When Bad Could Have Been Way Worse

I’ve been really slacking writing blog posts lately and there are a few reasons: Scandal (I had to hurry up and finish watching season 3), Shutterfly (they were doing a 40% off everything that expired the other day), residency, twins.

But…I’ve had a few posts planned that I wanted to write this week, and still will. The one I’d planned for today about traveling with twins will have to wait because I have to tell you what happened around 2:00 today.

My mom and I took a little road trip with the twins this week to visit my aunt, uncle, cousin, and grandmother in the southern part of the state. The babies were awesome the whole way. It’s only 3 hours, but still…the babies could have screamed the entire way. We had two great days in the mountains and headed back early this afternoon.

Around 2:00, we were out in the very middle of nowhere, and I really do mean the middle of nowhere. There wasn’t a town for 25 miles, no rest areas, no cell service, no cattle, no ranches, no nothing at all. I had been snoozing and little miss Neala started squeaking so mom woke me up to see if she was ok. She was fine (come to find out later that she had a GIANT full diaper). A few minutes later there was a very loud “thunk” on the back passenger side of the car and it felt like we had blown a tire or something. Mom is an amazing driver and very, very calmly started pumping the brakes to slow down as gracefully as possible. She put her blinker on and started to pull off the road. Shortly thereafter, we felt another clunk and I looked out the window to see the entire wheel rolling up beside us, up the embankment, and back down right about the time we scraped to a halt. I say scraped, because the part of the car that the wheel attaches to literally scraped along the pavement (I’m sure there were sparks flying) until we came to a complete stop. The wheel had sheared off at the bolts! As far as we could tell the tire was not flat, and there was no real damage to it, but the entire dang thing just flew off! The babies were silent through the entire thing!

See! There’s nothing left!!

Luckily, and thankfully, there was a family driving two cars traveling behind us and they immediately pulled over to help us. We spent almost no time on the side of the road, a place I’ve been terrified of my entire lift, and they drove us to the nearest town. Once we finally got into cell phone service, we called various husbands, dads, brothers, grandfathers to come to the rescue (that’s really just 3 people…my hubby, my dad, and my brother).  We spent the next 2 hours chilling out with the babies in the gas station turned ice cream shop in San Antonio, New Mexico, population…maybe 10? We took over one of two booths in the place with our carseats, diaper bag, breast pump, diapers, etc. Don’t worry, I took some really quality photos in case you were having a difficult time imagining what our afternoon looked like. You’re welcome.

And this is where we spent our afternoon.

It was a lovely place, really.

We were all so comfortable.

Especially Neala.

So, basically, our day could have been much worse. We could have flipped the car, thank you mom for saving the day. Those nice people might not have been right behind us and stopped. It could have been raining. The babies could have been screaming. Any number of things could have made our afternoon way, way worse. But…we are fine, the babies are fine, and the ice cream was tasty!

Daddy was SO happy we made it home safe and sound!