First Day of Summer - Pools, Hotdogs, Ice Cream, & Good Samaritans

Today is a great day to start a blog!  Not, at all, for any of the reasons I have wanted to start a blog, but I’m writing nonetheless.  I will write next time about the reasons I thought our lives might be interesting enough to blog about, but today, this will be completely unrelated…  but possibly not a complete waste of your time.

Today is the first day of summer and it has come with all kinds of excitement.  We’ve done some typical, fun, summer activities but topped off the day with some unexpected, non-fun, non-summer….  Crap.  I’m just being honest.  It’s crap.  Not literally.  It’s not, in fact, feces, but it’s still…  well, you know.  In a house with two young boys, I feel like that distinction is necessary.

In true cool Mama fashion I had great “first day of summer plans” of blowing up the baby pool (even if it leaves the hubby and me light-headed), hotdogs on the grill for lunch, and a run for ice cream cones.  All of which we did!  Great!  Our kids think they have a super cool pool – check; provide fun, but nutritionally lackluster meal that everyone loves – check; stuff everyone’s tummy’s with even more summer junk food with chocolate on top – check!  We are incredible parents!

Then back to reality.  Daddy must go to work.  The boys and I begin an afternoon of errands in our recently unreliable car.  After some “car issues” (since I don’t know what else to call it) I dutifully watched all the gauges, reasoning through the readings with countless flawed assumptions until….  It happened.  A little light started blinking.  30 seconds later, there I was along the highway in 90+ degree heat with two young boys, and a car that won’t move an inch!  Some kind of transmission problem – boring!  We’re still trying to figure out exactly what’s going on, but I’m leaving that to my genius husband.  No really he’s a genius.  I don’t mean he’ll solve all the world’s problems or anything (afterall Oprah needs something to do), but he really is about as awesome as a man comes.  I’ll ramble on about that more later.

What I’m interested in now is what happened after I stopped along the road.  See, in our previous state of residence over a period of 10 to 15 years I’ve been stranded with a car in one way or another and handful of times, and the reaction (or lack thereof) of those passing by always surprised me.  The most memorable of these instances occurred when I was extremely pregnant with our first son (imagine a short girl with a regulation NBA basketball under her shirt), on a VERY cold winter morning.  I was driving my husband’s very large diesel truck.  As any normal pregnant woman would do, I forgot to unplug the truck before I backed out of the drive, therefore, also, forgetting to close the hood of the truck.  A tenth of a mile up the road, guess what happened.  I got a windshield full of blue truck hood!  It didn’t double back, but still flew up with such force that it was stuck.  In the below zero temps (maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t, but it makes the story better than just saying it was cold doesn’t it?) before the sun was up, there I was literally hanging from the hood with my belly hanging over the radiator and feet dangling just below the bumper.  Let’s all take a moment to picture this…  It’s ok to laugh at me.  Ok?  Guess where my neighbors were!  Watching from their front door as they drank their steaming hot coffee!!  I was just as angry about the lack of response from our own neighbors as I was my mistakes that led to the current predicament.  I did find a very large, very heavy monkey wrench in the toolbox.  What was I going to do with the monkey wrench, you ask?  I beat the crap out of the hinges on the hood!  I had flashbacks to high school softball, and I was swinging at the plate!  By then there was no hope of getting help.  I mean, who is going to approach a pregnant lady wielding such a large chunk of medal in that manner?  I’ll tell you who wouldn’t!  The people that lived 3 houses down from us!!  After a few  intervals of wailing away on the hinges and thawing my hands in the cab, the hinges gave; I closed the hood, waved at my warm neighbors, and started my 1 hour drive to work.  That is what happens when you break down in that state.

Do you know what happens in THIS state when you’re stuck alongside the road?  In a matter of 10 minutes 4 cars stopped to help!!  3 of those 4 drivers crawled under the car to give their two cents.  I won’t consider the difference of traffic, time of day, the fact that I had two young children, or any other facts.  The fact that matters to me is that people stopped to help.  We love Kentucky already, but every day we are here, even the “bad” ones, we find reasons to love it more.  If you know which state we moved from, don’t be offended.  We disliked it for more reasons than the lack of good Samaritans.  Just kidding…  kind of.

Again, next time I’ll fill you in on “Our Little Slice of Heaven” and why I think I need to write about it.  (I’ll give you a hint, much like what I assume much social media sharing is, I just want to brag).