Chuck E. Cheese, Please.

So, last Tuesday was on Jeremy's birthday, and the only thing this child wanted to do for his party was go to Chuck E. Cheese. Why does he want to go to Chuck E. Cheese, you ask? Well, because PBS early morning cartoons tell him that it is the only place a kid can go 'to be a kid'. Knowing that this stage of childhood only lasts a small window of time, Ammon and I resigned ourselves to an afternoon of crappy pizza and arcade games, figuring this was simply a rite of passage that we could no longer avoid. We were wrong, people. Wrong on so many levels.
First of all, does anybody out there in cyber-land know that you actually have to make reservations for Chuck E. Cheese on a Saturday?! I didn't, so if any of you had clued me in on that little tidbit, I'm sure we would have been granted a much more helpful server, and possible even enough chairs to seat everybody, instead of forcing the adults to hover around one end of the table and eat standing up. And without plates. Or drinks. Or napkins, actually. But that's another story.
So, back to the party. Because it was Jeremy's party, we decided to let him choose two friends to invite from church, along with his cousins. Unfortunately, we didn't calculate that with two friends and several cousins, come approximately 73 other people. Of course, we knew these extra parents, siblings, and assorted hangers-on were coming, but we never actually sat down to figure out the sheer volume. I admit, when the waitress asked me how many there were to be seated in our non-reserved table, I fibbed. By about half. So......after dropping $50 on pizza, four drinks, and about a million tokens, we sat back and watched the throbbing crowd around us. It was hysteria, people. Everywhere you looked there were pizza-stained faces, delirious with sugar, crowds, and missed naptime. The birthday boy disappeared into the crowd with his friend, and a cup full of tokens, never to be seen (or heard from) again. After about 30 minutes, the adults were begging for mercy. Even willing to eat the cardboard-like pizza and feed coins into machines, simply to make it all go away. Wisely, I made the decision to bring the cake and presents back to my house. Hysteria confined to my apartment rather than the throbbing, writhing mass of toddler-dom at Chuck E. Cheese? Much better, trust me.