Clara's 5th

Has it been five years already?

It seems like only yesterday that a little baby tumbled into my life, with striking blue eyes that met mine only after I gently called her name and an unabashed passion for life. Five years later, I have a goofy little girl with two missing teeth (you can't tell from this picture; she has a mouthful of food) who's just starting to read. But she still has the same joy-filled blue eyes and a fiery love for life.

Five years... Why is time so awesome and so cruel at the same time?

It's our family tradition that you get to choose where to eat on your birthday. This has resulted in far more hours than one should ever spend in a Chuck E. Cheese over the years. Thankfully, Clara choose Peter Piper this year: same game room chaos, true, but 100% less creepy animatronic talking rodents.

The place was fairly quiet when we got there, and it looked roomier than I'd remembered as well. Apparently they'd done some extensive remodeling since we'd been there last, and Mondays are slow evenings. After ordering our pizza and game tokens, filling our drinks and finding our seats, we sent the kids off to play. Colin, who, despite dragging us to places like this and acting like a sugared-up twit for the past 7 some-odd years, was suddenly too cool to be seen in a place like this, especially with his baby sister, and only begrudgingly looked after her as she rode a rickety old kiddie ride and tore through the jungle gym.

The pizza didn't take long to cook, so I rounded up the kids to get to chowing down. Colin finished his pizza in short order and wanted to get some time to play some games without his tag-along sister, so he went and blew all his tokens in under 2 minutes flat on the coin-drop games. I gave him a few more dollars to play, with the warning that there was no more money for additional tokens. Again, 2 minutes flat, and he was back at the table complaining about being bored.

It was all lost on Clara, though. She was very happy to be there, eating her favorite pizza and playing games. Once she'd finished up and had a good wipe down of all the pizza grease, she struck out with D and I in tow and tokens in hand. One ride in particular had caught her attention while she was eating: it was bright orange, loud, had a huge screen with air blowers and seats for two which rocked and shook in sync with the scene onscreen...

Oh, look! There's one... You can really get anything on the internets, stationary death traps included.

Anyway, she thought this was a great idea, and I didn't call "Not it!" fast enough, so I sat with her on this thing while D stood away and watched on with a camera phone and a smirk. The ride was clearly not designed for either of our sizes: my head sat well above the head rest, legs cramped up onto the foot holds, and you could fit three of Clara into the other seat with room to spare. Clara wanted to do the simulator with the race cars, because, well, because race car. I vaguely remember, in between the repeated blunt head trauma from that shaking contraption of doom, crashing into other cars, going over speed bumps that jumped over lanes and through loop-the-loops at breakneck (not figurative) speeds.

For all my silly complaints of severe and/or life-threatening head and neck injury, Clara actually had a blast: she was whooping and hollering the whole time. Everytime the seats bucked, she'd laugh, which sounded even more funny given that she was being violently shaken by a robot. Eventually, the ride came to a stop and it was time to get off. I crawled off, still rather dazed at the experience, but Clara, still very much excited with the adventure, tried to jump off unassisted. She caught her thigh in the handles, bent her leg in a very unnatural way, tumbled off the ride head first and was caught by a very horrified DeAnn. We spent the next 15-20 minutes or so filling out an incident report with the manager of the establishment. Don't worry, she was dancing and running around through most of it, though that might bruise up.

Thankfully, the rest of the evening was pretty uneventful. We sang happy birthday to her over a big, chocolate cake with a candle shaped like a "5" and watched her blow it out. After cake and ice cream, she opened her cards and presents. We got her a Disney's Beauty and the Beast DVD and a Tangled TAG book for her reader. Grandparents and great-grandparents sent her a rather nice chunk of change by way of those noisy electronic birthday cards she absolutely loves. We read her book and finished off the last of Snow White that we'd started the night before just before she called it a night.

Final tally: pizza had, tokens spent, concussion sustained, incident report filed, tickets won, trinkets acquired, cake and ice cream scarfed, cards and presents opened, books read and happy little girl exhausted, but truly loved.