Up and Down

I took the kids to the mall for lunch yesterday just to get out of the house a little. Going anywhere in India with 3 kids is always an adventure! I’m not sure why it’s so much harder here…I take the kids everywhere I go at home…it’s not like it should be that much more difficult but for some reason it usually is! J

So we go to the food court to eat and it was pretty uneventful but as we’re leaving the fun begins! I was trying to rush them because we were late to meet the driver and the mall is huge so I’m prodding them along. We’re on the 4th floor so you have to take a lot of escalators down. They won’t let you take strollers on escalators and they have a guard standing at the top AND bottom of every single escalator to enforce this rule. The elevators there don't work so I had to use the escalator and every time I'd get to one, they would make me take Sutton out, collapse the stroller, have the guard ride it down and then I would get all 3 kids on and ride down. It was the biggest ordeal you've ever seen.

**I need to add 2 side notes for this to make sense...Usually Indians are TERRIFIED of escalators!! It often takes them several attempts to get on one so they assume that we are just as scared of them! Also, we are a spectacle every where we go. They LOVE babies and especially blonde haired children so anywhere we go, people surround us a try to pinch the kids cheeks, take their pictures, etc. So we create a scene without doing anything extra**

So the last level of escalators that we had to ride down, I had Anna Claire's hand, am holding Sutton, holding the collapsed stroller and trying to get everyone onto the moving escalator when somehow in the mix, I wasn't able to grab onto Bennett as we step on. So he is left standing at the top as we move down. I felt terrible and immediately he starts screaming. All the Indians assume it is because he is terrified of escalators but really he's just upset that we left him! I'm trying to tell him to just stay there and I will ride back up and get him while in the meantime a huge crowd begins to gather to watch and take pictures of the spectacle. When I get to the bottom, I set the stroller down and go to get on the "up" one- which of course stops working right then! The guards are all trying to help fix it, Bennett is crying, and everyone is taking pictures of us!! The guard keeps saying, "wait Madam, one minute, we will take care of it" and I'm trying to tell them that I will just walk up the steps but they won't let me. Finally, they get it moving and then make me wait at the bottom as the guard races to the top to help the crying little boy and rides Bennett back to the bottom. When he gets to the bottom, I tried to hug him and console him but he is so mad that he yells, "I am SO mad at you!! WHY did you leave me there?" as everyone continues to take our picture and watch him have a fit!!

The only thing I could do was exit quickly and laugh about it! I'm sure all those people who watched it all go down are still laughing about the crazy lady and all her kids creating a huge scene at the mall!!