I'm a KidGrade Ambassador

The purpose of this post is two-fold:

1. To tell you about how I am now an ambassador for the website KidGrade. 
2. To show you pictures from yesterday's Kidgrade ambassador meet 'n greet at Kookaburra Play Cafe, a fun indoor play space in Chicago that you, too, can visit! 

First up: KidGrade!  KidGrade is a website where anybody can go and rate a venue according to its family-friendliness.  It's like Yelp, but with a special niche for kid-friendliness.  Restaurants and entertainment venues are rated on a 1-to-10 scale in the categories of Price, Location, Parking, and Kid-Equipped.  There is also a space for comments.  Let me stress that anybody can go and rate a place on KidGrade, and if your place isn't on there, you can add it.  (I should note that at the moment the site is limited to Chicago-area attractions.)  My job as an ambassador is just to encourage all of you to use the KidGrade site.

The founders of the site are a local couple with three kids.  This family could not have been nicer.  Their mission for the ambassadors is to have fun, and they are rewarding us well with (so far) an annual family membership to the museum of our choice, a gift certificate for a pumpkin spice mani/pedi from a service that comes to your house, and fun family parties!

Yesterday's party at Kookaburra Play Cafe was our first gathering.  (The KidGrade people paid for our admission, just to make that clear, FTC.)  Kookaburra Play Cafe is one of many indoor play spaces in the Chicago area.  The admission price is comparable to other similar places I've been, although I would like to note that I think these places are a little bit expensive (no doubt because their overhead and insurance are really high), and I'm kind of glad that here in the south suburbs we slum it by taking our kids to the mall or McDonald's for indoor entertainment. 

BUT, the children at the gathering had a BLAST at Kookaburra.  They have a fun play structure:

They have costumes you can dress up in:

They have a play kitchen, a train table, an art area, several ride-on vehicles, and a baby area.  I don't have pictures of any of those, but here's another picture of the play structure.  It has a pulley, so kids are learning about physics!

I thought Nathan was perhaps going to go through all the Village People costumes, but they didn't have the Indian:

I'm really excited about my year as a KidGrade Ambassador, and I hope you'll use the site, too!