Yesterday......

We were involved in a serious accident after I picked the girls up from the studio....the van is probably going to be totaled, but thankfully we walked away with fairly minor injuries (burns from airbags, bruises, cuts, back aches, etc)....I had Hannah, Em, Sophie and the baby with me....things would have been much worse had we been in a car or even the minivan....a landscape truck coming the opposite way lost a huge auger off the bed of its trailer and it came flying into the front end of the van. Our guardian angels must have been watching out of us....the van didn't roll, I didn't hit the bed of the truck that was in front of me (which would have probably decapitated both me and Hannah) and the person behind me didn't rearend us, the windows didn't shatter.....the squad that responded said that they were amazed at how little we were injured, saying that they would have been using the jaw of life to recover bodies had I been driving something smaller...

The auger hit the front corner/driver side.......ripped off the bumper, pulled it under the car, destroying the wheel/rod,everything on the driver side. Thankfully the truck stopped (it took him a few minutes, he ended up about 1/2 mile down the road).....there is definitely some neglicence (sp) involved....he either didn't secure it properly (his fault) or the pin assembly was bad (company's fault).

I am trying not to be angry.....after all, the 4 things I can't replace walked away from it....Will and Sophie only had slight redness from their carseat straps and Em just banged her knee (apparently when she saw Will's carseat flying up as my body was being thrust back against the driver seat...his carseat was directly behind me.....she instinctively tried to stand up to grab it with her seatbelt on so her knee had a "rug burn" from the back of the seat)....emotionally they are torn up (you should hear Sophie in her little 2 year old voice tell about the accident...of course according to her version,the fact that she fell in the grass when she got out of the car is worse than the crash)....Em swears she will never learn to drive....Sophie and Will tossed and fussed all night....wonder just how much they remember. Hannah's face is burned and bruised from the airbag and my arm is pretty torn up (those darn airbags eject VERY forcefully!) and I can't really use it, makes taking care of the kids and house almost impossible. Poor Will, I can't hold him or nurse him on my right side....guess we will be spending a lot of time laying in bed having nursing-fests!

On a bright note, I got a glimpse at the brighter side of my fellow man yesterday.... three WONDERFUL people stopped to help us.....the guy in front of me, the guy behind us, and a lady coming down the hill behind the landscape truck. The guy in front of me put the kids in his truck and pulled them over in a nearby driveway to keep them out of traffic, the guy behind us flagged traffic (there were almost 2 more accidents immediately following mine one car ended up doing a complete 360 to avoid hitting into the van and then minutes later someone almost rear ended us as they flew up around the curve). The woman gave the kids water bottles to calm them down and held the baby for me since I couldn't move my right arm. The responding squad had great people in it and two state troopers loaded everything they could from the van into their patrol cars and drove us home.