Of course

Our happy day birthday dinner with Doug (half-price appetizers at the Yard House, outdoor patio seating, good beer to enjoy–at least for Doug) ended with our car dying outside of Doug’s office where we had gone to let Mercy use the bathroom before heading home. Luckily we had both cars with us (and thank God for AAA Plus), but the whole thing still involved a significant amount of waiting, switching car-seats, and, by the end of the evening, two very overtired kids and two crabby parents. It wasn’t the birthday bliss that I had hoped for, to say the least.

My mood shifted at one point in the evening when I was standing next to Doug’s car (the functioning vehicle) at the gas station. We were waiting for the AAA guy who was running late, and I was holding Aaron perched on top of my pregnant belly while Mercy stood in between the two front seats, singing into the rear-view mirror using a little cross necklace as her microphone. The truck finally arrived and, while the AAA guy worked on hooking up the car, I noticed Doug walking toward the street. At some point, I realized that he was getting far enough back to capture the scene that we were with his cell phone camera. For some reason, that diffused the whole thing for me and I just started to laugh.