This is the first time in a while I haven’t had a post written the night before and ready to go – sorry, the kids wore us out! My oldest set of nieces/nephew (my brother’s kids) and my brother Wade and his wife stopped in town on their way to go skiing over the long weekend. So we met at Dave and Buster’s, which is a nicer restaurant attached to a huge arcade/gaming place – fancier than Gigglebee’s or Chuck E. Cheese (the last time I was at a Chuck E. Cheese, I got pinkeye, while on vacation). Wade had some leftover cards with game credits from some work event, so we had dinner and then worked on using them up.

Dave and Buster’s has the excellent appetizer of soft hot pretzel bites – I have been missing hot pretzels because we used to eat at a restaurant in DC at our January meeting that had hot pretzels as an appetizer. Well, we moved hotels and we don’t go to that restaurant any more. But I love hot pretzels so of they are on the menu I am getting them. These came with three different kinds of sauce and rated a thumbs up from us – I personally like as much sauce as possible. I had Mediterranean citrus shrimp for my meal, and they were fine. My main object was to not get too full after having those pretzels as an appetizer. The kids didn’t want anything to do with them, they were happy with fried cheese sticks. Ken had teriyaki steak, which he said was good, my brother had a steak (don’t remember which) and he said it was good, Laurie (sis in law) had a steak which I think she liked, and the oldest niece, S, who is 12, had a steak and also liked it. The younger two had macaroni and cheese. We offered to take the leftover steak from Laurie and S. but they are staying at a condo for skiing so they have a refrigerator, shoot. :  )

It was amazing how much energy they still had after a 12 hour car drive across Nebraska and half of Colorado. Well, I guess they were shut in a car all day and needed to burn some off. We had a lot of fun with all the games.

I took S. her pepper pants and she liked them, telling her mother she was going to wear them over her pants the rest of the night, but then she didn’t after I had her take them off and showed her how to tell back from front. I am going to see them again on Saturday, I think I will take along some thread and embroider a “F” in the inside front, since it is kind of hard to tell w/home made pants. She also thought they would be awesome over her ski pants, but we didn’t know if the cotton material would be good for that, and I haven’t seen any fun rip stop nylon pepper prints.

There is a photo booth there that takes your picture and then “draws” it in a different style. You can see this one of the kids is drawn in the “Leonardo Da Vinci” style. Uh huh.

Ken and I were just as bad at the Jurassic Park shooting dinosaur game as we remembered. I believe I beat about everybody in the car racing game where you all have a different machine and race against each other, which is kind of unbelievable. There was also a trivia game (heavily slanted toward MODERN questions esp in the music category) and a Wheel of Fortune game which was hard because you only got to pick 3 letters and then you had to solve the puzzle.

D. (age 6) got his own picture somehow. His sisters explained “something happened!” and then “T. pinched Dawson!”

Earlier in the night I had said, “These kids are old enough that you could throw all three of them on a plane and send them out here by themselves for a few days,” by the end of the night I was questioning whether we would survive that…..

Well, a good time was had by all and the intrepid skiers headed up into the mountains at about 10:30, still having a 2 hour drive to get to their ski area. My brother is a good night driver so I am sure he got them there ok.