I am betrayed by technology

This week I have the privilege of farming out 3/4 of my children. The oldest 1/4 I always deliver to the custody of the state... a small yellow bus takes him away to the Child Indoctrination Center every weekday. The middle 2 and the baby generally hang around the house, eating rocks and fighting over identical cups. But this week, Vacation Bible School! You may remember, if you're an especially remembery reader (it's my blog, I can create words), that last year I cried when they went to VBS and had relatively deep thoughts. This year, I was less sentimental, probably because the sibling wars have been especially noisy of late. So yesterday I dropped them off and did a little jig, metaphorically.

Now, I don't go places without my GPS. It's old, and I haven't been able to update it in years, because of a glitch, so it still calls Russia the USSR, and it has Berlin divided, and it pretty much is unaware of Lee's Summit. But basically, it gets me places. Before I had it, I mostly drove in circles on the verge of tears and eventually called the MOG to explain which way was left. Stuff like that. But then we were given this and all of the sudden I was an independent woman, and I could go to Walmart whenever I felt like it. I was drunk with power.

So this morning I left with only 20 minutes to spare, which would have been fine if Pierce (the GPS) had been feeling up to par. I got in the car and backed out of the driveway, only to find a greyed-out screen when I got to the stop sign. Now, it is not hard to get to the VBS. There's basically only one way. But I faintly remembered it course-correcting my previous route, so I thought, "Eh, I'll turn left." Eventually it woke up, but it had me somewhere else, traveling down a highway I was not on, and evidently driving through forests and bodies of water, or aimlessly across lanes. "Turn left NOW," Pierce would say, as I passed a guardrail over an overpass.

15 minutes later I was somewhere else, with trees and unfamiliar roads. It's always helpful, in those scenarios, to have a couple of miniature geniuses in the backseat. "Well. Why didn't you wait for the GPS to boot up?" they ask. "What if we drove into a hole?" another one offers. "Mom, you should sing." I used my Michelle-Duggar-having-a-calm-psychotic-break voice to explain that I was lost, and everyone should try to be as quiet as possible, forever, immediately.

I hard-booted the GPS multiple times, holding it up as a sacrifice to God, hoping for an accurate signal. Finally, it found us. "Turn around as soon as possible," it said. Right.

We got there. 10 minutes late. Considering that we came via Narnia, not bad at all.