Chuck E Cheese and Sprinkles

We are so lucky to have found two great group of friends Jackson's age who also have awesome moms that I love to hang out with. One group is our Gymboree Group, who we see every Thursday, and the other is our Friday Play Group. Every Friday we get together with our Friday play group and head to someone's house or on a field trip. This week, we met at Chuck E Cheese.

My sweet friend, Ashley, took photos of all the kids and emailed them out afterwards. I love this picture she took!

One of my favorite things about today was that all of the kids and all but one of the moms were there. A lot of our friends have been in and out of town and everyone has been busy with the holidays, so it was just great to have a chance to see everyone and catch up again.

Almost immediately, Jackson took off running and just knew that this was a place for kids to have fun. He bounced from ride to ride, asking to get in and wanting to put the tokens in all by himself. Actually, putting the tokens in was his favorite part. He would put in a token, jump out of the ride before it started going, and come over to ask me for another token. Haha, that's not exactly the point! Jackson's favorite ride had a camera attached, so we got 4 pictures of Jackson and Chuck E Cheese riding in a truck together. They are hilarious. I'll have to hook up the scanner and upload them soon. You can see one of them in my hand in the picture Ashley took.

Jackson and his friend Davey went for a few rides in this monster truck. This thing wasn't messing around. It was about 3 feet off the ground, rocked back and forth, front and back, and had a shut-off function if anyone stood too close. As you can tell from the picture, Jackson wasn't too sure about it. One second he would be yelling "YAY!" and the next he would reach for me and say "Help? Help?" in this pathetic little voice. I have another (blurry) picture of him laughing his head off two seconds later.

One exciting thing about arcades that I remember from growing up is the tickets. Oh the tickets and the crappy little prizes they buy. So, imagine my feeling when Jackson grabbed my hand and dragged me to the prize display. When we got there though, he asked to have a little mini-tootsie roll sucker worth 10 tickets. We counted our tickets out (counting is BIG with Jackson right now... he can count to ten but he may not hit all the numbers along the way - ha!) and had enough for the sucker! (the guy told me he would have given it to us anyway, how sweet) So, Jackson picked a raspberry sucker and actually managed to hold onto it for another 45 minutes of play time.

Finally, we ran out of tokens and I took Jackson home for a great nap.

In the afternoon, I developed this mad craving for cupcakes. Specifically, Sprinkles Cupcakes. Yum. Steven sweetly volunteered to drive our whole family to the Dallas store - a good 30 minute trip.

Jackson definitely thought it was worth the trip! He became VERY familiar with cupcakes when he was frequenting birthday parties this fall. He immediately saw the display case and said "Cake! Cake! Cake please!!" (As a side note, he has excellent manners. Especially when he wants something.) We told him that he could have one cupcake and asked which one he wanted. "Chocolate!" So I asked him, do you want chocolate and chocolate or chocolate and vanilla?" and he replied "Vanilla!" I don't really know how much he understands what he's saying and how much is just repeating the last word I said, but he seemed so certain and excited, that we went ahead and ordered it for him. It sounded so good, we got one for each of us too!

He was a mess! We sat down to eat in the store (which has a sweet kids' table, as you can see in the picture above) and spent most of the time laughing at Jackson trying to eat his cupcake. He got about halfway through before we decided that he was done for the day. Sorry kiddo! We saved the rest of the cupcake for later and we brought home two doggie-cupcakes for our bad doggies.