Lost in Translation

Eric says that blogging gives me a unique perspective on events in our lives. I think he may be right.

Last night was one of the most stressful evenings we've had in a while. And really, it was only a stressful hour or so, but that's enough, you know? Because that hour feels like hours. I can't say that I wasn't a bit stressed at times, but I kept thinking to myself, "at least this will make an interesting blog post."

Kennedy had a birthday party yesterday after school. It was the first one of those parties. Last year, most of her friends had their parties at a "tumbleland" at the mall--just a place where they can run around and play. Boy, do they need those here! While it's not something that we can easily afford, it's okay. Understandable. Reasonable.

Yesterday's party was anything but reasonable, and Eric and I struggled a bit with whether or not we were going to let her to go to one of those parties. In the end, we let her go, and I have no fear that she has any expectations of her own birthday parties following in these footsteps.

The party began with a 45 minute ride around the city in a limousine--something Kennedy described as simply "amazing." The limo ride was followed by dinner in a restaurant that was catered specifically to the kids. Kennedy reiterated the fact that the "yogurt was better than anything she had ever had." And it had Fruit Loops in it. Doesn't get much better than that, I guess!

After dinner, they went to a pottery studio that had been rented out for the event. Each of the girls were able to make two pieces; Kennedy made what she describes as "sauce bowls." (Apparently, they're small.) Then, she decorated a pottery bowl that had already been made and prepared for them to paint.

This week the pieces will be glazed and delivered to school for the girls to take home. Yeah, our daughter's party consisted of painting and coloring in Eric's classroom. We like to set the bar low.

While Kennedy was at her party, we let Cade choose where he wanted to go for dinner. He chose Pizza Hut--again. So, we drove over to the mall and had pizza followed by hot chocolate for dessert. On the way, we saw the building where Kennedy was, so I was confident that we would be able to find it without too much trouble.

We left about 20 minutes before we were supposed to be there to pick her up, and I figured that it wouldn't take more 10 minutes to get there, even if there was traffic. Unfortunately, we chose to follow the pin on the phone, instead of the mental map that I had.

This resulted in driving to the pin and not being able to see the building anywhere. We found a spot to park, but that wasn't helping us orient, so Eric wanted me to start driving. This was about the time when Cade fell asleep. It was good timing, because I was just about to get on a highway which led me to a bridge, taking me the wrong direction over the river. Sitting in traffic. Fifteen minutes late. Heading in the wrong direction. Perfect.

When the divider finally ended, prayers were said, and traffic cleared in the other direction, I pulled a completely illegal U-turn (along with the car right in front of me), and we were at least headed in the right direction again. At this point, Eric tried calling the parents, but neither of them spoke English, so they hung up on him. Thing were not looking good.

After a few more wrong turns, we eventually started heading somewhat close to the right direction. After again, ending up driving way too far in the wrong direction, and getting stuck in more traffic, we were able to get ahold of the parents. This time, Eric was able to speak to someone in English and got some directions that were helpful. We were able to orient ourselves better on the two different maps we were using (both in Korean, of course), and we were getting closer. We were about 45 minutes late at this point.

We finally found the building, not surprisingly, it was right where we'd seen it before! Of course, there were two buildings, and Eric went up into the wrong one the first time, but it wasn't long before they made it out. Kennedy was tear-free, thankfully. It turned out that she wasn't the last one to be picked up, even though we were more than an hour late, so she wasn't too stressed about it. We finally made it home safely around 9:00, and we were all ready for bed by then!