Hooray for Friday!

I'm especially happy that this week is coming to an end. On Tuesday, as I've already shared with many, I had a little accident. No one was injured, just a poor unsuspecting mailbox....make that a brick mailbox worth $1200! I think when I do things like this I try to see the humor in them and like to share with others to make me feel better. I'm still learning that my husband does NOT like to share his mishaps and rarely finds humor in them.


It seemed innocent enough, I was headed to a baby shower in a neighborhood not far from (but much nicer) than my own. It was at my cousin's new home and although her driveway could have easily fit 8-10 cars and was completely empty upon arrival, I decided that I would be thoughtful and park on the street to let others park on the driveway. The problem: her house is at the end of a culdesac and so the street is rounded AND I couldn't see the curb at all as there was too much snow. I was one minute late, and so in a hurry as I HATE being late. I was trying to back up to park and suddenly I heard that awful, unexpected THUD! I'm not sure what words came out of my mouth but I'm thinking it's a good thing I had no children on board. I looked in my mirror (too bad I hadn't done that to begin with!) and saw a HUGE brick mailbox. OOPS.

I quickly decided against parking on the street, parked in the driveway and hurried over to see what damage I had done. The mailbox was definitely missing a few bricks, but didn't look too bad. I hurried up to the door, praying that I wouldn't know the people and luckily a young guy about my age opened the door. When I get nervous I say REALLY dumb things so it went something like this:

Me: Ummm....I have some bad news for you.
The Guy: (says nothing, just looked at me like "who are you?")
Me: I sort of hit your mailbox and there's some bricks falling off...I'm really sorry...I feel really dumb. Can I give you my name and number and you can bill me or whatever?
The Guy: (looking totally dumbfounded goes and grabs a pen) Here you can write your name down but I probably won't get around to fixing it until spring...I'll have my contractor come and look at it. (Did I mention these are BRAND NEW HOMES, he probably only used his precious mailbox like 10 times)
Me: Okay....I'm sooo sorry.
The Guy: I just appreciate you telling me and not just leaving.

So, the entire baby shower I'm thinking, "I should have seen what it did to the back of my car." "Should I tell Layne or just try to take care of it secretly?" Well, I can't hide anything from ANYONE, so as soon as I got home I told Layne all about it. There is a small dent in the bumper of our car, but I'm thinking that that's what bumpers are for. I had a hard time sleeping that night.....just felt dumb and BAD for it all.....by the next morning I kind of blew it off.....until Wednesday night, the GUY called me. I thought it was sort of funny because he said, "Hi, ummm you hit my mailbox the other night!" I'm thinking, "Yep, that's me." Anyway, he said that the contractor came and looked at it and it wasn't just some broken bricks...the entire mailbox was bent and leaning and they would have to replace the whole thing....it would be like $1100-1200! At that point I told him I would be calling my insurance afterall and getting back to him.

The great news is that our insurance will cover 100% and there is NO deductible!! Ah, my lucky day! The not so great news, I got to share that story with the insurance and it's just even sillier when they start asking you how it happened, and they have to record this stuff. I told the lady from the beginning that she might find it funny and I heard her snicker a few times. When I called the GUY back to let him know my insurance would take care of it, I got his voice mail which said, "This is Dr. Harper, please leave me a message." Oh...that's who would have a $1200 mailbox! Maybe he thought making it really big like that and encasing it in bricks would prevent it from getting hit or damaged....HA HA HA.

Just for the record I've only had 3 accidents.....and all of them involved parking! :)

I'm also glad that this week is coming to a close because Layne left Wednesday morning for San Antonio, Texas for trainings. I have to say, my kids have been really pretty good. I took them to story time on Thursday and they got to meet Santa. Mattie completely surprised me because Santa and Mrs. Clause invited kids to go up and sing with them and I looked up and there was Mattie singing all the words to "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer." From what I could tell he was even singing the right words......he's always singing the wrong words just to be silly. He sat on Santa's lap and told him that he wanted a "toy eyeball"....Santa looked at me like since I'm his mom I should know why he'd ask for that. I just smiled. Matt is a goofball.

The kids helped me make pizza tonight and we used the miniature pizza pans that my mom let us use as kids. They LOVED it. It was a big mess, but big fun. After dinner I was thinking that I had done pretty good this time with Layne being gone....what a dumb thought. As soon as I thought that, Hyrum whacked his head really hard on the cupboard. While I was holding him to try and get him to stop screaming, Kennedy bumped into Matt and he spilled his water and got his shirt wet (that is like a fate worse than death for Mattie to get his clothes wet!) So, Matthew starts screaming. So I'm holding Hyrum who is screaming, listening to Mattie who is screaming and WHILE I'm trying to get Mattie a new shirt out of the dryer, Kennedy (who had put off going potty ALL day) starts screaming and crying that she is going to poop her pants! For that 3 minutes I was really wishing that Layne was home, but we survived. We are looking forward to Layne taking a few days off before Christmas!