Crash! Take Two.

Back in November 2006 I went to my six week OBGYN appointment after giving birth to Jason. It was the week of Thanksgiving and snow actually fell from the sky that day, a rare event. The block we live on in our neighborhood has an alleyway that about 15 houses share. It's a quaint little feature in our part of the neighborhood. At the time we didn't have an official driveway and we parked our van parallel to the alleyway in our yard on the grass/mud. As I returned home from my appointment, I made a right hand turn into the narrow alley to find a car was coming the opposite way in the alley. So I pulled into our makeshift muddy driveway to make room for the oncoming car.  However, I poorly assessed the situation, pulled over a little too soon, and in the process I sideswiped a tree in our yard. At first I didn't think there was any damage, and that the awful noise I heard as I scraped the tree was just the tree branches scraping the van windows. But when I got out of the van, I could see I dented the side door and scraped some paint.  Gasp! I was super mad at myself. Our car was only 18 months old, and it made me sad. I mourned for about a day. I wanted to blame it on the unusual snow that was falling that day, but it had nothing to do with the snow. I apologized to my husband and he was very kind and just laughed at me, and he's teased me about it for the past four years.

That following year we had some neighbors complain about our muddy parking spot, and we received a letter from our homeowners association requiring us to install a drive way, or else....... We never found out what the the "or else" was because we gave into the peer pressure and obediently complied and installed a pretty new driveway to replace the eye sore of grass/mud. It was something we knew we needed to do, but we never wanted to spend $2500 for a slab of cement in our yard. I was hoping for a new computer. We ended up placing the driveway parallel to the alley exactly how we had been parking on our grass/mud, so we could pull our van into the spot easily and not have to worry about backing it out and hitting somebody, especially one of our children.

Also since that incident, my dad was kind enough to help us pound out the dent and avoid having to pay what would probably be $750 each for new side doors. (The last place I want to spend my money is on my car. Remember, I wanted a new computer.) Of course there was still evidence of reckless driving on the side of our van, but it definitely looked better.

Are you wondering where I am going with this story? Probably not if you've read the title of this post and peeked at today's picture...

So on Sunday night my husband took the kids (minus Emily because she wasn't feeling well) on a small churchy errand.  Emily and I were on the couch when we heard a strange noise outside  It sounded kind of like a collision, but it didn't sound like two cars, just something smashing or falling. I couldn't quite figure it out. I looked out the window and saw nothing. Coincidentally my husband came home with the kids at the same time. He walked in the house with a grimace on his face. That was when I realized the strange noise we heard right before he came in the door was not a coincidence. He said, "I ran into the fence."

It turns out the same thing happened to my husband that happened to me four years ago (which actually made me feel better about my accident.) There was a car coming out of the alley as he was pulling into it. He pulled over to let the car pass, but unfortunately pulled over a little too early. Since the tree I hit was removed when we installed the driveway, the only thing left to hit was the end fence post which left a nice white latex paint mark along the side of the van....and a dent.  However, my husband didn't really dent the van door, he just kind of re-dented it, and it looks just like it did four years ago, except with white fence paint this time.

 The Re-Dent.  I had a little deja vu when I saw this.

As you can see my husband didn't actually scratch the van paint, he just scraped the paint off the fence. It should come off with some Goo Gone. And I will need my dad to come back and help me pound out the dent again. In this picture I have pointed out my bads, where I actually scratched the paint off the car.

Where the fence used to be.  

As you can see, my husband was making a right turn into the alley and pulled over a little too far and the fence went crunch.

Now the fence is sitting against our garage. You can't even notice it's missing from the street. I don't think we'll even need to repair it. We'll just paint the edges of the section of fence it broke off from.  

I laugh about it today. It's just a car and a fence. I mean, we installed the driveway parallel to the alley so we wouldn't back over any people. A missing fence post and section of fence is no big deal. I'm just really glad I never got the van doors fixed! Seriously, why don't they just make cars out of rubber? Or why don't we drive around giant bumper cars? Wouldn't that make sense?

And it doesn't feel right ending a post without a picture of a kid:

This is Jason on Christmas Day chewing his Hubba Bubba.
Notice the scar between his eyes.  That was accidentally my fault too :(
Picture Here
Story Here