Confessions of the Real Me: The Day I Got Stuck in a Museum Exhibit

Confessions of the Real Me. i series on my blog where i share the not so perfect bits and pieces of my life. because in reality…our lives are not always the perfect pictures that we share on social media channels. i know mine isn’t….but i’ll take it.

The Day I Got Stuck in a Museum Exhibit

it happened with the best intentions. however, those intensions quickly turned into shear panic.

sometimes people make bad decisions….or should i say, sometimes i make bad decisions. i'm a mom, and sometimes decision making is clouded with child rearing, wanting to make my kids happy and lack of sleep.

during spring break, i took my boys to one of our favorite children's museums. we spent the entire day there and were having a blast. as we were wrapping up our visit, we wanted to stop by one last exhibit we hadn't seen yet. my older two boys went together with their friends to see one part of the exhibit, and i took my littlest, Vann, to explore the other side. at our last stop, we found ourselves in a room with a game call Belch-a-Frog.

Belch-a-Frog  is a game where basically, you shoot fist-sized plastic balls from a froggie shooter into holes on a game board. the balls that make it into the holes, gather below the game board and roll into a gathering basket where you can grab another one and play again.

when we arrived at the game, there were only two balls to play with. once my son shot those two balls into the holes, there were no more balls to play with.

we checked the basket below the game….the balls that fell into the holes, should have been in the basket. we looked, but there were NO BALLS.

where did they go?

i looked down into one of the holes on the game board and to my surprise, saw that there were about thirty balls stuck inside the game. the incline of the game's  bottom wasn't tilted enough for the balls to roll down into the gathering basket. thus, all the balls we just sitting there.

my son wanted to play, and since it looked like a easy fix, i figured i could reach down and brush the balls into the gathering basket. super simple.  

so i thought…...

the holes on the game board were all different sizes, so i decided to reach down the largest hole…as they weren't that big and my arms aren't that small. but i didn't think i'd have any problem reaching down and pushing the balls. i'm tall and have long arms.

WRONG.

as i reached my arm down the hole, i realized the balls were a lot further down then i thought...and the hole was smaller than i thought. or maybe my arm was just bigger than i thought. whatever the case, i felt the sides of the hole around my arm get tighter and tighter. however, i continued to reach farther and farther.

BINGO! i finally felt all the balls, and then brushed them towards the gathering basket. you could hear a rush of balls rolling down the incline. AWESOME! i fixed the game. woo who!

AND THEN……..

i went to pull my arm out and nothing. i yanked again. nothing. i stood up high and pulled as hard as i could…it really hurt, but my arm didn't budge. my heart immediately stopped. MY ARM WAS STUCK!!??? seriously.

i looked around and no one was around except for my son, who didn't even realize what was happening. thank goodness, because i am pretty sure if anyone would have been there, security would have already been called and i would have been the laughing stock of the entire museum.

images of rescue crews and ambulances coming to cut my arm free, flashed through my mind. and the thought of the evening news featuring a story about "A Mom Who Got Rescued from Getting Stuck in a Museum Exhibit" started to freak me out. WHAT WAS I GOING TO DO!!!!

my heart was racing….I ALMOST PANICKED.

then, a little voice told me to stop.

calm down…..

and stop trying to yank my arm out of the hole. the weird thing is...at that moment, i remembered watching a story on the news about a man who….gulp…got a "body part" stuck in the water jet of a hotel pool and rescue crews had to chisel him free. because that "part" swelled up so much he became stuck. i know….gag. i'm dying right now as i am not sure i should be revealing this part of the story….but that is what happened.

anyways, i realized that if i kept trying to pull my arm out, my arm would swell up and just make things worse. so i decided to take a different approach. with my free hand, i used my fingers to push my "arm fat" down and away from the sides of the hole. then i wedged my fingers into the whole next to my arm and yanked my arm as hard as i could.

OOOOOOOOUUUUCH!

and YAY! my arm painfully pulled out of the hole. i didn't even care that it hurt SO BAD. i just wanted to be free, and at that moment, i finally was.

what. a. relief.

within seconds, another woman and a child entered into the room to play with the Belch-a-Frog game. i grabbed my son by the hand and mumbled to the lady "whatever you do, don't stick your arm down the hole" and got the heck out of there. i grabbed my other boys and left the museum.

never again will you see me sticking my arm into a museum exhibit, or into any sort of hole for that matter. and just in case you want to see the aftermath of what getting your arm stuck in a museum exhibit looks like…i'll show you…..

the end.

wanna read more Confessions of the Real Me? 

Confessions of the Real Me: Picture Perfect Mom?  |  Free Printable