St. Patrick's Day Sucked Part II

Second of a two part series. If you haven't read about St. Patrick's Day morning, start there. It's a doozy.

I know it's been a long time to get this thing posted. It sat half baked in my drafts box for awhile. My parents, god love them, are old and still adjusting to the time change. They will be fully adjusted by the time they leave here. But since my computer is in the room they sleep in and since they are in bed mere minutes after the kids, well, finishing this has been very slow going. As it is, I'm sure there a plenty of typos which I am not even going to look for right now. I'm publishing as is. Want to edit it? Have at it and send me a copy! Enjoy.


Every mother can tell you that there are those days when your children are the worst in the bunch. Well, maybe not every mother, but most. Well, maybe not most. Okay. Maybe just me. In that case, I am here to tell you that there are those days when MY children are the worst in the bunch. Days when they act like demonic angels ascended from hell to wreak havoc among the frolicking seraphic children of all the other mothers. Days when I am sure they were sent here in payback for cheating on my fifth grade math homework or for smoking in the bathroom in high school, or that one time in band camp... well, I was never at band camp, but you get the point. St. Patrick's Day was that day.

By the time we arrived at Think Town (a children's museum here in Seoul), it was lunch time. We found a little table and sat the children down to eat their packed lunches. Lunch, to my children, means run like greyhounds and scream like banshees while Mommy tries to get some form of nutrition ingested. I wolfed down my yogurt while watching the other children happily eat the lunch I'd packed and keeping Roman from losing an appendage in the escalator.

When we finally got into Think Town, I was already tired of talking to my kids about their piss poor behavior. That is never a good way to start out. The first stop was this sectioned area with wood floors and big blow up, rolling things, requiring shoe removal. When everyone was finished playing there and were ready to move on the next section, Reilly Kate absolutely positively refused to even consider the possibility of putting her shoes back on. It was a battle I wasn't going to win so I just shoved the shoes in my backpack and gave up trying.

Next stop was the great big rolling dice. Being a casino floozy myself, I'm all for introducing children to dice throwing at an early age. First the big foam dice, then a little Yazte, high school Bunko club, and then by legal age they're winning at the craps table. Throw the dice, baby! Yeah, I probably should have chosen my words more carefully. Roman, well, he took to actually throwing the dice... at the heads of the other children in that section. He even tried to throw one at a kid just walking by. As the other kids stacked them up high, he'd take them down and whip them. I grabbed both kids and we headed out for another part of the museum, Reilly Kate still barefoot, by the way.

A few sections down was a large science room with multiple stations. All the children scattered to check out the various activities. Some went to blow bubbles. Others made designs on the giant Lite Brite board. There was magnetic sand to play in and a Jacob's Ladder to watch. What did the spawn of Satan do? Roman threw himself on the floor in a fit of rage over my taking him from his beloved dice game. Reilly Kate performed the same trick she's been doing since she was 14 months old -- she ran around in a tight circle and wailed at a pitch that is just right for bursting fine crystal. I found myself a place to sit, far from either of them, hoping that perhaps no one would notice they were mine. Sadly, I really can't pawn them off here. In a room full of Koreans, do you think that anyone is going to believe they are not mine?


After a bit, a science show started in the room. All the other children sat quietly watching the scientist do different chemistry experiments and tricks of physics. I looked to see where my apes had gone and find them attempting to catch and swing off this twirling ribbon exhibit. First off, this was not something designed for that purpose. Those ribbons were not sturdy enough to hold a child's weight. Second, if they were sturdy enough, it sure as hell wouldn't be safe for them to do this. I looked around, waiting for one of the staff members to come up and say something like, "Simian pets puts caged or necklace pretty good." Which would mean, "Take your fucking brats and get the hell out of our museum!" They didn't say anything, though. They just watched and laughed. Damn teenagers!

I herded my crew over to the science show where they did actually sit for about 5 minutes. One of the girls in our group offered herself up as a volunteer for the scientist and was rewarded with a toy of some sort. Well, that of course does it for my greed monster. At the very next opportunity, she bullets up her hand and becomes the next lucky contestant. I knew it wasn't a good idea, but once she has something in her head (like not wearing her shoes through the museum), there is little I can do to convince her otherwise.

This is going to come as a surprise to most who know Reilly Kate, but since moving here she's become a little shy and clingy. To be expected when you are four and suddenly find yourself an expat living in Asia. So she got on stage and stood there, smiling and happy until the scientist asked her her name. For those who don't know, Koreans have extreme difficulty distinguishing the "r" and the "l" sounds. They mix them up, transpose them, or just use one or the other sounds. This is because those two sounds come from the same letter in Korean. Reilly Kate's name is extremely hard to pronounce for a Korean. We weren't thinking Korea when we named her obviously.

"What your name?" he asked in English.

"Reilly Kate."

"Myo?" which means "What?" in Korean.

"Reilly Kate."

"Lie-lie... myo?" was his first attempt.

"Reilly Kate." Gone was her big, I'm-gonna-get-me-a-toy smile.

"Lie-lie... Otikae?" His second attempt followed by an Korean expression of frustration akin to "What should I do now?"

"Reilly Kate." At this point her bottom lip was starting to jut out.

"Too difficult," he said in English to which everyone in the audience laughed. He played the whole thing off well, but not to a four year old.

What the scientist was going to do was show how it takes a lot more wind power to push a big ball than it does to push a small ball. He'd already balanced a ping pong ball in mid air with a blow dryer. Now he wanted to do the same with a soccer ball and a leaf blower. He took his leaf blower, pointed it at his face, and turned it on. It distorted his cheeks and mouth and was very funny. Now, he wanted to do it to Reilly Kate. As he brought the blower into position, he told her to open her mouth. She clamped her lips down tightly, and turned to look the other way. He asked her again. This time, her bottom lip started to quiver and her eyes welled up with tears. I ran up to rescue her. Poor baby had bitten off way more than she could chew.

Instead of just grabbing her and sitting back down, which is what I should have done, I squatted down next to her and tried to encourage her to open her mouth. It was no use and I really couldn't say as I blamed her. That thing looked intimidating. I don't even know how safe it is to point such a hardware power tool at the face of a four year old. Naturally, since baby won't do it, the crowd wants Mama to. Actually, it was the scientist's idea with a rousing endorsement from my fellow preschool moms sitting in the audience. Ah, yes, they got my back.

So, reluctantly, I leaned forward and opened my mouth. Just as the mad scientist was about to press the ON button, I said a quick prayer that the wind didn't get trapped in some kind of wrinkle pocket on my face and rip off my whole head. He turned that sucker on full blast and I could feel my face shift as he moved the blower's focus. My eyebrows swiggled, my chin lifted up, and my mouth filled with air making me look like a puffer fish with a sloped forehead and an underbite. It is a damn good thing I was squatting down because that scientist was moving that air all over the place. Had I been standing, my boobs wouldn't have been safely secured behind my knees, and the force of the wind would have dislodged them from their home in my bra. Most likely, the pair of 38 DDs would have gone flying wildly, smacking me upside the head and leaving me with two black eyes. It was bad enough the way it was.

All that. All that embarrassment. Stripped of my dignity. And for what? A cheap little toy? Do you think they even gave me the damn cheap little toy, the lure that got my greed monster to go up there in the first place? Hell no. I got shit. Thank you very much for letting us use your face as a big wrinkly, fleshy mass to demonstrate our BIG TOOL, Ms. Peet. And don't let the door hit you on your way out. Yeah.


Immediately after we got off the stage, our group dispensed with the sitting quietly at the science show and went off to blow giant bubbles. Fine by me. I'm good with that. I like bubbles. Until Roman decided to take a bath in the bubbles. I looked over and saw the bottom half of his arm just drenched, his hand swishing around in the soapy mess. I actually had to wring out the sleeve of his shirt.

While wringing out Roman's soapy sleeve, Reilly Kate wandered over to the giant Lite Brite board where everyone else was happily building hearts and circles and the like. She, instead of using creativity to, well, to create, chose to use her wits to collect the most pink pegs, lining them up on the shelf. Woe to anyone that tried to actually use one. I could hear the discussions she was having with the other kids all the way across this enormous room.

Once I was done cleaning up the little man, I had to go referee the Lite Brite Grinch, leaving the little man to go run amok. Literally. He ran around taunting the other children with, "Na na! No catch MEEEEE!" I went and grabbed him, and redirected him over the the Lite Brites. He loved it. Grabbed a bunch of pegs and started sticking them in the holes. Of course, he wasn't happy just sticking them in and leaving them in. He had to take them back and then shove them back in a little harder. It seems he thought the object of Lite Brite was to plow the buggers all the way through the board, letting them drop to the bottom, behind the lights and out of anyone's reach. I don't know if the people at the museum were ever able to retrieve the pegs that Roman so diligently worked to push through.


I turned to locate Grinchy girl and found her on this twirly handlebared thingy. Just look at the picture to see what it was since I cannot describe it well. Also, look at the picture to see how absolutely filthy my sweet baby girl had gotten. She was like Pig Pen in the Charlie Brown series. Just covered in all kinds of filth. I looked at the other kids, all of whom still had their shoes on, and none were dirty. Not a one. So my little Pig Pen was waiting in line for this thingy and mocking all the kids who were taking their turns.

"I can go so much faster than you. I am the fastest. I am the fastest in the whole world. You go slow but I go fast. Get off so I can show you how to go fast." And so on and so forth.

I stood over by the thingy and told her to knock it off. Fortunately, most of the children in line couldn't even understand her since she was speaking English and they were Korean. But there were the kids, her friends, that we came with and she wasn't holding back for them, either. The more I told her it wasn't nice and that she shouldn't say that, the more emphatic she became that she was indeed faster and that she only wanted to show them how to be as fast as she.

When it finally came to be her turn, she climbed aboard and, well, she couldn't even get the damn thing to turn at all. She was tripping over her feet trying to push the thing, she leaned to and fro, she jerked the handlebars. She tried it all. Stifling a laugh, I leaned over and gave her a good push. Know what that smart ass did? She said, "HA!! See? I AM the fastest!" As an aside, Roman, too, got on the thingy not long after her, and without even a blink of an eye or the slightest wiff of a push from another, he had that thing twirling 'round and 'round so fast that getting a good picture of him on it proved impossible. He was just a blur. Please note how nice and clear Reilly Kate's picture is. She was standing still as she mocked the other children. Yes. She's a gem.


Roman, having grown bored with the Lite Brite board and having used his single turn on that twirly thingy allotted to him by his sister, went over to a bike on a track. He geared up with a helmet, climbed aboard, and fell in love with the bike while putting the the young Korean woman escorting the bike back and forth under his spell. Korean women just love Roman -- his blond hair and blue eyes, those chubby cheeks, and devilish grin. They look at him and whisper to one another, "Yapuna," which means beautiful. Well, this one was no different.

When the ride finished, he flashed that young woman a sweet smile and said, "Two!" "Two" translated from Roman into English is "more." Without hesitation Agashi (means "young woman" in Korean) pushed him forward for another turn, totally ignoring the three other children patiently waiting in line for their turn. When ride number two was finished, what do you suppose happened? "Two!" Roman demanded and so commenced ride number three. By this time the parents of the children waiting patiently were growing impatient and personally, I don't blame them.

Before ride number three was even halfway completed, I began preparing both Roman and his agashi for their final parting. "This is it. No more. Last time," I said. The agashi giggled and Roman smiled and when they completed ride number three, they didn't even stop, didn't even so much as pause before going right back for ride number four. I stood uncomfortably as I heard angry Korean from behind my back. I peeked over my shoulder and saw that the line had doubled and the Koreans moms huddled around casting the evil eye our direction. What am I saying, "our?" They were casting it MY direction. And I was guiltless. I was the one encouraging an end to the bike rides. No matter, I was their fall guy.

I walked up the steps of the platform to capture my bike pirate when they returned. Agashi turned to me and said, "Okay. One more time. Last time." Then off they went. But the way she said it would almost imply that I somehow wanted a fifth ride for my kid. No. No. No, indeed, I did not. Well, completely disgusted the Korean moms grabbed their childrens' hands and left the line in a fit, glaring at me the whole time. I apologized, for what I do not know. By the time Roman got done with his fifth and final ride, there was no line. I think, had I allowed it, Agashi would have put him right back on that damn bike.

The other preschool moms began shepherding the flock towards a little coffee shop inside the museum for smoothies, snacks and much needed Mommy lattes. Like herding cats, I would grab one of my offspring and the other would run away. I gave up and concentrated my efforts on collecting all of our belongings (including Reilly Kate's shoes) to demonstrate that we were leaving that room. When I turned around, coats and shoes and bags in hand, I looked over to where Roman and Reilly Kate had congregated around the bubble blowing station. Roman had grabbed one of the great big metal wands and was banging it with all his might against the side of the soapy basin. Reilly Kate stood next to him, watching, as she licked the palms of her hands from wrists to fingertips. Remember now, she is covered in filth of the blackest kind. Who knew what it was or where she picked it up or what organisms were lurking in the crevices of her palms. But this is the kid who thinks boogers and toe jam are haute cuisine so really, this hand licking should not surprise me. Nevertheless, it did. I exploded into a mommy tirade, grabbing them both by the collar and marching them off to a much needed coffee break.

By the time we'd gotten there, there was a line. We stood waiting to order for a few minutes with my kids begging cookies and other snacks off their friends. Just as it was our turn to order one of the museum workers came in to tell us that an astronomy show was about to begin. Personally, I would have skipped it. But all the other kids were marching off to the show and my kids would not be left out, even for the promise of strawberry smoothies and chocolate chip cookies. My latte wasn't to be. We joined the march into a dome shaped room and laid down on the floor.

As soon as the lights in the dome were turned off, a pretty cool light projection show began, showing all the constellations. The narrative was entirely in Korean, which is to be expected. The problem, of course, was that my kids don't understand Korean and were bored within about 20 seconds. Bored kids become talkative kids and in a dome shaped little room, talk echoes. Plus, Reilly Kate doesn't talk, she yells. I spent the entire 20 minutes trying to get my kids to be quiet. I really felt sorry for the Korean children in the room since they couldn't hear a word over my chatty children. I would have taken them out, but I couldn't see past my hand. It was pitch stinking black. I'm sure, had I tried to get them out, we would have tripped over the light machine and broken it.

Still, darkness and all, I was just about to grab the kids and drag them, belly crawling to the door, when Reilly Kate stood straight up and began shrieking, "I'm wet! I'm wet! My pants are all wet!" I still couldn't see a thing but I stuck my hand out to get her to sit back down and she pushed me away. "I didn't pee! I didn't pee. Mama! Don't! I didn't peeeeeeeeeeeeee!" The sound of her shrill hysterics pierced my ears and I'm sure everyone elses. The woman sitting at my feet groaned and her child of maybe 2 or 3 whimpered. I wanted to melt into the floor.

Finally, the longest 20 minutes of my life came to an end. The lights went back on and I looked over at Reilly Kate who was still complaining of her ass being wet. She was covered in smoothie. Somebody had brought in their drink and it had spilled. My child, who should have been laying still looking up at the "stars" on the ceiling, had instead been wiggling around all over the carpet, knocked the drink over and then proceeded to sit in it. Not only was she covered in dirt, grime, and other assorted filths, but now she had a green, sticky, wet bum.

We went back to the coffee shop were I got my much needed jolt of caffeine and a strawberry smoothie that each kid took a sip of and promptly forgot. Reilly Kate went off with her girlfriends to record a rock video and Roman sat down quietly at a magnetic building station. I drank my coffee and called Mike to tell him we would be leaving the museum shortly and on our way home. I went to check on Roman who was still playing nicely. I went to check on Reilly Kate who was singing like Gwen Stefani. It was a bit of heaven that wasn't to last.

On my way back to the coffee shop, I peaked in on Roman again and he was gone. He'd left his shoes on the chair he was sitting in and the magnetic balls and sticks all over the floor. He must have just swept a hand across the table and tossed them all. I raced around and found him back in the rolling blow up pit. He conned some nice Korean grandmother and her adorable little boy into rolling him around like he was the king on a palanquin. He'd roll here and there. Wherever he pointed, they would roll him. The roller would come to a stop, he sit up, point, yell something incomprehensible to me (Korean perhaps?), and these two would hop to it, rolling him around some more. They all seemed to be having a good time, although Herr Dictator seemed a bit much to me. But whatever. Who am I to judge, right? Besides, I've got magnets to clean up, which I did.

The magnet station was directly behind this hardwood floored rolling pit. I could hear and see what was going on, but I couldn't actually get to Roman because it was cordoned off. I was crouched down, picking up the magnets, when one of the magnetic balls wizzed by my head. I turned around and there stood Brat Boy the Evil One. He was actually laughing at me and reaching into his pockets for another ball. I leapt up and tried to grab him through the fencing, but he moved back, away from my reach. He tripped on his feet while walking backwards and out poured the balls he had stuffed into his pockets. The Korean grandmother came rushing up and collected the small metal balls. She looked, smiled at me and I thanked her in Korean as I held out my hand for her to give me the balls. She nodded again, still smiling, and handed the damn balls back to Roman!

Roman starting pelting the grandmother and her cute little boy with the balls and all they did was duck and laugh. I ran as fast as I could around the fencing of the rolling pit until I got the entrance. I collected the balls off the floor and frisked Roman for the remainder. I was livid and I'd had enough. We were definitely going now. I put the balls back in the magnet station, went off to collect a less than thrilled Reilly Kate, and then back to get Roman. It took me less than five minutes to get my unhappy, temper tantrum throwing offspring clothed, shoed, out the door with appropriate goodbyes to our friends, the grandmother, and half the staff at the museum. As I walked out, I had Roman under one arm, legs kicking and hands grasping at the doorjam, my other hand clutching Reilly Kate as she whined and cried.

I came. I saw. I had my ass kicked.

Post Script: I was so distracted with the kids and my frazzled nerves that when we left I took a total wrong turn and wound up lost. It took us about a 15 minutes to find our way out of the building and another 20 minutes to find a cab. Once we got into the cab and began our journey home, stuck in mild Seoul traffic, my driver admitted to me that he had no idea how to get me home. Through the miracle of cell phones and Mike's Korean, we managed to make it to our beloved homestead. As we were getting out of the cab, I smacked Roman with the door leaving a nice bruise on his temple. I carried him through our courtyard, wailing over his contusion. Just as our apartment came into view, Reilly Kate began a full sprint, tripped over her feet, and landed in a face plant. By the time we entered the sanctity of our home, I had developed a nervous twitch that only ceased after my third Guinness. Ah, yes. Twas a day. Twas a day. Twas a very, very, very fine day.