Operation 8th Birthday Party

This last weekend wasn't just about busting boards. Nope, we had another first: Shira and I hosted our 8 year old's birthday party.

This, it turned out, is no minor affair. There's a theme/activity to consider, and then a location to host it at. For some reason, Shira wasn't excited to have 16 kids in our house at one time? I know, such a party pooper.

After quite a bit of research, she settled on what turned out to be the perfect combination: a video game truck to entertain the kids, and renting a space at an Arlington community center.

The video game truck is offered by Rolling Video Games and is exactly what you think it is: a truck where 16 kids can pile into and play games individually or together. Here's what the truck looks like (this is from their website, I don't have any good pictures of trucks without any kids in them):

We were told the truck would allow 16 kids to play at one time. I think we crammed a few more than that in, too. Many of the kids entered the truck, and didn't come out for 2 hours. The company provides a "game coach," which meant that we didn't have to figure out what kids wanted to play or change around games.

The outside of the truck opens up, and in our case, we used this so the the adults could play dancing and race car games. Everyone really did get entertained.

As for the community center, that too was a surprisingly enjoyable experience. They do rentals all the time, so that was no big deal. What was a big deal, was when we asked if we could host a 40 foot truck on the property. Their response: sure, that sounds like a lot of fun!

Another wrinkle: we wanted to rent the space on Sunday, but they had a group that had it reserved for months in a row. Rather than turning us away, they made special arrangements to fit us.

The whole experience made us feel like our event really mattered, and that they wanted to work hard to exceed our expectations.

With video games, cake (and cupcakes, and brownies, and M&M bars -- all baked by Shira!), there wasn't really much doubt that the party would go off well. And it did!.

I took many, many photos. The vast majority of which aren't appropriate to publish. But, I just have to put up this one photo. It's of one of our younger guests (he must be about 4 now - maybe?) clobbering David in Wii Sword Fighting. This kid was unstoppable!