On Video Games

Last night the grandparents took the grandkids to Chuck E. Cheese and the parents got to tag along. The pizza was as bad as you'd expect (really, does even pizza sauce need to be sugared so kids will gobble it down?) The building was so overstimulating that you needed to step outside just to avoid a seizure. And the kids were in heaven.

At one end of Chuck E. Cheese was a stage full of animatronic anthropomorphic creatures all playing instruments and singing "Feliz Navidad" and "The Dreidel Song" and "We Wish you a Merry Christmas." Noah and Ana, our neice, were entranced and watched and danced for most of the night.

Sam? He couldn't care less about dancing animals. Not when there were video games to play. Last year when we took Sam, he thought the moving trains and cars like those outside grocery stores were the best thing in the world. This year, he wanted to try every single video game that you drove or flew. So we drove big rigs, batmobile-like off road vehicles, race cars, wave jumpers, fighter planes, and even go carts. Most of these games moved so much they had seat belts, and Sam was in heaven. I operated the pedals while he steered and once he discovered that most of the rides had turbo buttons, we never went below 150 mph and never missed an opportunity to crash into other cars.

Noah, who wants to be like Sam in everything, tried the snow mobile game with Joy driving him, but one seat vibration and he was done. That was fine with Joy, who was getting motion sick from the games, but it won't be long until I'm hoping from game to game with two little boys who want to drive. I see many sugar-laden pizzas in my near future.