Flat-out awesome

After Will came back inside from getting the newspaper this morning he alerted me to the fact that all the windows on my van were open.  Also it was raining pretty hard.  Oops.  I ran out and closed the windows, noticing in the process that a large portion of the inside of the car was soaked, including the girls' carseats.  Great.  I made a mental note to head out a bit early on the way to preschool so I could try to dry the car out a little, and went back inside to continue coaxing Emily to eat faster, take another bite, OH MY GOD please just eat your breakfast we need to go to preschool now!

I did, in fact, manage to get everyone ready and out the door early.  By then the rain had cleared up and I took some time to mop up some of the water and put towels down over the seats where people were going to be sitting.  By some miracle, as I turned on the car and backed out of the driveway the clock said 8:49.  Usually it says 8:52 by the time we get on our way.  Yay!

My sense of accomplishment quickly faded, to be replaced by confusion as I headed off down the street and noticed my car was shaking pretty hard and was tough to steer.  All of a sudden I remembered how a guy had come up to me yesterday in a parking lot to let me know my front right tire looked a bit low.  I had thanked him, then driven off thinking that I should put some air in it when I got a chance.  I was also wondering if I would even be able to figure out how to do such a thing once I got to a place that had air.  Perhaps I should've put that higher on my to-do list.  So I slowly drove back home and got out to assess the situation.

Yep.  That's a flat tire.

The first order of business was to get Emily (who was now late, dang it!) to preschool.  Luckily Will works only about a mile away, so he came home to drive Emily to preschool for me.  With the most pressing issue taken care of, I turned my attention to getting the car fixed.  Whenever something goes wrong with my car and all I can do is just stand there and wait to be rescued I feel so annoyingly girly.  My Dad taught me how to do all of this basic car care stuff when I was 16 but heck if I remember any of it now.  At the same time I thought I remembered hearing that the spare tire on my car was stored underneath it.  Ew.  I was SO not crawling under there.  Girliness won out and I quickly decided I couldn't take care of this myself.  But do I call AAA or a tire store?  AAA could put on my spare but they couldn't fix my real tire or sell me a new one.  A tire store wouldn't come out to get me, but they could fix my problem if I could get to them.  So I called both, and soon I had a filled but loudly leaking tire and Charlotte and I were carefully driving to the tire store with the AAA guys following to make sure we got there without having a blowout.

The tire store took my car and told me they'd have things taken care of in 1-1.5 hours.  Luckily they had some crayons and a coloring book for Charlotte.  I was dreading the wait, but my sweet little girl just sat there and quietly colored with me for 45 minutes straight.  By then the tire guys had patched my tire and I walked out of there just in time to go pick up Emily, having only dropped $22 on this whole ordeal AND with compliments from the other waiting customers on how cute and well-behaved my daughter is.  It was amazing.  I don't even feel like I wasted a morning because it gave me a chance to play with and focus on Charlotte for a good chunk of time, something I don't do as often as I should.

Plus tonight was MY night (i.e. Wednesday, i.e. Will comes straight home after work to watch the girls and I get to head out BY MYSELF to Zumba and my Weight Watchers meeting) and I lost the 0.2 pounds I gained last week without too much effort, so today shaped up to be a pretty awesome day, flat tire and all!