Coming Home, Being Thankful

I drove to Virginia early last week with just the kids. It’s been a tradition for many years for the moms and the kids to gather the week before our annual July Fourth party and spend time prepping for the party, corralling small children and laughing at nonsensical things.

The husbands generally join us later in the week as soon as their jobs make it possible.

So it was this week.

And for the ride home Riley is staying with Emma a few extra days and driving the car Kevin drove up home.

Which is why we were driving home Sunday with six kids instead of one and two grown ups instead of one.

Exactly half way home, with Kevin behind the wheel this time, an odd shaking began in the car. A crazy-loud helicopter-like sound surrounded us and Kevin artfully maneuvered the suburban to the side of the interstate.

The temperature gauge registered 103 degrees.

The back of the suburban was filled to the heights of the roof with our stuff and a giant trunk from the farm. The jack was underneath all that stuff. Naturally.

The kids rallied beautifully. It was sweet. Really sweet. They chose not to complain about the heat or the scary proximity to other cars careening past our stopped one.

Kevin and I unloaded our possessions onto the grass. Bergen located the jack. We all had a bit of a learning curve as in all our seven years of owning the suburban, it has never had a flat tire.

Miraculously, about ten or fifteen minutes after Kevin sweating and preparing to change the tire, jacking up the car and all that stuff, a police officer pulls up behind us.

He invites me and the kids to sit in his expedition’s air conditioned interior as he helps Kevin with the tire.

(By the way, for the entire length of this day, Otto is wearing his felt eagle mask we made this week.)

Time passes. Lots more sweating for the guys outside. It’s six o’clock on a Sunday evening. The access to lower the spare is completely broken. In other words, the spare is entirely inaccessible After several phone calls, it is clear there are no real options for repairing this tire this evening.

It’s a waiting game and other than waiting in a suburban overnight on the side of an interstate with five young children, we really had one choice – get a hotel room for the evening and fix the problem in the morning.

Officer Gary was incredibly kind and helpful.

And there we were, five children and me in the backseat of Officer Gary’s patrol SUV, double buckled, a three year old in my lap, unsafe, uncomfortable, driving away from our car with all of our stuff on the edge of a highway.

And at that moment Mosely reaches for my hand, intertwines our fingers together, looks up into my eyes, smiles and whispers to me, “We need to write this in our thankful notebook.”