Chucky Cheese

Its hard to say what the girls will be like as they get older--but they certainly have distinct personalities now.

We took the girls to Chucky Cheese for the first time this Sunday. We began to take a seat right up by the animatronics, but Evelyn took one look at the blinking mechanical dog playing a banjo and started screaming. So we sat on the side, where they could see--but not too close. I think this picture of Evelyn shows her complete and utter shock. She is actually watching the person dressed as a giant mouse--"Chucky Cheese" walk out onto the floor. She was not impressed.

Rowan is a completely different story. She saw Chucky Cheese and started waving at him from across the room, smiling and laughing, as if he was some friend at a party and she was waving him over. She bounced along to the silly music and couldn't take her eyes off of him.

Neither girl particularly enjoyed the rides, even the little bitty kid rides. They did like Skee Ball, but couldn't throw the balls hard enough to go farther than a foot.

We tried to take some good pictures of the two of them--but they move so quickly it's like trying to take a picture of a firefly.

Andre is against Chucky Cheese in general, and in particular. He wants the girls childhood experiences to be something you would see depicted on a box of granola or illustrated in a fly fishing magazine. You know, where the entertainment is learning how to tie nautical knots and identifying various animal droppings.

That's all well and good, don't get me wrong. I love to hug a tree as much as the next Austinite, but I want the girls to have a wide variety of experiences. I think you can appreciate the natural beauty of something like the Redwood Forest and also enjoy the complete gluttonous joy that is Disney World. Why does it have to be one or the other?

Parents make these kind of black and white, this or that choices on lots of things. I'm not talking about health and safety decisions, but rather the kind of things that don't really matter. Its the "parental snobbery" if you will. Such as, "My kid, will never, ever, ever, eat McDonald's, it's only (fill in the blank) food for my little one." As if one happy meal, and oops, there goes little Johnny's cholesterol, he's ruined.

You hear this kind of thing all the time. When my sister's son (and first child) was born she dressed him exclusively in ultra-cute, if not designer baby clothes. She'd say, "I'm not going to put anything on him that I wouldn't want to wear." Unfortunately, by the time he turned 2 he decided the only thing he would wear was T-shirts, shorts, and his favorite cowboy boots. ha!

I can't say that I am immune from my own parental snobbery. When the twins were expected I insisted on using only organic crib sheets. Why? Not because anything else was harmful, but because they were my babies and therefore needed the best and in my obsessive compulsive way I had decided that organic baby sheets were the best. Parental snobbery at its finest. I have since bought normal cotton sheets from Target. That's the other thing about parental snobbery, it fades with time and/or additional children.

There were other things too. Like bottles. We spent so much money on buying the "best" bottles and when it was all said and done my favorite were the cheap $2 bottles from the grocery store. What can I say? I was a victim of advertising and parenting magazines.

I can only begin to imagine all of the moments to come in which one of us will draw a line in the sand and firmly say, "not any kid of mine is going to ...". That is, of course, until the day when even our best intentions are overruled by our strong-minded children who already have opinions of their own.