” he said. Then he raised a
gross furry paw. “Hey, your little girl dropped this.”
He
handed me the 1,000 point ticket. I took
it appreciatively.
“Aw,
thanks man! Are you sure?”
“Oh,
yeah, I’m sure. I mean, I’m pretty sure
she caught it.”
“With
her face.”
He
laughed. “Yeah.”
I
thanked him again and walked off to give it to Shay. She was ecstatic.
Now
came the part where I realized the worst job in the world is not, in fact,
wearing the mouse costume. It had to be
working the ticket counter. There is no
way in hell I could do that job without just freaking out. If you ever really want to test your
patience, stand in a group of little kids barely capable of grasping the
concept of money trying group their tickets together. You don’t
have enough for the bunny! Or the Nerf
gun! You have enough for six
suckers! Or ten bracelets! No, little-kid-I’m-SURE-isn’t-part-of-this-party
I’m not buying you a soccer ball!
Eight o’clock finally rolled around and parents began to trickle in to
get their kids. They all looked
refreshed and rested due to their brief respite.
Pretty
sure I looked shell shocked. Again.
But
Shay was happy. And Mo, despite her firm
belief that the place was far too babyish for someone of her vast maturity, had
a ton of fun too, and even went so far as to admit it on the drive home.
The
drive home.
It
was then I realized, with supreme satisfaction, that I was not the sorry
bastard that had to clean up. That was
for the kid in the mouse head and his cohorts.
Well. Teenager jobs suck, but it could be worse
than being a less whiney Holden Caufield in a mouse costume, watching kids run
around and keeping them from falling off the proverbial cliff. “The Catcher in the Seizure-Inducing Flashing
Lights.”
Next
up: Mo’s sleepover.
Jesus. H. Christ.
