Boys and Cars and Birthday Parties !
Filed under: Around DC, Entertainment, field trips, Food and Drink, General Motors, Holidays, Mom Victories, Parenting
It’s that time of year again!
While most people are planning holiday festivities,
our family is planning a birthday party.
Holiday babies present a special problem.
From the moment my son was born, a week before Christmas,
everyone instilled in me how important it was to
‘Make His Birthday Special!!’
So every year the question comes up-
What do we do for a birthday party?
And every year it gets harder, because they are getting bigger,
and even a teensy bit cynical sometimes.
This year proved to be the toughest yet, my son’s 10th birthday party….
How to entertain 15 10-year-old boys for 2 hours?
And the answer came out of the mouths of babes….
My son heard about a new place that opened up for parties,
a simple little warehouse….
So how could a little warehouse, with no decorations,
appeal to a bunch of little boys that are starting to get big?
It couldn’t. Unless this little warehouse was filled with…
VIDEO GAMES!
Yes, you heard me right. A video game party.
The little warehouse we went to is called The Trenches.
And for a reasonable fee, you rent the whole place for 2 hours.
You get the whole place to yourself,
and there are tons of video games and they are all free-
no tokens, no tickets,
JUST PRESS START.
The place had old-time arcade games, new ones, Xboxes, and much, much more.
So the boys get to run around and play games,
have the whole place to themselves,
and just take breaks for pizza and birthday cake.
You’re done. The boys LOVED this. This was the easiest birthday party ever!
I believe that this is the next up-and-coming trend in birthday parties.
I have heard that these are popping up around the country,
along with video game buses, so the birthday party can come to you!
How good of an idea is this? I cannot stress how much all the boys LOVED this party!
And to top it all off, I drove my son and a couple of friends to the party in the Cadillac CTS, the 2014 MotorTrend Car of the Year.
And the boys thought it was so cool!
In other words, Mom saves the day, and makes the birthday special, for another year….
Yey Mom!
Happy Birthday to all the Holiday Babies out there!!!!
Surprising Field Trips (a.k.a.- you can lead a child to water, but you can’t make him impressed)
In keeping with suggestions from online parenting guides, and PBS, and articles in the weekend paper, and even blurbs on the sides of cereal boxes, I decided to do something fun and educational with my son. We take ‘field trips’ together.
We got in the car and went down to the National Mall. My son loves cars… and trucks… and planes… and rockets, really any mode of transportation. So I’m thinking, ‘What could be better than The Air and Space Museum?’ Nothing… or so I thought.
I don’t know when you last parked down at the Mall, but parking is surprisingly easy. They added parking all along the service road that borders the Mall, the entire length of it. And if you want to take Metro- you’ve got the stop right there.
I pulled into a space only about a block away from The Air and Space Museum. No meters and ‘rock star parking’…cool! We walked across the little service road to the sidewalk and immediately saw a beautiful fountain in front of the National Museum of the American Indian. It had many levels and an edge big enough for a child to walk along. He loved it (at this point I knew, maybe he’s not going to be as excited as I thought to see Wilbur and Orville Wright’s plane).
I finally coaxed him away from the super cool climbing fountain and we went into the Air and Space Museum. As you all know – it is gigantic. All the rockets were great. All the planes were great. Everything was great, but it’s almost overload for kids…
We walked around a little more. I think we stayed a little over an hour and that included a trip to the Air and Space Museum McDonald’s. The happy meal toy was a NASA rocket – nice touch McDonald’s and NASA.
We then started to leave; he told me he was ready to go. But wait, he was so impressed with the purse/bag x-ray machine that the guards showed him how it worked.
We made another stop at the fountain, crossed the street and my son yelled, “Mommy, look!” It was literally a bus and truck put together, I’m sure to haul artifacts around the Smithsonian. I believe it was a government vehicle.
“It’s a… BusTruck! I’ve never seen one of those before!” And he just stared.
When my husband got home from work and asked what we had seen and learned on our ‘field trip’ my son immediately started in with a description of the BusTruck…
no planes, no rockets…
the BusTruck.
So once again, I tried to give my son an educational experience, and he gave me the education.
…But he’s a fun teacher!
* I originally wrote this post for DC Metro Moms.
Eat, Pray, Love, with 2 Little Boys
Okay, so it’s not exactly ‘Eat, Pray, Love’.
BUT, my friend Mary Jane,
is RIGHT NOW,
making her way through Europe with her 2 youngest sons.
She has 5!
Yeah… 5.
She’s a saint.
She’s 1. Eating… Check.
She has visited churches 2. Pray… Check.
And she loves her boys… and husband. 3.Love… Check.
And she’s also teaching them history while they go!
Isn’t she fabulous???
Check out their travels on her blog-
Yesterday they were in Pompeii… Where will they be today??!!
Visit The ‘Other’ Cherry Blossoms Around DC!
Don’t want to fight the crowds down at the Tidal Basin?…
It’s really not that bad- as I wrote last year (parking is easy- at least during the week).
But lugging kids around can be cumbersome… so –
There is ANOTHER, GREAT ALTERNATIVE!
Go see GORGEOUS CHERRY BLOSSOMS IN BLOOM in Kenwood!
The entire neighborhood is covered and lined with Cherry Blossoms… everywhere!
They even create a canopy of blossoms over the street- it’s super cool,
and quite lovely (I love the word ‘lovely’… How was your day? ‘Lovely, Thanks.’)
Get on Little Falls Parkway, and Turn into Kenwood at Dorset Ave. There is a ‘Kenwood’ Sign.
You can even walk the Capital Cresent Trail- it goes right through Kenwood!
It’s a nice little field trip-
Enjoy!
An EASY Field Trip… A Car Dealership
I recently asked my son What He Wanted to Do…
His Reply- “I’d like to go to EuroMotorCars,
and check out the new Mercedes Sprinter Vans
that I saw in the parking lot.”
Okay…
So we went!
If you have a child who loves cars and trucks and anything with wheels, check out a local car dealership.
Just let them know you’re ‘just looking’, or rather, Your Son is
What an Easy ‘Field Trip’!