What made it all better

A week ago Saturday was one of those days.  Twenty things to get done before noon. Dan was in Arizona for a few days helping his parents, so I was one-woman juggling the baseball game/theater class/errands.  Top on my list was running into Portland with Aubrey to buy her new tap dance shoes. On the way back we planned to run into two more stores, to check more things off the list.

All was great until we were merging onto the freeway.  We were merging from the right, and had a long merge lane ahead of us to help us enter the traffic flow.  We were crawling along, as was the car in front of us.  I looked to the left to check out the cars we would merge into, when . . . . Bonk. Or is that Crunch.  Or is that Ouch?

Aubrey and I weren't sure what happened.  Did someone hit us?  Wait . . . did we hit someone?  Yes, we did.  It turns out that the car in front of us was driven by a fairly new driver, and she freaked out about merging and came to a complete stop on the on-ramp.  I, of course, made the mistake of looking over to the side just as she stopped.  So, it was definitely my fault. (But, I do wish she hadn't completely stopped).

Not a lot of damage and no one was hurt.  Unfortunately, my heavy-duty Honda Odyssey bumper cracked their not-as-heavy-duty Jetta bumper.  So, insurance will have to replace their bumper completely.  The next week our insurance adjustor told us it would cost $600 to straighten our bumper (it popped out of alignment a bit), reattach our license plate, and touch up a tiny spot of paint.  Lucky for us, the repair man we talked to did a "good enough" job on our damage for free!  It took him about one minute.

We continued on our way to Portland, shaken and regretful.  We were additionally delayed by a "bridge lift" on the Columbia River, when the I-5 bridge is lifted to allow a tall ship to pass through.  We got lost in Portland three times trying to find our way to the dance store/back to the freeway.  One of the times we were lost we decided to go back to the store (we were going in circles anyway) and exchange the dance shoes for the more expensive ones that really fit better.

We finally made it back to Vancouver barely in time to drop Aubrey off at her class and run home to get Joseph for his game. We definitely didn't get any of the other errands done that morning. It was one of those "take a deep breath" days, which I did.

And then Joseph came to me and said,

"Mom, I'm sorry you got in a car crash.  You can have all the money I'm saving in my bank to fix it.  Will that help?"

And I gave him a great big hug and told him that his sweetness and love fixed it completely, no money necessary.  It was a bad morning but a good Mom moment, which made it all better.

This is the note I found on the table later that day: