A bummer -- but not a tragedy

So just look at this sad little fender bender! The girl in charge was just a wee bit traumatized when she was rear-ended on her way to school, but frankly, I was relieved when I saw how little damage was done to her fun little get-around-town car.

I did have the classic racing-heart moment when my phone rang at 7:15 that morning -- exactly eighteen minutes after the girl in charge and the sunny girl left on a drizzly Thursday morning on their way to school. The voice on the other end of the line was a slightly breathless sunny girl, who said, "Hello -- Mama? OK, we'll all fine, no one's hurt, but . . . " You can figure out the rest of that conversation! It turns out that after picking up a carpool pal, the three girls were stopped in traffic when they were hit from behind by a distracted commuter who didn't even see the traffic stopped in front of her.

The sunny girl said, "she wants to talk to you," and handed the phone to the girl in charge, my calm, cool, collected girl, who promptly burst into tears. When I got to them ( about thirteen seconds before the pal's mom showed up and approximately seven minutes ahead of the husband, who courteously paused to put on pants before he flung himself into a car), I was just glad that everyone seemed to be OK, and our car had managed to escape major damage.

But . . .

The little red car is almost ten years old, so it didn't take much to total it. The insurance company was d-o-n-e, done with us, thrilled to write us a check that so completely did not cover the cost of buying a reliable-if-used kid car. And I tell you what: if it hadn't been so sad, I would have laughed my ass off at the husband, who kept saying after we got off the phone with the insurance company, "This can't be right . . . . This morning we had a car . . . "

So the quest began for a new get-around-town car, and we turn out to be total creatures of habit.

Not only did we replace the fun little red car with an almost identical fun little red car. . . .

. . . but the girl in charge raced to place her Golden Snitch back on the antenna -- right where it belongs.

Here's a November prayer of gratitude -- that my girls and their friend are healthy and safe, and all we lost was a car.