December 26

We pretty much all wanted to get out of the house and do something extra special the day after Christmas. In honoring Skyler and Luke's pick we went to Chuck E. Cheese. There isn't a lot in Oxford, where Nathan and Sarah live, so we actually drove to a town in Delaware to go to Chuck E. Cheese. I thought it was funny that we went to church in Maryland and game time in Delaware. But I digress.

Here are a few pictures from our afternoon:

Ski ball was by far the family favorite. All the kids played, the adults had several contests which began in earnest after I discovered one of the ski ball (tracks? What do you call those?) was broken. It calculated my score way higher than it actually was-- although I also skied a pretty good game. I got several 4,000s. And I broke the high score of the day and was rewarded with a whole lot of tickets. Apparently you get 50 for breaking the high score. So the contest was to see who could break the current high score. And then who could break that high score. I fell out of the running pretty early. I can't remember if Jared or Nathan held the final highest score. Whoever won, we ended up with a LOT of tickets.

Cashing in the tickets!

Skyler REALLY liked feeding the tickets into the machine. As soon as we got a new string he rushed over to feed them in.

This tea cup was Micah's favorite ride. When you put the token in, it said something like, "Get ready!" When it would say that Micah would smile really big and clap his hands. I couldn't catch it on camera though. I even tried to video him, but he didn't do it for the video either.


Luke's favorite "rides" were the red car that takes your picture (We always leave Chuck E. Cheese with 10+ pictures of Luke in that car), the virtual ride that has a buckle (Luke didn't care about the ride-- he just wanted to fasten the seat belt buckle over and over and over), and this monster truck. Luke was actually too scared to put a token in because it was a pretty bumpy ride, but he would grip it and shake as hard as he could. He thought it was hilarious to make it bump.

So that was a fun afternoon. Later we played outside with the green soccer ball some more, and that night we had a big family dance party. Luke was very much into Sarah that night and wanted her to dance with him. Whenever she tried to take a break Luke would find her and say, "Do you want Sarah to dance?" It turned into a whole family dance party that was lots of fun.

Jared's cool moves. HAHAHAHA

The rest of the pictures are of us doing the "ceiling fan dance." That just means you spin in a circle until you get dizzy and fall down. Obviously, Luke was the leader of that dance.

And boom. I got pretty dizzy. Skyler was checking to see if I'm okay.

After the kids were in bed we played Ticket to Ride again and ate lots and lots of candy cane almonds. It was a great trip, and we hope we can visit again pretty soon.