On Crying

The sharing of this sad video coincides nicely with the sharing of this sad tale, though the two are otherwise unrelated. On Saturday night, we took a grumpy baby out to dinner and thought we'd never make it home. We went for Chinese lamb skewers in Sinchon, which is 2 subway stops from ours. Joash had eaten for two hours, napped for half an hour, and we thought a walk in the Baby Bjorn would settle him further. We were wrong. He remained pretty awake until his hungry cries necessitated our early exit. We headed down to a subway more packed than ever we'd experienced before. There's no way to describe how packed it was because you'd never grasp the scope of the situation without having pushed through it yourself. I will note that I now understand how people are trampled to death in crowds.

So, but, we didn't just need to go through the turnstiles and board a train. Dan's transit card is broken, so he needed to buy a ticket. We couldn't make it to the ticket machines, didn't want, with a crying baby, to wait in a ticket line 50 persons deep. Back up out of the subway we went to try and hail a cab. We made our move. The heartless cab driver rejected us, even though Dan had a baby strapped to him. We made a desperate and ultimately vain attempt to figure out the bus system. Dan called Johnny for help. We tried for another cab, then headed back underground to see if it was less hectic. It wasn't. We decided Dan would just buy another card so we could get home. He bought a card but the vendor couldn't put money on it. Finally, Dan and Johnny swapped cards. We queued up at the turnstiles, and countless minutes later, we were, with our crying baby, on our way home.

It was our most stressful venture as parents yet and we survived and Joash survived and then we decided to spend the rest of the weekend at home.

-Serenity