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Why Michelle Obama secretly loved Chuck E. Cheese as a young mom

Birthday parties = chaos, the Obamas quickly discovered.
/ Source: TODAY

On the latest episode of her new podcast, Michelle Obama sat down with some of her best girlfriends to chat about her experience making friends while living in the White House, and what saved them from chaotic birthday parties when they were new moms.

On birthday parties, the former first lady shared, "I remember Barack going, we don't need to rent a facility, it's like, why would we spend that money, why don't we just do it ourselves?"

Michelle Obama with her girlfriends.
Michelle Obama with her girlfriends.The Michelle Obama Podcast

"And then, you're exhausted... with food, and you got all these people and folding chairs."

Sound familiar?

Her solution: "Chuck E. Cheese."

"I would pay any amount of money to be able to go somewhere, pay somebody, for two hours," she said, before her friend Denielle Pemberton interjected, "Gymboree!"

"They had that stuff, organized, and all you had to do was bring some pizza, and you would leave, wouldn't have to clean up," Obama said. "Pizza and goody bag, that's all you needed."

During their candid conversation, the group of friends also discussed how Obama formed new friends after she moved to Washington D.C.

"We came together really over the girls, just by chance being in the same school," Pemberton explained about meeting the former first lady. "And then being assigned to the same basketball team. The first time I really reached out to you was the most important thing of basketball game is... snacks! We were assigned randomly to be snack parents together. And I said, now how do you serve snacks with the President and the First Lady of the United States?"

Kelly Dibble jokes, "How's the first lady make a Costco run?"

Pemberton explained that she had to go through an assistant to reach the former first lady.

"As I would with any parent, let's divvy it up, and figure out what we're going to do, and the person who worked for you at the time said, 'Oh my gosh, thank goodness... thanks for reminding us. It would've been really embarrassing,'" she explained.

Obama said she was thankful for the simple reminder because she would have been judged for showing up with no snacks. She said, "To show up, to be the president and the first lady and not have snacks! They would've talked about me like a dog. You saved me."

Snacks ended up becoming a point of contention for Obama and her daughters, Sasha and Malia, the former first lady said, as the White House chef tended to going above and beyond.

"If I brought cookies, they were freshly baked White House cookies, individually wrapped, with bows, in packages" she said of the craftsmanship from the White House staff. "Sasha and Malia would be like why can't you just bring regular snacks? Why couldn't you just get some Chips Ahoy cookies?"