Sunday, January 23, 2011

Our scary week

Occasionally DH has to ditch telecommuting and actually commute up to the office for meetings and face time and, I'm told, dinner at Friday's. Or maybe it was Chili's. At any rate, he was supposed to drive up last Tuesday. That being Massive Ice Storm Day. The roads were clear enough out here in the western badlands of NJ, and I got in to work OK, so he got going. A couple hours later, he calls my cell to say first, that he's fine, and second, the car went off the road entirely and flipped over, and he's waiting for the police and ambulance.

My initial reaction, because I'm not one of those graceful heroines in the movies, was unprintable. And then I kept asking if he were OK, as though examining him over the phone was going to do the same good as, say, an actual doctor doing it in person. Way to react, there.

This, more or less, was his description: He was on one highway, it seemed fine, he switched to the next one, it seemed slippery, he started to get out of the left lane, it spun out of control. It may have only flipped once, or maybe more than once. He was very, very grateful to have been wearing his seatbelt. He was also grateful that he'd taken the car seats out of the back before he left (the idea being that his mother would be picking the kids up from school for me, so I wouldn't have to duck out of work early), because that was how he got out of the upside-down car -- through the back seat. Not too sure how he would've done that had the car seats been in the way.

Also, instead of being out a car and two car seats, we're just out a car.

Because oh boy is that car totaled. At least that's what the tow truck guy said when I called him to check on getting DH's laptop/suitcase/etc. out of it. And the insurance folks told us flat out, start car shopping. I have not seen the car, or pictures of it, and I'm guessing I don't want to, ever, or this whole thing is going to come home to me in a way that it has not and I will have a breakdown of some sort.

A nice couple going to have lunch saw the accident happen and the guy jumped down to try and help DH out of the car, and then they sat and waited with him till the cops got there. Anonymous couple, you have my gratitude, because DH was especially freaked at that point. Then DH went to the ER to get checked out, just in case, which of course took basically the rest of the day, but the tests were fine. He's since had some stiffness, but otherwise more or less good.

I spent the day at work basically not working, running point between him and his bosses and his mother and letting my bosses know what was up, in case I needed to leave, although I couldn't figure out whether that was the right move. 1. I probably would've spun out exactly where he did. 2. I also probably would've gotten massively lost in upstate NY, even with a GPS, because that's a special talent of mine. If he'd been admitted to the hospital, of course, that there is a different story.

The thing we couldn't figure out was how to get him home, and a colleague of his solved that by driving up and getting him, on the grounds that it would've been on the way to the office anyway. We owe him, big time, and he wouldn't even let us feed him dinner. I think we managed to shove a bottled water into his hands before he left. He did see the car, when the two of them stopped by the yard to get the laptop and suitcase, and he seemed pretty freaked about it in his own right. He said DH was lucky.

Which yes, I think so. It seems unreal to me that he could've walked away from that kind of wreck with basically not a scratch. Consumer Reports said about 33 percent of car rollovers result in fatalities. Scarier in retrospect. I feel profoundly grateful that he's home, and that our biggest worry right now is getting another car.

I am sad about that wrecked car. It was the first one we bought together, when we were engaged and living in Florida, and it had a sunroof and leather seats and cruising down A1A in it was a nice way to spend a sunny afternoon. I was amazed we could even afford a car so nice.

No more leather seats for us, I think, what with the years of juice boxes and playground dirt and beach sand and who knows what else ahead of us. We just started looking at cars yesterday, and we were looking at (shudder!) SUVs. Small SUVs. Non-ostentatious SUVs. Big enough for a family, not a soccer team.

In the meantime, I am driving my car very very carefully, because I've never felt that luck was an infinite thing.

Monday, January 3, 2011

No more wandering

Kiddo's eyes, that is. It's been more than a month and we haven't seen them drift out once. The redness seems about gone, too. And the eye doctor is quite satisfied with his progress. I guess you'd call this an optimum result.

He seems to have forgotten the whole thing, which might be for the best. I will be perfectly happy if the only thing we ever have to worry about with his eyes again is the inevitable glasses, since Mommy and Daddy are both four-eyed types.

I can't say he's behaving any differently -- he seemed to be doing well in school anyway, and he still won't eat dinner unless dinner involves pizza and/or chicken nuggets. But the point, I think, is that this would've eventually affected his behavior if his eyes had continued to deteriorate. So the timing was dead on.

Now if we could just get this kid to use the potty regularly, we'd be set.