Today was our last weekday in San Jose. We wanted to make it good because we know that doing kids stuff on the weekend here is pretty busy and traffic-y. The boys have been asking for weeks when we can go to Chuck E. Cheese. The Reno Chuck E. Cheese is nice but it's a little complicated for me to get everyone up there first thing when they open. The Chuck E. Cheese near my parents house is only a couple blocks away.
Before we left for our adventures, I went for another run. I think I've gotten nearly 10 miles running in San Jose on this trip. My goal on this run was to beat my Wednesday time over the same route. Wednesday I ran the 3.5 miles in 36 minutes and 11 seconds. I pushed myself really hard today, wanted to stop running through the entire time, and felt like I'd never actually be able to do it. But I finished, ran the whole way, and my time was 35 minutes and 27 seconds. That translates to an average pace of 9:59minutes per mile.
I looked back at my times running the same route last year. My pace last year was 10:50min/mile and 11:32min/mile. So I've improved a whole lot in a year. It's sad to me because it still doesn't feel easy. I still have to push myself to keep running the whole time. But I'm definitely getting faster. My legs feel like cement blocks the whole time I'm running when I push myself like that.
Anyway, after all of that, we went to Chuck E. Cheese. Usually a round of 80 tokens lasts the boys and me about an hour. This time, they were going through tokens like there was no tomorrow. When I was ready to play a couple games, I had to go buy some more tokens just to have some for myself and Grandma.
The boys are getting pretty independent with the games. They didn't really need help reaching anything and they could pretty much figure out any of the games. Grady had some issues with the skee-ball games. He was mixing up which lane he was supposed to throw the balls in. So there were one or two of the skee-ball lanes that ended up with lots of extra balls.
The boys each got at least one picture card. Peter and Grady both like pretending that they have a license to put in their wallets and these are fun because they have your picture drawn on the card. They were much more reasonable about them today. Some days, they end up with like five cards. Today was just one each.
They got pretty good with the tickets too. Between the four of us playing, they ended up having 500+ tickets. Of course, they had to keep them separated out so they could individually pick out their prizes. I'm not even sure which games the boys liked best this time. I gravitated towards the basketball and football games. I was surprised when both of the boys were able to throw hard enough to make baskets and get the football through the goals.
We were back at the house within about an hour. The boys kept picking out small prizes, so they both came home with a large stack of accessories. We had plans to go to Psycho Donuts afterwards, so we ended up driving down there with Boris and Alex too. We had our special donuts and then my mom and I went to get some more shopping done while the boys (including Boris and Alex) went to some comic book shops.
I still didn't find anything while shopping. It's a bad season for colors for me. But the boys found bunches of stuff - comic books, prizes, thumb wrestling superheros. When they got back to the house, the thumb wrestling superheros were one of the first things they showed me. And they said "now we don't have to make our own thumb wrestlers". Because I guess they must think about that often; whether or not they have the characters that they can thumb wrestle with. It's actually in a Stink book. And the book shows you how to make your own.
Anyway, they played with Nik and seemed to have lots of fun. Then we all met for dinner at Shin's. Peter liked his chicken teriyaki, but didn't like the shrimp. Grady liked the shrimp, but didn't eat any of his chicken teriyaki. Overall the dinner was a success because both of the boys found stuff they liked that wasn't simply carbs.
Everyone was pretty tired when we got home. The boys had showers and got to bed pretty quickly. In between, Grady is still practicing his cartwheels. He's finally gotten the mechanics of it down. Now he just needs more practice to build up the muscles.
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