The Wood Family: Darek Is Turning 3!

Sunday is Darek's 3rd birthday! I can hardly believe he is almost 3. This year has been the first year that he has really recognized that it's his birthday. Before he didn't really know what it meant or cared about it. This time we've been counting down the weeks and days. Yesterday was his birthday party. We had a total of 6 kids (including Alex and Darek). We had our neighbors Christian (5) and Savannah (2) as well as two of his buddies from nursery Truman (3) and Dylan (2). We were having a little trouble coordinating the party time with everyone we wanted to invite, so I knew it would probably not work out as the best time. But the plan was to have everyone get here at 1:30, play a little, open presents, eat some cake and ice cream and then head to the theater to see Cars 2 for a showing at 3:20. Darek loved opening presents. He didn't really care to look at what he got immediately. He would open one and then head on to the next present. He did this until they were all open, then went back to the boxes to figure out what he got. It was really funny and cute. I don't think I planned the timing out great. I didn't realize that the kids would want to open every box of every present and play with all the toys... RIGHT THEN. They were having so much fun though, I hated to put an end to it. So we skipped the ice cream, had cake really fast and somehow made it to the movie on time. Then the chaos began...

We got there with only 10 minutes to get treats and get everyone seated and situated. My parents, brother and 2 of my friends also came. When we were directed to our theater, we were surprised to find out the Green Lantern was playing. So when we asked the employees about it, they said our showing had been moved to another theater because the original had a broken reel. When we went into that theater, we found that our seats were taken. In other words, when they switched theaters, they didn't mark our seats as being sold, so they double sold our seats. The main reason my parents came was to help us out with all the kids (if needed), so we had them sitting right behind us. We had to do some adjusting with our seats. I had Ryan and two of the kids sit in the row in front of us and eventually we got settled, but still worried that someone else might come in and demand our seats. My parents were not having as much luck. A very rude older man came in and had the same seats as my parents, plus a few more. He got angry with my Dad (with my Dad trying to explain what happened) and they went to find a manager. They got an employee and were trying to page a manager. The manager would not respond. When they spotted him and yelled his name, he looked over and said, "I'm off". So the poor employee was left to handle a very unpleasant situation. And really, he did nothing to solve the problem. My parents had already had to move seats 3 times and were getting frustrated. The older man insisted the seats were "his" and demanded my parents get out of them. He was yelling at my Dad, who was trying to talk to the employee about the situation. I told the man to stop, that this was not our fault, but the theaters. He then screamed at me, "Well, it isn't MY fault!!" The guy was just a moron and a jerk. My Mom told him she was sick of hearing his mouth and got up and moved. His reply was, "Good, that's fine with me!" His daughter was telling me that if we really all wanted to sit together, that I should just get up and move down to the bottom of the theater. Sure, I'll just quickly move all 8 of us! I got a little angry with that and we got in a little yelling match. Anyway... I could go on and on. My parents ended up moving to another row, no where close to us, but gave clear instructions that we were to see a manager after the show.

The movie was great, by the way. Perfect for boys! Throw in spies with cars... every boys dream. But I was very entertained also. We really loved it and the kids were actually very well behaved during the movie. Darek and Savannah slept through about half of the movie, but that's what you get for having a party during nap time. I was bound to hit someone's nap time. Even with all the craziness going on, I'm so glad we took the kids to see it. I think Darek remembers some of it! :)

As we were leaving, I had a few people come up to me and apologize for how we were treated. It was really nice to hear that from other people. I was glad we weren't being viewed as the ones causing the problem. When we got out of the theater, my Dad was already talking to the new manager, the employee that tried to help and the manager that was "off". My Dad was pretty upset, rightfully so. He talked to the new manager about better ways to handle this kind of situation... mostly just to have someone in the theater directing traffic when they KNOW something like this is going to happen. The other manager stood there looking annoyed and bothered. My Dad asked for an email to be sent to him explaining what they would do to ensure this wouldn't happen again like this. The new manager told us he would send that as well as refund our tickets and apologized profusely for what happened. He was very nice and very courteous about the issue. He refunded all of our tickets! It helped make a bad situation a little better. The thing that made me SO angry was the man and his daughter that were so rude to us, also demanded to get their tickets refunded. FOR WHAT!?!?!?! As were getting our refunds, the daughter leaned over to me and apologized for her fathers behavior and said she was so embarrassed by him. What about her? Oh well. I came outside and found out that the manager had given my parents an envelope with 22 free tickets and 6 free popcorn vouchers!!! We split that up, so we'll get some free movies for the next little while!

We got the kids their goody bags and took them home. They really had a lot of fun, but I was sad that Dareks first real birthday party was tainted by this situation. The nice thing is that the kids didn't even know what was going on and probably won't remember a bit of that! After we got home, all the neighborhood kids came in to play with all of Dareks new toys. They stayed until about 7:30. Then we all got in our jammies, our pizza was delivered, we put on Harry Potter 4 (we're trying to get through all of them before the last Harry Potter comes out) and enjoyed the evening together. It was a great end to our day. We're going to have another small little celebration on Sunday and I'll post more about Darek at that time. For now, here are a few pictures of Dareks party.