Tonite was Mega Fun Pizza Place Night for our elementary school. This is where you go eat pizza, and a percentage (or a fraction of a percentage, can’t remember) of your purchase goes back to the school so they can buy things like electricity and chalk. No child left behind!

Anyway, this happens every six weeks or so during the school year, to roughly correspond with report cards. Because why is it Mega Fun Pizza Place (MFPP)? Because it has video games. And if you get enough “S+”‘s on your report card they give you a coupon (redeemable only on MFPP Night) to be used toward video games.

So here’s the drill:

• 1 week before: Kids ask every hour or so when they get to go to MFPP. Suggest we ought to go once “on our own” and “make sure we know the drill.”
• Morning of: Jump out of bed because it’s MFPP Night. My seven year old was up at 4:30 this morning. But that’s another blog entry, altogether.
• 5:00: Gather at the house after school. The doctor has said the baby with pinkeye should not go to MFPP, so Mom “volunteers” to stay home with baby.
• 6:00: Drive
• 6:05: Upon seeing the line to get in, joke to kids about eating before 7:00.
• 6:20: Get in. Line actually moved pretty fast this time.
• 6:30: Sit down with food, after going through the buffett line. Admonished by child with wristwatch that it is not 7:00, yet we are indeed, eating.
• 6:30 – 7:00: watch in amazement as two boys who never eat anything inhaled as much pizza, pasta, breadsticks, slurpees, croutons, and red jello as we could hold. For $12 I fed all three of us, have somebody else to clean it up, and watched SpongeBob on a fifteen foot projection TV. Crack dealers could learn from the business model these people are using.
• For once, I was sitting with the “cool kids.” The whole time we were eating, girls were stopping by and winking and giggling with my boys. One pulled up a chair and ate her pizza and jello with my four year old. Based on body language, I have no doubt that had they been a little older (or perhaps just without adult supervision?) she would have jumped his bones right there on the table. I was witnessing the four year old equivalent of a cocktail lounge.
• Did I mention we weren’t the only fundraiser? There were FIVE going on tonite. When you pay you put your receipt in the jar that you want to give the % to. The PTA already wrote us down as “attended” on their clipboard, but we gave our receipt to our school, too. Good dog.
• One of the fundraisers was for a sorority. The only thing better than unlimited pizza, pasta, breadsticks, croutons, and jello while Spongebob is on a fifteen foot projection TV? All of the above plus sorority girls running everywhere.
• Except I’m tempted to say “grow up” a little too often. I am old, dammit.
• 7:00: we head for… the games.
• Next 45 minutes: play games (all games 25 cents! for one more week!) There is noise, loud music, louder games, crying, laughing, scolding, giggling. And that was just my kids.
• 7:45: Head for the Ticket Eater. If you don’t know what that is, consider yourself blessed.
• 7:57: clutching 27 cents worth of candy and toys in our grimy paws, we head for the exit. We have survived another MFPP Night.