Good day or bad day?

I was going to make today a good day. I was planning to do lots of fun things with my kids. As I was checking my fan mail while I ate a bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats Sarah simply opened the refrigerator and said, "Look! It's magic!" Then she secretly told me that it wasn't really magic. It was cute and I made a mental note of it. Then the kids were taking pictures of their toasted oats cereal art. I gave permission for Emily to take a picture of her house,

but somehow the camera was transferred to her younger brother, Bradley. On Monday Bradley was forbidden from the camera due to misuse and clumsiness so he definitely should not have had the camera today. But he did and of course his clumsiness caused him to slip on the milk on his chair and fall crashing to the tile floor, camera and all. Usually cameras are pretty resilient, but not today. The lens of the camera slammed onto the floor breaking the lens cover. It was pretty obvious it was broken beyond repair. I was furious, but contained my anger and just cried. I excused myself and went to my bedroom to finish mourning and called my husband to discuss appropriate discipline for this particular scenario. The punishment ended up as loss of TV and computer privileges for the rest of the week and cancelling our digital cable subscription until we save what it will cost to buy a new camera. The kids were devastated but I think they understood the severity of the situation and that a digital camera is essential to Mommy's blogging career. I immediately went to circuitcity.com and shopped for my next camera. I was secretly happy to find out the only affordable camera had a 3 inch LCD monitor as opposed to my 2.5 inch. I decided to ponder the purchase for a few hours before purchasing. Fortunately the broken camera still takes pictures and movies indoors. Here's Jason testifying that the camera is indeed broken (Watch it. It's only like 10 seconds.)

(This is the first time using Blogger video upload and I have no idea why there is an extra image below the video. It looks dumb. I know.)

However, it doesn't take very good pictures outside as you can see here:

So yeah, I need a new camera. I guess the lens cover served as some sort of shield from sunlight.

Since the kids weren't allowed to watch TV, they decided to exercise their imaginations and build a fort. They played that a hurricane, earthquake, tornado and hail were all coming to destroy the kings, queens, princesses, princes and baby birds. They were princesses and princes disguised as peasants hiding in the fort. They mixed a magic potion to make golden eggs and regular eggs.


I fixed macaroni and cheese for lunch and the milk jug talked to me:

I love when he talks to me.

Then I got the phone call. My husband's car died. It wouldn't start when he went to lunch. He got a co-worker to jump it at around 2:30PM and he decided to drive home in case it decided to do anything else wacky. About a mile away from our house at the intersection to our neighborhood it quit. He called AAA at 3 PM and they said a tow truck would be there within the hour. I decided to get the kids ready and drive there to keep him company. We arrived and waited and waited....and waited ....and waited. Meanwhile the car was stuck at the turn signal. A police arrived to help direct traffic and he jumped the car so my husband could get it to a safer area. The car died again. So we waited in the 95 degree weather. I turned the van off, but had the fan blowing to save $8 or so dollars in gasoline. I asked,"Why isn't the clock working?"

My husband replied, "Probably because the battery is about to die."

At that moment the van quit and we were stuck in the heat dripping sweat. Two and a half hours after the initial call to AAA a tow truck arrived. Woo hoo! I told him that my van needed a jump and he told me that he didn't have any jumper cables. Why would a AAA tow truck not have jumper cables? Anyway, we were able to use ours and got the car on the flatbed and took it to the shop. We won't know until tomorrow what is wrong. The good news is that we still have 40 days left on the extended warranty we purchased when we bought it. I have bad luck with warranties though and they always find loopholes. But I am going to remain optimistic.

While we were waiting, Emily said, "I wish today never happened." I kind of agreed, but I remembered that trials make us stronger. I got my workout today. Broken camera. Broken car. It's all good. It could've been worse. I could've actually cancelled the cable today.

Time for So You Think You Can Dance.