On Friday night, after months of nagging from Melchett, we finally went to a Peter Piper Pizza restaurant. As you can see, she was just a little bit excited about this...
(For my American readers, I must warn you that the following excited description of our evening is about to sound very 'country mouse' to your 'town mouse' ways, but we don't have the delights of PPP in the UK, so you must excuse us, but then we do get our fun from running down hills after bits of cheese).
It was her birthday...and rather surprisingly, it was actually quite fantastic (we thought the amusements would keep the kids...well, amused but that the pizzas would be pretty average - we were wrong).
I mean, just look at how ecstatic Goth Child looked! (Yes, this is GC's excited face). By the way, please excuse the terrible photos, they were taken on my phone and the camera on it really is appalling. Once we've been here long enough to build up a decent credit rating I do plan to get a better one.
Aaaanyway, the best way to explain PPP is by telling you it's JUST like Pizza Planet from Toy Story!
The restaurant feels a bit like a food court, with a children's play area and an arcade (much more about this later).
This it before it got totally packed out and I got embarrassed taking photos.
To the right, there's a counter where you order your pizzas (Melchett had a traditional cheese and tomato pizza, Goth Child had the same but added 'Canadian Bacon' which is code here for 'Ham' and I shared a 'Smokehouse' (
The pizzas were gooooood:
Then once we had eaten as much as we could (as per usual not being proper Americans yet, the portion sizes still defeated us ;) so we had to put considerable amounts in boxes to take home for later), we bought tokens ($20 for 100 I think) to go and play the arcade games. Unfortunately, The Claaaaw was not our master, in fact it was broken...I'm pretty sure it's been that way since the Aliens and Buzz first escaped...
We played the Skee Ball Machine:
(which Goth Child seemed to be a bit of an expert at...lots of practice on Wii Carnival Funfair Games I suppose). We played on the Basketball game, traditional shove penny machines, shooty shooty games, pinball type machines:
And the more points you get on each of the games, the more little pink tickets the machines throw out at the bottom for you to collect. The aim is collect lots and lots of these pink tickets until you have probably about three times or more the number Melchett had here:
Then once you've had enough (or used up all your tokens), you do something else incredibly exciting (if you're a kid or just a big kid), you feed the tickets into a ticket eating machine and get a print out of how many points you've earnt (which is what Mr Devyne was doing at the top of this post, whilst Melchett was almost exploding with excitement). And what do you do with your print out? You take it to redeem goodies at the Prizes Booth:
Every 'prize' displayed how many points you needed to redeem it. There were tons of sweeties (translation into American: candies) and toys available to redeem from 5 points up to a neon guitar shaped clock for 1,500 points that Goth Child desperately wanted (she only had 266). Ah well, there's always next time...
So Peter Piper Pizza = very exciting.
Then on Saturday, we had Melchett's Pirate Princess Party. Try to imagine if you will fourteen 7 and 8 year olds all dressed up and super hyped up about being at a party, being able to cannonball into our pool and then eating lots of highly unhealthy party foods....can you imagine the noise levels? Yep, that was about it.
We made treasure maps, we played pin the tail on the parrot, we walked the plank (on dry land) and splashed about in the pool a lot. The weather held for most of the afternoon, so we were very lucky. And Melchett wore the pirate princess dress I made her (and has worn it ever day since, I am going to have to forcibly remove it soon to wash it):
She's such a poser. I have absolutely no idea where she gets it from......
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