wrapping up AJ's visit

About a month ago Aunt Jenna came to visit. I've been meaning to post the rest of the pictures from that trip, and with an upcoming event sure to generate lots of posts, now's a good time to do that.

We went to Chuck E. Cheese's!

Chuck E. Cheese must pretty heavily sponsor Disney cartoons because there are quite a few commercials that brainwash kids into thinking the restaurant is greatest place on Earth. Will knew about and was excited about Chuck E's for a long time before we decided it would be fun to go when AJ visited. To be honest, I wasn't expecting much, and Jenna and I discussed how we should probably get beer if it was available (it wasn't).

Turns out, it was an AWESOME place to go.
We got some deal that included pizza and drinks and 30 tokens. Those 30 tokens go a long way, as every game required only one to play. We played all kinds of games, it was truly fun for all of four of us.

Those who have not been to Chuck E. Cheese's may not know this but a main reason to go there is to win "tickets" based on how well you play the games. At the end of the night you can trade in the tickets you won for prizes that are fun for a minute but should go immediately in the garage sale bin (or worse) when you get home. When we finally burned through all of our tokens, we had 197 tickets between all of us (mostly due to mom's incredible skee-ball skeelz), but Will had his eye on a 200-ticket pirate set. As it was past bedtime, we were frantically trying to find an inexpensive way to win or con 3 more tickets, and were saved by a father who was there with his litter as he donated 3 of his tickets to our cause.

So Will got to be a fierce pirate. In the picture on the left, he was a little confused about the eye-patch, I think he was trying to close the eye behind the patch but could only close both.

Fun fact: Erin cannot voluntarily close only one eye - she can't wink. We haven't really tried to teach Will to wink but he may have inherited this deficiency. I have teased Erin about this for years and now I can use my jokes all over again ;)

Another day we went for a walk downtown and went to the Dinosaur Museum and got new Michigan sweatshirts (since AJ needed one and Will had outgrown his old one). Will and AJ, who were by this time best buddies, teamed up to fool ol' dad and hid from me under the stairs. I almost had to go home without those two sillies.