Maegan had her 10th birthday party today at the Pineville Ice House. We got there around 12:30 and the parking lot was nearly full. That seemed odd. When we walked inside it was literally packed! Hundred and hundreds of people. The mascot of the local professional hockey team was there too with several of the team's cheerleaders. What's going on here?

Apparently today was a huge open house event that we didn't know anything about. Ice skating was totally free to everybody and so was all the food too. My initial concern was the overwhelming crowds, but seconds later I realized something of paramount importance - I paid (quite a bit) for Maegan and her friends to go ice skating and eat food - but skating and food was totally free to everybody today. Why was I the only person in the building who had to pay for anything? If we had all just shown up unannounced we would've paid nothing. WTF?

More on that story later.

The kids didn't care about the crowds and had a great time. Here's a photo of Maegan skating, taken near the end of the party when the crowds had gone.








Here's a photo Patty skating with nephew Connor.










And here's a cute photo of Darah's first time on the ice, being "walked" by her Uncle Ian.

Now back to that story about us paying for a free day. I spoke with the manager and explained about both the excessive crowds and the fact that we were paying for things that everybody else was getting for free. Apparently there was a mistake and nobody was supposed to be able to book a birthday party today. The manager agreed with my points and was extremely nice and appologetic. We had put a deposit down but they didn't charge us the remaining balance.

Since the kids had fun I have to ignore the crowd inconvenience. It was nice of them to forget the remaining balance, but $50 still seems a bit high for the only items that wouldn't have been free from the open house - an ice cream cake and soda.

Labels: Maegan