Wednesday 3 December 1997

For our Wednesday Night LRY dinner outing, we collected at Chuck E. Cheese's Magical (Satanical) Pizza Place.

KT and I decided it was satanical because their phone number starts with 666. We decided it was magical because their phone message says so! (Those reading who don't know me or us: don't take it seriously.)

Jon W and Sean C were already there when Wende and I arrived. We ordered a large cheese pizza and got tasty beverages and 120 tokens (actually 126 came out. hee!) Before we had paid, KT H and Dennis and Adam W arrived.

Anyways, we all ate and watched the robot-ish animated characters and then played video games and ski-ball and stuff. Sean and I played a two-player dinosaur shooting game and the seat shook around to mimic what we saw on the screen.

We played much ski-ball and Adam won the jackpot of 182 tickets by getting 350 points.

But there were two coolest things about the night:

• While I played a ball shooting game, a baby and his mother were sitting by me. I suddenly remembered what Linda L recently told me after I wrote my thing on ESP. (side note: as I tried to type "gravity07.html" I mis-typed "gravity06" Turns out gravity06 was correct...)

  Linda wrote:
  

  Children before they have a firm grasp of the english( or for that matter any) language must depend on nonverbal communication. By the age of 2 they are masters of reading body language and facial expressions. Unfortunatly, when they begin to learn how to vocalize their needs they forget the lines of communication they were born with. Try this: Make eye contact with a small child in a public place. Try to read what they are sending to you. Watch how the mother and child are communicating. If the mother is connected with the child's needs the kid will be generally happy. If she is ignoring the kid (or wants to exert her will over the childs) the kid will show it usually by crying or worse. Most times there is a great amount of fustration involved if the mother doesn't make an effort to be observant to the childs non-verbal signals.

  I smiled gently toward the baby and opened my mind to him. He immediately smiled at me and began to verbally speak something like, "bahb ahb" (I of course wanted to hear "Rob"). I looked into his eyes for a while, asking "what are you thinking? what is in your mind?"
  I didn't recognize any blatant communication, but I was quite pleased that he looked up at me for a bit.

• I and kT and Dennis and Jon all climbed up into the tunnels and bright plastic ball pits and had a marvelous time. I have never (that I remember) gotten to play in a ball pit before! We buried ourselves, splashed the balls around, threw the balls around and generally had a ball.

  At one point I lost my pager in them all, and we splashed around for a bit looking for it. Wende paged it, but I found it without consciously hearing it beep. I really enjoyed thrashing around in there.

1997 Index