i've made a huge mistake

ready for another tale of my attempts to be a fun mom and how badly it failed? i thought you might be.

we have zoo memberships and i received an email a couple weeks ago, inviting us to come to a members only event that was held last night. it included free face painting, bouncy houses, and carousel rides, which my kids always beg for. even though the event was from 6:30-8:30 and it was a school night, i thought, what the heck? the kids will love it and tuesdays are randy's longest teaching night, so i'm always looking for good ways to get out of the house to pass the time. i can be a fun mom, right?

it usually takes 25 minutes to get to the zoo, so we left the house at 6:00. we encountered unusually bad traffic in the first ten minutes, which was going opposite of commuter traffic. after sitting in that for 30 minutes, i saw that there was an awful accident in the opposite direction that was causing them to reroute traffic, causing horrible delays in all directions, especially that opposite of ours. i felt bad for the people going the other way, and then about 15 minutes later, encountered traffic just as bad as theirs once we got off the freeway to go to the zoo. i figured there must be a terrible accident, but the closer we got to the zoo, the more i had the sinking feeling that the traffic was a result of the members only night at the zoo.

i was right. it ended up taking us an hour and a half total to get to the zoo.

parking was miserable, although i should be grateful that we did eventually find a spot that was very close to the entrance. as i got out of the car, i looked at the woman getting out of the car next to me, who had a look on her face that reflected my own feelings, and asked her, "are we having fun, yet?"

and then, we went through the gates.

the zoo was a zoo.

i don't know why i had imagined the event so differently, but i had. i blame the excellently worded email that i received that made it sound like it would be an intimate affair. i had envisioned us getting there, walking in, going straight to the carousel and riding it over and over. perhaps we would have to get off and wait in line in between, but maybe there would be times that the attendant would simply wave us off and tell us to just sit tight if we wanted to and stay on for another ride.

HA!

there were swarms of people everywhere. i quickly assessed the situation and realized that we had about forty-five minutes before the event was over and we were only going to have time to wait in one line. we had to pick our one thrill because we were only going to get one. since the main reason i had come was the carousel, we decided on that line.

the line crawled along for thirty minutes. while we stood and waited, madeleine kept asking why we couldn't go and do the bouncy houses (which she could see). i informed her that the lines for those were longer, jonathan couldn't go in there with them, and i wasn't about to let them go in there in this crowd without me. she only asked me a few more times after that.

as we got closer to the carousel, i noticed that at least a third of the horses were empty during each ride. there was a teenager running the whole thing and apparently he couldn't be bothered to fill in all of the seats to make the line go faster. there is nothing more irritating to me than inefficiency. by the time we got to the front of the line, i had several ideas for him on how to make this thing run more smoothly. i barely managed to keep these ideas to myself.

the ride itself was very fun. the girls were a little disappointed that they didn't get to be on horses that went up and down (the stationary horses were the ones that were mostly empty on several of the rides), but i was just glad to be on the carousel at all. jonathan loved the whole thing and the ride was at least a decent length.

as we got off the ride and started back to the car, i made the girls hold on to the stroller and threatened them if they took their hands off of it. it was dark in a zoo that is not set up for being open after dark, with thousands of people swarming about. every mother's worst nightmare.

my poor, deflated children didn't understand why we couldn't do more than one carousel ride and i promised them that they could have some ice cream when we got home. we got in the car and the traffic wasn't too bad coming out. we got past the worst of it and were on our way home.

and then we hit gridlock traffic again. at 8:45 at night. the accident that we had passed almost three hours before was apparently still not cleared up and they were still diverting traffic. randy called just as i was debating what i should do and he ended up being my GPS system and directing me home on back roads. all three kids were still awake at this point (jonathan had lost his binkie at the zoo (of course) and wasn't ready to fall asleep without it, apparently) and a little scared with the whole process.

we were all very grateful to be home when we finally rolled in at 9:15. ice cream was administered and we hurried the kids to bed as soon as it was consumed.

even though it was a disaster over all, i have to say that my kids were troopers through the whole thing. there was very little complaining and they were very obedient the whole time. perhaps it was because the fear of their mother's wrath was still fresh on their minds after a particularly bad trip to costco the night before, but whatever it was, i was very grateful for it. it was the difference between me coming home in tears and being able to laugh at the ridiculousness of the whole thing. 

the only redeeming thing about this whole adventure was that i got a couple of really cute pictures of me and jonathan riding the carousel together. the lights were glowing just right and he was looking up with a look of pure joy on his face. i would have posted those pictures with this post, except that i just went to instagram them (i was too tired to last night) and realized that i lost all of them when my phone crashed for the 20th time this morning, so i don't even have that going for me.

c'est la vie.