I go back and read this post regularly just to remind myself – Never falter. Never fail. Never step foot into Chuck E. Cheese.

E. Cheese, that is.

Chris and I made it four years, ten months, and three days into our parenting career without crossing his threshold. And we were well pleased with ourselves.

Then we received an invitation to a good friend’s son’s birthday party. A friend that Ali would be disappointed to miss his celebration.

(A friend whose mother agreed that I should write this post, for what it’s worth.)

He had been begging his poor mother all year long to have his birthday at Chuck E. Cheese, and despite her attempts at helping him pick a more lovely place, his heart was set.

I didn’t think about the invite for too long – I knew Ali would be thrilled to go, and my parental guilt of not taking my kid to the place Where a Kid Can Be a Kid earlier in her life temporarily eclipsed my intense desire avoid that GermHole at all costs.

Plus, it couldn’t be as bad as I imagined, right?

I was so deluded in my planning for our attendance that I even nonchalantly agreed to take both kids alone if Chris wasn’t able to leave work early enough to join us.

Fortunately, God did not smite me that ruthlessly.

We set out as a family to The Chuck. Our first clue of what was to come should have been the fact that there was nary a parking spot available.

No, all of those cars definitely weren’t there for the eerily empty looking Japanese Steakhouse next door.

Nor were they there for the ABC State Liquor Store on the other side.

(Although I have a feeling that more than a few parents have been driven to it’s doors after visiting The Chuck.)

(In fact, I now have a strong suspicion that their choice in location was no accident.)

No, all of those cars were there because the fire code was being grossly violated at none other than Chuck E. Cheese.

Chris dropped Ali and I at the door, and he and Noah set off in search of a faraway and mythical parking space.

Ali and I crossed the threshold.

…and were both immediately in shock.

I have been to the Circus. I have been to the mall during Christmas. I have been to many Alabama football games with the attendance over 100,000. But I have never seen so many people crammed into so little square footage in my life.

It was bone-chillingly frightening.

And deafeningly loud.

And there was a very distinctive odor.

So distinctive in it’s unique mixture of vomit, feces, and germs in their most natural form that it was the first thing Ali pointed out.

Not the arcades, not the blinking lights, not her friends (that she couldn’t see through the throngs anyway), not the prizes behind the counter…

“Mommy, it smells really bad in here.”

“What baby?? I can’t hear you!!”

“IT STINKS!!!!”

Maybe this was all because it was a Friday night… and Veteran’s Day… and that they had obviously booked as many birthday parties in one night as would possibly fit in their building AND the empty steakhouse next door… but whatever it was, it was more shocking than I could put into words.

I only managed to get one picture of the madness, and it doesn’t do it justice at all. But to give you a small taste of the ocean of people…

(See that tunnel in the sky in the background? Remember it – it’s important.)

After several minutes of trying to schematically figure out how it was possible, Ali and I squeezed and pushed our way through the multitudes to find our party. We got some tokens and headed into the Corral of Crazy.

I am no germophobe, but the inch-thick layer of grease (that I’m sure could be grown out in a lab to reveal several new mutations of filth) on each and every arcade game about did me in. However, I held in there, began to get amused by the situation in which I found myself, and dove into the deep end of the germ pool.

A few days later after finally finding a parking spot and fighting his way through the front door, Chris and Noah found us. I barked out stringent orders to not let Noah come within eighteen inches any surface anywhere, and Ali and I went back to playing.

Then Ali saw the PlayPlace in the sky.

“I wanna climb in there!”

“What?? I can’t hear you!!”

“I WANNA GO CLIMB!!!!!”

“OKAY!! TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES!!!”

And she headed off.

Chris stole a few tokens and headed to the Skeeball machine, leaving me to commiserate visit with some other Mommies and watch for Ali in the windows above my head.

A few minutes in, I could see that the other guests were beginning to congregate in the birthday party area. I watched for Ali to pop up in a window, and when she did, I waved for her to come on down.

At which moment, she realized that she didn’t know which direction to crawl to get out.

She was only around one corner from the slide and the stairs, but she inherited from her mother a gene of panic-first-when-out-of-control.

And I saw it happen, in silent slow motion.

She had a meltdown, up in the sky tunnel.

She began crying, which drew a crowd of other tunnel dwellers around her.

But Ali also has a severe issue with her personal space being invaded by strangers. So the crying turned to weeping, and the weeping turned to screaming.

All silent, of course – at least from my spot on the ground. I’m pretty sure it was reverberating nicely in the tunnels, though.

I tried to silently comfort her from my spot and point profusely in the direction in which she should crawl.

Complete panic, no room to pay attention to me.

One of the other Mommies sent up her daughter, a year older than Ali, to retrieve her. Ali loves Abby – surely this would work.

I watched as Abby arrived at Sky Zero and began to comfort Ali and tell her that she knew the way out.

Nope – she was completely frozen in her all-encompassing panic attack.

More kids were crowding around, except this time they looked angry with the panicking, tunnel-barricading child. Ali reached for me, crying pitifully.

I had no choice.

The way up to the tunnel were those half triangles that are purposely impossible for adults to snake through – I am pretty sure I had to bend my backbone in four different directions to weave up eight levels of germy plastic to make it to the tunnels above. I finally made it up, and was gaggingly horrified at the thick layer of dirt, mud, probably a little poop, and botulism that coated the floor of the tunnel.

I wish I were exaggerating, but it was thick, dark, and I had to put my hands all up in it to crawl to rescue my daughter.

As I was turning the corner, I heard a kid screaming obscenities. He was coming around the corner towards me, still screaming with his head looking back over his shoulder. AT MY DAUGHTER.

He saw me, and instead of getting polite in the presence of an adult, he started screaming at me.

“You better get her ass outta here!! GET HER CRYIN’ ASS OUTTA HERE RIGHT NOW!!!”

That kid was so lucky that there was a slide at his feet. He popped through it and disappeared, as I began to shake with lividity.

I reached my hand out to Ali and led her back around the corner to the stairs made for invertebrates. We made our way down together, her crying, me boiling with horror and anger.

Of course, by the time we made it to the bottom, the eight-year-old cuss factory had disappeared into the masses.

I picked up my poor, sweet, innocent, panicking daughter and held her close.

She told me in my ear that she got stepped on – twice – and that it hurt.

And that kids were mean to her.

I managed to not begin weeping with her and apologized for the fact that there were awful, nasty, mean kids in the world.

We both made it to the birthday party, at which point I showered Ali in hand sanitizer, and she was soon lost in eating Pizza and birthday cake and watching a six-foot-tall electronic mouse dance the night away with his fake and nightmarish smile.

Fortunately, children are infinitely more resilient than there parents. Because I can guarantee you that I was the one that left the most traumatized that night.

…Well, me and the poor Mom who had to throw the birthday party – her row was a far worse one to hoe than mine, and she deserves the hugest of Mommy Scouts Badges for making her son’s birthday dreams come true.

But the next time we saw each other on Sunday morning, we pinky swore (or the Mommy equivalent of pinky swearing, anyway) that no member of either of our families would ever, ever, EVER step foot into Chuck E. Cheese ever, ever, EVER again.

 

That trip did not only leave us emotionally traumatized. The health results were quite horrific as well, and can be found here.

This is some of my most ground-breaking research to date, and I’ve started to feel the shame creep up on me again, so I decided it was time for a re-share. Originally published October 20, 2011.

You asked for it, so I’m here to deliver.

I collected and analyzed the data that you so generously provided (via this post and on Facebook) regarding the frequency of the bathing of your children.

In particular, I collected, where given:

• Number of children per family,
• Number of baths per week,
• And, since so many of you had differing schedules for your different aged children, I collected the individual ages of children and corresponding baths per week, where provided.

My assumptions:

• That none of you are in The Liar category – probably not a true assumption, but if you were going to go to the trouble to comment, I can only suppose that you were honest about your shame (or lack thereof).
• For those of you that did not provide your children’s ages but I know about how old your kids are, I estimated.

My sample size:

• 82 Families.
• 171 Children.

With those scientific parameters in place, I present to you my findings.

First, the simple percentage breakdown of families and their bathing choices.

During the data collection, I noticed a trend in the families that actually do bathe their children every night: many had no idea that families existed that did not do so.  To those seven-bath-a-week families, this graph should be stunning.

You are accompanied by only 17% of the population.

But you have clean sheets, so take heart in that.

And for those of us who fall into one of The Ashamed categories,  I plotted the above information into the categories and sub-categories previously established.  This graph should be all that you need to know:

I was curious as to what other trends could be discovered in bathing practices.  The first avenue I wanted to explore was whether the number of children in a given family had an affect on bathing practices.

I have a feeling that my fellow two-kid families are about ready to kick me out of the club.

(Apparently I was simply meant to have three kids.)

I also wanted to see how bathing practices changed across children’s ages.  As there should be, there seems to be a correlation – the older the kid, the more baths they received.

Whether this correlation is due to ripening tween body odors or the fact that the child can bathe themselves and, therefore, is less hassle for the parents is unknown.

And finally, I wanted to see a visual of all of the responses.  I couldn’t figure out how to get my histogram to look how I wanted it to in Excel, so I went old school.

Plus, I live for any excuse to use graph paper.

So here are all of your children, plotted by age and number of baths.

Again, notice the clearly more populous lower bathing region.

This data makes me feel so happy and validated on the inside that I feel like singing a heartfelt chorus from “You Are Not Alone” right now.

…and probably makes you seven-time-a-weekers ready to yank your kids out of school, make them wear gloves, and smack a Flu Mask on ‘em.

The conclusions of my report are as follows:

1. The Shame Should End.  Immediately.

2. Those of you who actually do bathe in the upper numbers should feel freed.  Celebrate your extraordinary cleanliness tonight by skipping baths!  Perhaps even after making Mud Angels in the yard and eating cotton-candy-covered-caramel-apples?

This is the sequel post to yesterday’s reshare. Again, it’s five years old, so excuse the poor writing. But I left it in it’s original state, embarrassing though it may be.

So what could be worse than a squirrel chewing through my shower wall while I was in the shower? The squirrel coming back, of course. Once a squirrel has shown that he is able to EAT your HOUSE at will, there is nothing that chills your bones as hearing that horrible chewing noise.

Termites? That’s nuthin’ compared to Satan the Squirrel eating your house!

(If you’re totally lost so far, this is the Sequel to my Satan the Squirrel post on Wednesday. If you missed it, you may want to start there.)

Fast forward a year to late 2006. I was QUITE great with child when we started hearing the scratching again. This time on the other side of the house, in our bedroom.

It made us twitch with horror and nervousness all over again.

Chris got an animal trapping cage (it always struck me as ironic that the cage’s brand name was “HavAHart”, which in our case was not at all true. We were just trying anything that we could at that point to get rid of him. I mean – if we’d caught him alive, we wouldn’t have trusted letting him go in even the remotest location of Alabama – he’d find his way back, just like he did every winter). He fixed StS a delicacy of Peanut Butter, Bird Seed, and other secret ingredients (he found the recipe off of some squirrel’s gourmet cooking site). Every night, he would climb up in the attic hopefully, and when disappointed, move the cage to a different part of the attic, slightly alter his hors d’oeuvres, or anything else he could think of in hopes of a better catch.

Unfortunately, neither the cage nor another effort that included a box of mothballs making our house have an unbearable stench tricked StS in the least.

It was mid-December when it all came to a head.

Ali is due January 7th. I’m already having contractions on and off (desperately hoping that they are more than they were), and we’re taking our childbirth classes at the hospital, learning all sorts of stuff about the process that we would rather not know.

We get home on Friday night from our class and head to bed around 11. I am having more contractions than I usually have had, and am REALLY hoping that they mean something. I’m laying in bed, paying close attention to my contractions, listening to Satan the Squirrel scratch while Chris is brushing his teeth. Then I happen to look up. I groan from the deepest deep of my gut. There are two holes in the ceiling to the left of the bed.

Editor’s note: Not only are there two holes in the ceiling, but these holes are in the EXACT spot that we had roof leakage three different times, which means that Chris painstakingly re-popcorned, primed, and painted three times. Why of all places StS had to pick THIS spot which we already hated, I will never know. Probably because his first name was Satan.

NOOOOOOOOOO. Dear God, do I have to tell my husband about this???

I finally call out meekly, “Hey baby, please don’t freak out. . . .”

He runs into the room. “What?? Are you going into labor???? Did your water break???”

“Noooo. . . . ” , and I let my eyes travel upward to the ceiling.

The blood drains from his face. I see him planning a military operation in his head. He promptly leaves (at 11pm at night while I’m still contracting) and heads to Wal-Mart.

This can’t be good.

The poor checkout lady. I bet she had to file some sort of “suspicious patron” report.

He comes home around midnight with the following catch:

• 3 cans of Great Stuff
• Pellet Gun
• Bullets
• Super Stout Rat Poison
• Bird Seed

He decides to go with what he knows best for his first try. He gets a can of Great Stuff, holds it into the hole in the ceiling (where we STILL hear StS scratching), and empties the WHOLE can of noxiously odorous, ozone killing neon orange foam into the ceiling.

The scratching stops.

We both envision StS, arms and legs and tail extended, frozen in place in the middle of a foam casket. We chuckle evilly and fall asleep, having happy dreams of sugarplums and dead squirrels.

The next morning before headed go back to our birthing class, Chris got up on the ladder to check out what he did.

Turns out, miraculously, that his unloading of the can actually PUSHED StS back out of the hole in the eave and had BLOCKED his entrance back into the house.

It was quite a lucky shot!!

So Chris patched the NEW awning hole, patched the dang bedroom ceiling, and we went to a voodoo doctor and bought twenty voodoo-squirrel-dolls in which we tortured every night before going to bed, and we never saw StS again.

Ok, we didn’t go to a voodoo doctor. But apparently Chris’ great skill with orange noxious foam got around in the squirrel community and they quit bothering us.

But despite the fact that we live 20 miles away from that battlezone, every time we see a squirrel, we look deep into their beady eyes, wondering. . . are YOU Satan the Squirrel??

I am re-sharing this story because it’s a good one. But I post it with no small amount of cringing at my five-years-ago writing style. But I left it, mostly intact, for you to judge as you will. Originally posted November 2008.

My husband and I have a repulsion for squirrels. If we see one anywhere near our house, we both start getting an uncontrollable nervous twitch. We have anger fantasies towards them. The thought of a squirrel concentration camp. Maybe poisonous gas involved. Oooh – – or an execution lineup.

I’m sure you’re thinking that we’re horrible people about now. Who would feel that way towards such cute, innocent woodland creatures?

Oh, we have our reasons. I promise.

Rewind a couple of years, one less family member, and a house ago. Back in our cozy townhouse at Whisper Wood. It was a lovely place – our very first home! We had rented a different townhouse for our first year of marriage, then bought this townhouse that we thought was tha bomb – it had a jacuzzi tub the size of a hot tub, a huge master bedroom and bathroom, and we painted every room all sorts of bright fun colors to make it look like it just got featured in “Trading Spaces”. It was great.

But then the hellish cruelty challenges of home ownership set in. You know, washing-machine-leaking-the-first-time-it-was-turned-on-and-ruining-the-hallway-paint-in-a-mega-way, unbelievable roof leaks, lawn maintenance, etc. It kinda took away some of the romance, but we kept going, as chipper as ever about our new house.

Until we met Satan the Squirrel and his lovely wife, Mrs. StS.

We first heard them in the attic, chewing. It was OBNOXIOUS. They would only start their chewing thing when we laid down to go to bed, and so we would lay there, eyes wide open, looking toward the ceiling in their general direction, just wondering what electrical wiring they were chewing through that was about to burn down the whole place.

Our attic was very hard to maneuver, so it was very challenging to deal with them.

Chris and our wonderful neighbor Darrel found their entry point and blocked it off from the outside.

But the chewing continued. Apparently they had trapped one inside the attic.

So Chris and Darrel get out the ladder again, and while they’re climbing up, StS was on our porch (not trapped) and starts “screaming” at them. Apparently we had trapped Mrs. StS in there and he was not happy.

He kept screaming and screaming. If you’ve never heard a squirrel scream, you’re a lucky person.

They opened up the hole, and little wifey ran out as fast as she could. They closed the hole again. Problem solved!

However, I could still hear them sometimes from my shower – since it was right by their entry point, we figured they were trying to get back in to get to their nut stash. One morning while I was waking up in the shower, it was especially loud.

scratch, scratch, scratch.

I tried to ignore it. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I caught some movement, I jump, thinking it was my biggest fear, a roach, of course. I look over, and right by my head in the corner of the shower is a squirrel nose peeking through the wall!!!!!!!

I SCREAM AS LOUD AS I CAN.

Chris doesn’t hear me.

I jump out of the shower and SCREAM AGAIN.

He comes running in there and I point to the hole in the wall the size of a quarter that wasn’t there just a few minutes before.

“The squirrel! He was! His nose! In my shower! Helppppppp!!!”

(Editor’s note: I believe it was at this point where I started referring to my Shower-Peeping-Tom as “Satan the Squirrel”)

Turns out that they could still get just barely into the eave of the house, but they couldn’t get to their nut stash. And every time I started the water in my shower, they started digging, somehow thinking that the noise was their nut stash calling out for them.

Chris gets a trusty can of Great Stuff and fills the hole full on the inside, then repatches the outside of the house AGAIN.

The previous owners had generously bestowed upon us the leftovers of tacky wall paper that went in that bathroom (as it was the spare bedroom’s bathroom, it was the one room we never painted). So we simply put a new sheet up over the great-stuff-filled hole. One day when the new owner decides to un-paper that bathroom, they are going to say “what in the world??”

That took care of our problem for that winter. However, the next winter always comes, as does Satan the Squirrel.

(Sequel to be posted tomorrow.)

Chris and I took a few days to ourselves last week and skipped town to celebrate our upcoming anniversary.

As such, I got behind on writing.

As such, you get a few reruns.

I originally shared this post in 2011. But we’ve recently pulled our Wii back out, and I’ve been shuddering all over again at the people with which Ali associates.

Ali loves to play on our Wii.  She especially loves it because not only have we created a Mii for her,

myself,

and Chris,

but  we have dozens of our friends in there also, which she easily recognizes as they pop in and out of her games because I am, if I may say so myself, a FANTASTIC MiiMaker.

When Ali asked to make some of her own Mii characters, I took it as an opportunity to meet some people that I’ve long been wanting to see.

You see, Ali has Party Friends that she plays with every day.  They’re her pretend friends, but are called Party Friends because they have many birthdays each year, and, therefore, many parties.

Besides all of their birthdays, they regularly die, come back to life, get married, move next door, have their houses destroyed by tornadoes, and many other soap-opera-like story lines.

(They even have their own god – his name is James Brick.  And he’s just like the real God, except that he’s sick.)

So, since I basically live with these Party Friends, I thought that it was a brilliant idea to let her create their Mii characters so that I could actually see these people that I feel like I already know so well.

So she started out with a more recent addition to her Party Friend Repertoire, Vowel.

After we finished the creation, she excitedly told me, “That’s EXACTLY what Vowel looks like, Mommy!!”

Let me introduce you to Vowel.

Vowel is now the definition of the word “creep” in our house.

Next, Ali wanted to create Samuel – her longest-surviving Party Friend, to whom she was also married to for a short time.

Also – he is Ali’s son.

(I told you it was a soap opera.)

However, as much as I knew about Samuel, I didn’t know until I met his Mii that he is apparently some sort of human-gopher halfbreed:

(Fortunately, they’re not married anymore, as Samuel died and came back to life unmarried.)

(Also fortunate, there were no part-rodent grandchildren produced from their union.)

She was on a roll, and was loving introducing me to all of her friends.  So next came the witches.  They usually live in Mississippi, but they visit sometimes to cause trouble.

There’s Nice Witch,

the aptly named Silly Witch,

And, the most common visitor and curse-word-teacher, Serious Witch.

(Serious in that she’s not happy and she’s not mad – she’s just “serious”.)

Finally, there was the newest Party Friend, Door-Fractions.  There was some debate over his (yes, it’s a he) hair color, but she finally decided on red.

However, that didn’t stop her from panicking the next day, while we were in the car and couldn’t do a thing about it, over the fact that his hair NEEDED to be yellow, not red.

I’m sure it will ease your mind to know that this great crisis has now been put to rest.

Ali’s Party Friends have considerably spiced up the appearance of our Mii lineup,

But now that I’ve met them in person, I’m having nightmares about waking up in the middle of the night and seeing HIM staring down at me.