Last time, we took him to Dave and Busters for dinner. He ate dinner with the two of us and then played lots of games in their arcade. The evening culminated with him selecting something from the little shop with the tickets he’d “won” from playing some of the games. He selected an orange cup with a built-in attached straw that wraps around the outside of the cup. Since that night, the orange cup has turned into a reminder of our evening with my son.
My daughter loves the orange cup and since there’s only one, she frequently asks for it or offers it to friends when they come over. She thinks this cup is the culmination of all things fun, wrapped up into some orange, dish-washable plastic, from Dave and Busters. She asked me yesterday in a whisper, “mommy, can I tell you something?” (Note here that things are always “told” even though usually “asking” is what happens with this type of request.) My daughter wanted to know if we could take her to Ghostbusters?
It took me a minute to realize she was sitting in front of the orange cup with the straw and was talking about Dave and Busters. I told her I’d see what we could do. Tonight, I asked my husband if he thought going there would work with my daughter’s vision? Sure, my son would love it and I knew they would both like the food. But how well would she fare with the games? Would there be ones she could do without seeing what was happening? We decided to risk it, thinking at a minimum there were lots of lights and colors and hopefully there would be more fun than frustration.
When we got there she was excited. She liked the colors and the crazy, bright LED lights everywhere. The noise wasn’t overwhelming to her like we feared it might be after a long day at school and a play date with her friend. We ordered dinner and then went out onto the game floor.
She wandered off a lot. She was in no way worried about losing us in the large space. She’s never gotten lost before, and we’re usually reasonably close. She checked out various games and I steered her towards several she could do with large moving parts (think Price is Right large wheel kind of thing). She loved it.
We went back to eat our dinner and then had time for a few more games. She wandered off more and this time I watched her more closely, seeing how well she was managing in the space. She had no trouble navigating around all the games and people, even in the generally dim area that was also at the same time over-lit by the LED lights on the machines themselves. She had one navigational problem, which was the black standing bar tables. There were a few here and there, usually pushed up against a game for drinks. The table top was just barely over the top of her head. She almost hit several and ran into the pole of one once and the base once. Other than that, no one would have known she had low-vision.
Games finished, we went to the “store” to get stuff with the tokens we’d “won” that the children’t couldn’t see because nowadays they’re all digitally added to the card. My daughter got her orange straw cup and “Rubber”, a green rubber ducky. My son seemed to be happy to have her at his special dinner spot and had a had zero complaints about the night.
The Big Boy Update: My son asked me at breakfast this morning, “mom, do you know when the Emperor fell into the pit in Star Wars?” I told him I did. He said, “that’s like as far down as Rayan and Keira’s basement.”
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: At dinner tonight we were talking about how to use our napkins instead of our clothes to wipe dirty hands clean. I did some of what I thought was very clear explaining about the whole napkin/lap thing but I must have failed because my daughter took her napkin and said to me, “no, mommy, you’re wrong. I’m gonna be right,” and then showed me how it was done.
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