Ashley's birthday party and eating a baby octopus

Alright, it took me long enough but...

So one of my kids, Ashley, had her birthday party last Wednesday. I knew it was going to be semi ridiculous from the get-go because Ashley is a very girlie girl. Her mother constantly dresses her up in pink and in really nice and girlie clothing. Also, she likes attention and loves to try and hold my hand and such, which I don't really let her do so much as I'm still getting comfortable enough with my kids.

Well, the day got more ridiculous when, on the day of her party, I saw her wearing a pink frilly princess dress and a tiara. I kid you not.

She wore that. To school. All day.

Not going to lie, I think that her mother is not preparing her well for the real world.

Anyway, there was a lot of good food to be had. Ashley's mother brought in spaghetti, fried chicken, some sort of Korean dish with some weird type of noodle, beef, peppers and onions that I really like, fruit and juice. Oh and those cupcakes you see. Yeah, each one had an edible thing on it with each students names, including mine:

That must have been ludicrously expensive.

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I went to a restaurant that served something called "shabu shabu," which is Japanese style food. Basically what happens each table has a stove built into it. A pot is brought with a special kind of broth to heat up. In the mean time you go to a buffet where there are raw vegetables, noodles and meat and seafood. Once the broth is boiling you put in the food to cook for a few minutes. So this is what I decided to attempt to eat:

So on the plate you can see raw beef, lettuce, mushrooms, cuddle fish, and being held by the chopsticks is a raw baby octopus.

Now, I'm not one to back out of trying new things. However, once the baby octopus was cooked through I had second thoughts...

Can you see why I was starting to back out?

Well, here I am about to eat that sucker:

So the ending to that particular story was that I ate that thing whole. I did not like it. I probably won't ever do it again. The only good thing about doing so is that I'm less afraid to eat Korean food I'm unfamiliar with as I think "I ate a baby octopus whole. I can eat anything." Speaking of which, I'll leave you with the last creature I also ate at the dinner:



-AALA