Finding Family Fun

As much as we love the weekend, we often squander it away, and then feel grumpy about that waste. Money is tighter than ever, but we had exhausted many of the free things that we like to do and we were restless on Saturday. So I pulled out one of those coupon magazines that come in the mail quarterly. Inside was a coupon for IT'z, which is a big family fun zone.

Generally, this is the type of place I avoid at all costs. They reek of wasted money, violence, and ill-behaved monsters (and their children). In fact, when we have passed it before on the interstate (usually while driving to the DFW airport) I make it quite clear that it would be a great father/son activity. You know, to do without me, while I am off getting pampered by a legion of beautiful Greek men who feed me grapes.

Alas, grapes are out of season.

After performing a variety of computations worthy of that guy from A Beautiful Mind, I finally came to the best use of coupons so we could get some serious bang for our buck.

So off we went. First stop was the AYCE Buffet, full of pizza, pasta, salad and dessert. You must purchase the buffet to get into the facility. The food was edible, and child-friendly. I compare it to a CiCi's pizza place- nothing I would choose at free will, but it gets the job done. This place also had baked potatoes and one of their pastas was pretty good, so I consider that a win.

We went on a Saturday night, so it was busy, but we got the boys an "unlimited activities" game card (that buy one, get one free coupon definitely made that possible!) so we were off to get in line.

First for the bumper cars...

(yeah, I am totally getting in on the bumper cars when we go back on a less crowded day. As it was, I didn't want to make the poor kids wait any longer.)

Then it was on to the race track, in which my guys got a really slow car. There was a lot of waiting all around.

And then there was the mini-bowling, which we did for a long, long time. It was a great combo of bowling and bocce ball.

We did tons of videos games and ended five- yes, five hours later- at the laser tag. This was the first time we have all done this, and it was a blast.

It was not a cheap evening, but we made sure to eek out every last dime's worth :)

We'll be back!