Last year I finally got Derek out of Chuck E Cheese by successfully suggesting that he have his party at the indoor batting cages. Well, unfortunately for many reasons, that place went out of business. There is an indoor batting place in Nashua, but I checked into that and thought that they had an unreasonable party package as far as what you get and how much you have to pay for it. I looked into the bowling alley, which Derek has been to, and it seemed reasonable. So I talked with him about that, telling him that the bowling alley would be good, and asked him for other ideas. He came up with Chuck E Cheese. So we talked about the two (after not being able to come up with any other good ideas), and he chose Sir Chuck's.
We have had bad luck when we have his party the weekend after his birthday, since that weekend is usually the first week of April vacation, and a lot of people go away. Also, I called Sir Chuck's and they said that Saturday is by far their busiest day of the week -- all day and all evening long. So we had his party the weekend BEFORE his birthday, and we had it on Friday evening. He had four friends come, and a couple of them had younger siblings with them. It was very well attended. It went very well and he had a lot of fun.
In its defense, Chuck E Cheese has been redone to put the "little kid" stuff on one side of the dining room, and a lot of updated games in the "bigger kids" section. There really are a lot of things suitable for the 8-12 year-old range now. The worst thing though is that they have removed Arctic Thunder -- our favorite game that we always played head-to-head.
The one thing that did take longer was presents, since there were more kids there which meant more presents to open. For some reason, Derek didn't seem to complain about that.
For his "cake", Derek wanted one of those really big (12-inch) chocolate chip cookies. And he wanted it frosted (having had one at a friend's birthday party). I figured for the number of people that were coming we'd probably need two. So I got one plain (no frosting), and I took some liberties with the frosting idea for the other one. He didn't know I was going to do that, and he really liked it (big surprise!). It still worked to put candles in it and have him blow them out.
With the kids being older, they didn't need much supervision at all. Still, I went around snapping pictures a couple of times. Of course, as always, they do come back -- when they want more tokens. We had some coupons and got a lot of them, so the kids had plenty of tokens to play games and get tickets. That is another good thing about Sir Chuck's -- We don't have to make up goodie bags since the kids can pick their own prizes.
After presents and "cake", the kids were free to play until their parents dragged them out of there. It did go later than usual, but with the kids being older it was fine. We were there for a solid 3 hours. Derek was very happy with his party. And that's what it's all about.