Janoski's Pumpkinland trip A.K.A. The day the GPS failed Paula

Today was supposed to be a wonderful day spent with my little Alec at a field trip with my MOPS group. Instead, it turned out to be an excerpt from the book "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day." (I love that book!) So instead of burying my head underneath the covers and going to bed at 8 p.m., I decided to "keep it real" and blog about my day. Hmmmmm, are you sure you want to continue reading?
I'm the Discussion Group Leader for our MOPS group and one of my duties is planning play dates. So today's field trip to pumpkinland was my doing. The day started out good, I was actually on time for once to meet anyone that needed to carpool from our church. Darrell sent me with his new GPS (I'm a Mapquest girl myself) and told me to "trust it." Two other moms met me at the church and they were already riding together and they also had a GPS. I had had several cancellations already so I figured there was no one else showing up, so we left promptly at 9:00 a.m. I was already well into my trip when I was notified by the church that I had left a mom who wanted to go. (Here's where the sick feeling started in my stomach! And I still have it because I feel AWFUL!)

So here's part of the chaos that erupted in my van within the first 10 minutes of the trip (and yes, I didn't pull over to use the cell phone.....God really protected me because I should have had an accident!)

*Paula calls Darrell: This GPS is taking me down 60...does it know that the Shippingport bridge is closed? O.k. so I should just press detour if it looks like it's taking me past the Brighton exit. Got it!

Paula gets close to the Brighton exit and successfully presses the detour button on the GPS...success....30 seconds later gets a phone call informing her that she left a mom at the church....failure.....10 minutes later realizes that the GPS has looped her around and she is now being told to exit the closed bridge.....failure.....all the while trying to listen to the GPS, retrieve multiple cell phone calls, and quiet Alec because he is on a non-stop conversation about playing with Maggie at pumpkinland. To make a long story shorter, I finally stopped and let the car that was following me take over and I SHUT OFF the GPS. A 30 minute trip took over an hour, 30 MOPS moms were graciously waiting on the hay wagon for us (because I had the MONEY), so we did get to spend 45 minutes before having the navigate our way home for lunch.
I wish it ended there and the rest of the day was smooth, but it was just one of those days. Ann-Marie ran a fever after she came home from kindergarten (and I found out after Jameson's mom dropped him off, so I had to seclude Ann-Marie so we hopefully didn't get Jameson sick). Alec had a cat nap in the car when I was lost in the morning, so he wouldn't nap (which he handled pretty well actually), and so I kept the kids home from AWANA to rest tonight. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. Good night!