Jack has really enjoyed Halloween this year. In addition to visiting neighborhood displays regularly, he has made several costumes and helped Papa create a pumpkin decoration for our condo. That's a little Playmobil ghost with a goodie bag. One costume was a pumpkin stem (a box painted green with leaves and a bug or two), and the final winner was a mummy outfit with a crown and strips of tea-dyed cloth. We were really sad to see the final decorations in the neighborhood coming down. Friday night Jack stayed with Nana and Papa and then we went to a birthday party on Saturday. It was held at a "party house" in Daly City, which has a climbing structure with ball pits and bouncing rooms and slides and some dark maze-like rooms. Jack didn't like the height, so he stayed on the lower level. I was inside the structure to encourage him to do more. At one point he ran over and asked me if I was having fun too.
After a pizza lunch, the party moved into an arcade with many games appropriate for four and five-year-olds. At first Jack didn't quite get the game concept, but then he played a game where you turn a wheel to manuveur a beekeeper to catch falling balls that look like bees. The beekeeper has a nozzle that looks like it is belching smoke. Jack asked me "why is he spraying them; he will make them unorganic." Jack caught six bees and won a tiny prize. Now he understands the arcade concept. Another highlight of the party was Jack and Zoe sharing four rides in a "hot dog cart." At one point, we had one token left for this ride that requires two tokens. Zoe also had one token, so they teamed up. A small step towards getting Jack to see Zoe as more than a rival for Emma's friendship.
All in all, I liked this birthday party locale (not as much as I like Glen Canyon Park, of course). They had only one party in the facility at a time. The noise level gets pretty high, but the people were helpful and the pizza was pretty good. The arcade is not video games.
