Count your many blessings

I'm having a bad day, and I mean a REALLY bad day, the kind of day where I probably could have cried all day long and still not felt any better. The kind of day where I lock myself in the room and let the kids have free reign of the house for over an hour (I have no stuff and no furniture so I wasn't too worried about them killing each other)

So around 5:30 my mom calls and says they are at the new house and do I want to come over? YES....please give me a diversion! Instead of driving my car the 1 mile to my mom's house (by the way, it's exactly 1 mile from my driveway to hers, I calculated that with my car) we decide to walk and I let Ainsley put her safety gear on and ride her bike.

About halfway to my mom's house we cross Van Loo Drive and start heading past the golf course. Ainsley is about 10 feet ahead of me on her bike and I'm pushing Caelan in the stroller. All of a sudden I hear tires screeching behind me and Ainsley and I both turn around to see what's happening. This car comes flying around the corner, goes up over the sidewalk, then takes a sharp turn, crosses the street to the other side and plows through the cement wall/fence of the house on the corner. He backs his car up out of the backyard of the house he hit and his car is just destroyed, and it looks pretty nice too (well it was anyway, before he used himself as a crash test dummy). He gets out of his car and kind of takes in the situation for a minute. I ask him if he's okay, yes, he's fine. I ask him if he needs me to call anyone, he says no, I'll take care of it.

At this point, the severity of what I just witnessed makes me think there's a good chance he's drunk, and if he's drunk, there's a good chance he may just get in his car and drive away, and I don't want to be anywhere near this sidewalk when he does, so we start walking quickly up the street to my mom's street. Every time I look back though I realize he's still not calling anyone, when I got the impression he had his own cell phone and was going to call himself. So I get on my cell and call 911. The operator confirms my suspicions, no, no one has called anything in yet.

I tell them exactly what happened, which street it was on, a description of the car, the address of the house he hit, all that good stuff. After I get off the phone and realize exactly what just happened and that we were a mere 20 feet from being killed just moments before, I kind of start to freak out a little bit. If Ainsley had been missing a shoe and we had taken just a moment longer to get out the door, it would have been all over.

I got to my mom's and of course told her about it. When she and her friend went to get us all dinner (we were painting my mom's house again) she said they drove by and there were several police cars, an ambulance, a fire truck, the real deal.

I had my parents drive me home after we finished because it was dark and there are no street lights on my street. The emergency vehicles were all gone at that point and you could just see the huge hole in the wall on the corner. I put the girls to bed and settled myself down here on the laptop when my phone rings...restricted number. I answer and it's the Maricopa police department. Apparently the guy was not just drunk but REALLY drunk and according to Arizona law, they can't charge him with a DUI unless someone can testify that he was in the driver's seat...guess what, I was the ONLY person on that road when the accident happened so that makes me the only witness.

I think I'm still a bit shocked at what I actually saw today.

At my mom's house today Ainsley said "I sure hope nobody crashes into grandma's house" and when we got home later she said "I'm glad no one crashed into our house mama"

I think it kind of shook her up a bit too.