This weekend had some massive disaster potential, but fortunately everything worked out quite nicely. The big event was The Chicken's 6th birthday party on Saturday.

Our original plan was a fairly straight forward kid party. We were going to invite two dozen curtain-climbing, ankle-biting kindergarteners into our house for cake and presents. That plan didn't last too long before we settled on a movie theater party.

The local multiplex has a party package where you get an hour in the party room (which is nothing at all like the champagne room… I know, I was disappointed too), 10 movie tickets, 10 kiddie snack trays, 10 dollars worth of arcade tokens and (time permitting) a tour of the projection booth. And all for the low, low price of $120.

The biggest drawback to this is that it's a package for 10 kids. Chicken has 22 classmates. After wrestling with the idea of forcing him to choose his 10 favorite school chums, we decided to invite all of them and pay extra to accommodate them. We were hoping that his birthday weekend would work out to be some sort of obscure religious holiday and many of his classmates would not be able to attend. Unsurprisingly, Saturday turned out to not be an obscure religious holiday and nearly his whole class RSVPed. So off The Bunny went to the theater to pick up another 80 dollars in movie tickets and snack vouchers.

Despite the potential for complete and utter pandemonium, everything worked out surprisingly smoothly. I worked the front door greeting parents and taking notes on who would be picking up each child. Sister escorted the chilluns from the outer lobby to the party room. Bunny's movie buddy Zeke played bouncer at the door to the party room by preventing kids from randomly wandering off. Bunny and her sister attempted to keep something like order in the party room through a three-course program of cake, presents and random beatings.

We all took turns escorting children to the bathroom. Sister may regret entrusting her camera to me while she was on a bathroom run. Her memory card now contains one picture each of my feet, ass and elbow.

That hour of party room time absolutely flew by and in a heartbeat we were lining them up to file into the theater. If nothing else, that school of theirs is doing a damn fine job teaching them to line up. You could almost imagine them as baby elephants, trunk to tail, as they marched neatly from one place to another.

The movie itself went very well. There was no fighting, no crying, no spilled snacks and only a few bathroom breaks. And the movie, Ice Age 2, was great fun. It's better than the first, I'd say. We liked it well enough that Bunny and I took Chicken to see it again Sunday.

After the movie, we lined up our baby elephants for the march out to the lobby and the semi-chaotic reunion with their parents. It turns out that time was not permitting for that projection booth tour. We didn't use any of the arcade tokens either.

But no matter. It was still a successful and mostly painless kid party. Final tally: 23 movie tickets, $300 (give or take). We're still trying to decide if $300 was too much to pay for the privilege of not having our house demolished by a 3'8" wrecking crew.