may days: Jack skips driver's ed

Once upon a time Holly was in town and we went to lunch and came home and Jack was highly offended because Holly nicely opened the van door for him and he refused to get out. I decided to call his bluff and left the van door open for him while Holly and Carma and I came inside for a minute before I tried to lure him out again. A very. very. short time later, we heard a metal scraping noise and went to the (open) front door to see this:

 AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
Well, not this exactly, this is after I sprinted across the street and threw open the driver's door and snatched my terrified, naughty boy into my arms while replacing him in the driver's seat to put the van back in park.

 So this is more like it:

 Right? Let's get a different angle:

Maybe a close up of the back so we appreciate the downhill slope that my child was rolling towards:

 

  HOLY MOLY. Honestly the whole five minutes afterwards is kind of a blur. I kept frantically asking Jack if he was okay, he wisely burst into tears and then fell asleep on the couch. Once I was pretty sure that I wasn't going to pass out, Holly and I went over to troubleshoot the situation, deciding that I should drive out along the path. 

Except:

 Oh yeah, the front tires were stuck in the mud. 

At this point I called Chuck on the verge of tears and he was calm and collected and told me to call someone in the ward with a truck. He listed off a couple (very nice) people and then said, "Brother Murphy" and immediately I could breathe again - of course Brother Murphy would make everything better! I dialed him up and he answered on the second ring and said he'd be right over. Bless him.

In the meantime, Holly and I (and Carma) wandered around the van some more and marveled at the fact that it didn't go down into the crick. We have this little patch of mud and weeds to thank:

It dipped enough between the street and the path to slow down the (already sloooow) progression of the van for which we will be eternally grateful. I feel like I should have shown more enthusiasm in school when we learned about inertia ;).

 At this point Brother and Sister Murphy showed up and hugged me and all was well. Brother Murphy hooked up the van to his truck...

and shortly thereafter we were free! After only delaying one nice person trying to drive down my street ;).

And here's the awesome reminder we had of the experience for the next week or so:

My heart still races when I see these pictures, imagining a million different ways things could have been so much worse. I'm so grateful that Jack was fine, albeit a little shaken up. I hope his guardian angels got some sort of promotion. I'm so grateful for Holly, who helped with Carma and kept me from having a panic attack and served as a witness when I was sure I was hallucinating and took pictures of everything. I'm so grateful for the Murphys; I'm sure I don't tell them enough how much they mean to me and our family. I'm so grateful for my awesome friend Cathy from down the street, who came promptly down to investigate as soon as she saw the ruckus. I'm so grateful for the reassurance I've felt listening to everyone else's similar 'driving' stories - including two out of my three brothers when they were little.

And now we have some updated policies about the van! We utilize the parking brake. Religiously. (postedit: for some awesome reason in Uplanders, you don't need the key to move it out of park. We even took it to a mechanic, thinking something was broken - nope, just how they're built!) And obviously Jack isn't allowed in it by himself. Possibly ever. 

It's cool to have your mom chauffeur you to prom, right??