It's been quite a day around here. This morning, Matt and I got up early and left the girls with my mom so that we could drive about 50 minutes from here and look at a medical exam table for my gestating midwifery practice. We were trying to time it so that I could feed Eve and we would be back before she needed to nurse again (she's pretty reliable about eating every 2-1/2 to 3 hours).
Things were going great as we drove down the highway; I had just said to Matt, "This is really a lovely drive when nobody is screaming at you from the backseat." And he had said, "Oh, it is, and it's such a nice day, finally," or something like that. And then suddenly our car's engine cut out and the speedometer dropped to zero.
Luckily Matt was driving, and noticed right away, and safely guided the car to the shoulder, where it stubbornly refused to start up again or do much of anything. We called AAA and then proceeded to spend the next hour and a half waiting for the tow truck. Not exactly the kind of "time alone together without the kids" that we'd occasionally fantasized about recently, but, well, it was the kind we got. As I've mentioned, I'm trying to be more focused on the present moment than worrying about the future, so instead of getting impatient with the seemingly wasted time (and the sure outlay of money that is to come), I chose instead to try to find as many things as I could to be grateful for about the situation:
Luckily Matt was driving, and noticed right away, and safely guided the car to the shoulder, where it stubbornly refused to start up again or do much of anything. We called AAA and then proceeded to spend the next hour and a half waiting for the tow truck. Not exactly the kind of "time alone together without the kids" that we'd occasionally fantasized about recently, but, well, it was the kind we got. As I've mentioned, I'm trying to be more focused on the present moment than worrying about the future, so instead of getting impatient with the seemingly wasted time (and the sure outlay of money that is to come), I chose instead to try to find as many things as I could to be grateful for about the situation:
1. That Matt was driving and not me. It would have taken me considerably longer to realize the engine had died, and I probably would have been stranded in the middle of the road.
2. That we didn't have the girls with us (and that it wasn't just me and them). If we hadn't needed all of our cargo space for the exam table, we would have brought them along, and it was a long, hot wait in the sun in a dead car. Not to mention the fact that we wouldn't have all been able to squeeze into the tow truck to ride back to Cedar Rapids, and so someone would have had to drive out to pick us up, and the girls' carseats were locked in the Neon and the keys were with us.
3. That it was "just" engine trouble and not an accident--so nobody was hurt.
4. That it happened just outside Iowa City, rather than on our way to Galena (an hour and a half away, where there was another exam table and some other equipment that we were planning to go see until we found this more local option) or on our way to see Matt's family (which is our next anticipated trip, about 3 hours away), both of which would have taken us out of free towing range.
5. That at the last minute, I opted for AAA "Gold," giving me 100 miles of free towing rather than 5. We were probably 30 miles from home when it happened.
6. That Matt and I were together, since the AAA membership is technically in my name only and so if it were just him, he likely wouldn't have been covered.
7. That if we have to be without one of our cars for awhile, it's not the gas-sipping Neon that Matt drives 20 miles to work and back every day.
8. That I wasn't on my way to a birth in the middle of the night.
9. That the weather was nice, making our stranding a not-too-unpleasant one.
10. That my family rallied around us--my brother came to pick us up, my sister and my mom entertained the girls, and I'm hoping my dad will lend us his station wagon to make a second attempt to pick up this exam table. Days like this are why we moved back to the midwest!
Throw in general, "two-children-under-two" chaos, needing to go grocery shopping, today being the last day to lobby Verizon about my phone that's still not working, and Matt having to head off to work shortly after we got back, and everybody was a little bit frazzled by the end of it. And, we have to wait until Monday or Tuesday for an estimate on the car. While it's easy to borrow trouble and worry about how much it will cost, or wonder how we're going to manage when these types of calamities strike and our closest family is even 30 minutes away, I'm going to try to focus on the many things that went right today. Today, we were able to (mostly) get where we needed to go. Today, we needed help--and we got it. Today, we were all fed, clothed, housed, and loved. And that's more than enough for today.
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