March 6: Party Animal

My son's 5th birthday is on Tuesday. We all know you can't have a child's birthday party on a Tuesday night during the school year, so the typical weekend before or weekend after rule applied. We went with the one before. And, we did it up big this year because, in our minds, 5 is kind of a milestone. We had to do something extra special, as we had my daughter's 5th at Tea Party Castle a few years back. We could just imagine, 10 years down the road, my son giving us the 3rd degree in an effort to understand why we did so something so extraordinary for his sister, but just the same old song-and-dance for him. Despite my wife and I both having big imaginations, we still couldn't let that happen! Problem is that, around here, there's nothing that caters specifically to boys and birthdays. So, we decided to have the party at Joe Dumar's Fieldhouse. I've previously blogged about an experience at JDF, however, this was the first party we've ever thrown at the facility. And, I'm pretty sure the last. Don't get me wrong, I think the kids all had a good time. But, everything was so chaotic that it was hard for my wife and I to enjoy our son and his birthday experience. The adventure started upon our arrival, when it appeared to us that no one employed for JDF seemed to know that we had a party scheduled. Eventually, we settled that little confusion, and we were led into a back area of the place where we were assigned a closet, with key to lock it, in which we could store our personal belongings, as well as those of our 11 guests. Next, the young lady helping us took our cake, and let me tell you we had more than a few doubts we were ever going to see it again (we did though, still fully intact, too!). From there, we returned to "The Bayou" gaming area to wait for our guests; who arrived shortly one-by-one. Once the majority of guests had arrived, the aforementioned young lady applied tabbed bracelets (5 tabs per) to each child's wrist and turned them loose on the facility. The bracelets are used to participate in various activities such as laser tag, putt-putt golf, slot-car racing, etc. At this point, the chaos really began. First, there's the task of ensuring every child is included in the activity of choice, so that no one is left out. Secondly, and more importantly, there's the task of ensuring every child, our own especially, is safe and remains in the gaming area. I felt like we needed to park guards at every possible entrance to make sure no child escaped. Thankfully, my oldest nephew and niece proactively inherited the role of camp counselor (as my Sister put it), and kept things in some order at the on start of the gaming chapter. After 1.5 hours of those shenanigans, we were led to the birthday room for pizza, pop, cake and presents. This is where it got really interesting, as no one from the JDF facility seemed to be available to help; other than to drop off the food at the beginning and return with the bill during clean-up. By cake time, we had no forks, no candles and no knife to cut the cake. Thanks to my wife, we ended up using the pizza server. I'm speaking with complete honesty when I say that the longest I ever saw the young lady in charge of serving us is when she was waiting around for me to sign the credit card receipt. I guess their philosophy is "our games and activities are so great, we don't even need customer service!" Just disappointingly amazing! But, in the end, my son had a good time, and we survived it without injury or losing a child. From where I'm standing, I call that a success!