So we had a little excitement on Halloween that I failed to mention yesterday. And by failed to mention, I mean that I was coming down from my massive forty-eight hour sugar high and way too tired to find all the words. If you visit here on a regular basis then you know that finding the words isn’t usually much of an issue.
Whether or not they are words worthy of five minutes of your life is debatable.
Saturday morning started with yet another mighty Rainbows soccer game. As we near the end of the season we are so proud that our team has really come together and embraced all that is good and true about playing soccer, as evidenced by the fact that they are all highly concerned about whose mom is bringing snacks to the game and what the aforementioned snacks will be and when, OH WHEN, can they eat the snacks? How long, O Lord, until snack time? HOW LONG?
We came home after the game with big plans to spend the day doing absolutely nothing but resting up for a big night of trick-or-treating. It was a gorgeous fall day so I spread out a blanket in the backyard and prepared to spend a leisurely afternoon perusing the vast quantity of Christmas catalogs that arrived in the mail that day because heaven forbid we get even one day of rest between holidays before we are bombarded with reminders that time is running out to get ready for the BEST CHRISTMAS EVER.
While I looked at the catalogs, Caroline was busy serving fake tea to Scout and Bruiser and P was attempting to make a homemade windshield for his Polaris out of plexiglass.
On a side note, I do not have a good feeling about the stability of this homemade windshield and if I could ask Santa for just one thing this year it would be to witness the moment that the plexiglass windshield falls apart and the ensuing non-Sunday school words that will come out of P’s mouth as it shatters on a ranch road somewhere in South Texas. That may seem like a twisted wish, but even P knows that there is nothing that brings me more delight than seeing him on a tirade about any sort of mechanical failure. It’s a sickness.
I’d just stumbled upon a page in the Garnet Hill catalog that featured this darling Buckets of Joy Advent Calendar and decided that I would recreate that crafty idea all by myself. I was ready to declare it Christmas Project ’09. However, when I showed it to P so he could admire all its cuteness and my thriftiness in declaring it Christmas Project ’09 instead of just buying it from the catalog, he totally killed my Martha buzz by asking, “Where on earth do you think we have room to hang 25 buckets in our house?”
“They’re not buckets. They’re tiny pails.”
“Ok. Where do we have room to hang 25 tiny pails in our house?”
Christmas Project ’09 was dead on arrival. Probably much like a homemade plexiglass windshield.
Anyway, I’d just found the tiny pails of Christmas joy when the phone rang. It was my sister and I could tell when I heard her voice that something was wrong. She said, “I don’t want you to freak out, but Mimi and Bops were just in a wreck on the way to our house.” My heart stopped for about three minutes until I was able to get Bops on the phone and hear that everything seemed to be okay even though they were taking Mimi to the hospital just to be on the safe side.
Apparently, they were heading down the street and a car didn’t feel the need to yield to oncoming traffic so it swerved around the car in front of it that was yielding and hit the passenger side of my dad’s car. And then, AND THEN, tried to speed away from the scene of the accident.
But what Mr. Hit and Run didn’t realize was that he’d just rammed into the Texas roadway equivalent of Batman. My dad had the presence of mind to block the driver’s getaway attempt and force him to turn into the closest parking lot where he was trapped like a rat. A dirty rat.
Mimi and Bops actually made it to our house in time to do some trick-or-treating later that night and didn’t seem too much worse for the wear. Of course it probably helped that I poured them each a glass of wine in a plastic cup to drink as we walked door to door. It was purely for medicinal purposes.
Because nobody ever said it was easy to be Batman. Or his sidekick.
Even on Halloween.