Cruisin' -- Part 1

November 6 was my mom's sixtieth birthday.  In Korea it's a really big deal to turn sixty.  The three traditional "milestone" birthdays are 100 days (baek-il), first birthday (chut-dol), and sixtieth birthday (hwan-gap).  No Sweet Sixteen, no rite of passage into adulthood, no over-the-hill.  Just a big fifty-nine-year gap between big birthday bashes.

It's normal for the children of the birthday-girl (or birthday-boy) to give a gift that puts to shame everybody else's gifts to their parents' sixtieth birthdays, and it's not unheard of to throw big dinner receptions, buy a luxury car, or send the parents on a trip, on the children's tab.  So when it became my mom's hwan-gap, my husband and I decided that we'd take my parents on a cruise.

So we went on a four-night cruise to Catalina Island and Ensenada, Mexico.  We took the kids and my parents, and we had a great time for the most part.  The food was great, the entertainment was entertaining, and there was free(!) childcare until 10pm.