Turn on a dime

No, the title of this blog is not describing the minivan's driving capabilities. ;-) It describes how life can change in an instant.

Sunday night after dinner the kids took a bath and we all headed to Target to purchase a game for Josh's Nintendo DS. He had saved his Christmas money and helped with chores all weekend to earn the last few dollars he needed to buy his treasure.

We all piled in the car and headed off to Target. It was 6:30.

Lauren fell asleep so the boys decided to go in on their own and the rest of waited in the car.

I was just playing on my phone and thinking what a nice day it had been and then Lauren coughed.

I stopped what I was doing and then realized she wasn't coughing; she was throwing up in her sleep.

I whipped out of the front seat and opened the side door to see all of dinner run down the front of her coat and pool in her lap. I stood there in disbelief for a second and then realized I didn't have anything for her to throw up into. So I grabbed Ella's blanket and tried to catch everything spewing out of her mouth. But she was still strapped into her car seat and couldn't lean forward to get everything out of her mouth and was consequently starting to choke.

About the time I reached to unbuckle her top latch she looked at me and coughed with a big heave and I was covered. I'd say from head to toe but it was really more like head to waist. ;-) I couldn't even see through my glasses and even in all that chaos my first thought was, "thank God my mouth was closed" because I could feel it all over my face.

That's when Dustin and Josh came out and Dustin took one look at me and said, "What the...?"

I screamed, "GIVE ME THAT BAG!"

And Lauren proceeded to lose the rest of her stomach contents into a Target bag.

As I attempted to clean myself up Dustin kept asking me what happened. I said, "It's not hard to understand, Dustin. She was sleeping. She puked. She woke up. What are you missing?"

"Well, what made her puke?", he said.

My puke covered face said it all.

So there we were driving home - me covered in vomit, Dustin hanging his head out the window, Lauren crying, Josh playing his new DS game and Ella sleeping - frantically trying to figure out what we were going to do about daycare.

I approached the intersection and out of the corner of my eye I saw a van coming. I slammed on the brakes, hit the horn and reached over to hold Dustin back. I looked up at the light and I had green. We sat there in the middle of the intersection, at a complete stop and looking at each other like we couldn't believe what almost happened. The driver who ran the red light had pulled over and was probably as shaken up as we were.

I pulled out of the intersection and immediately started crying at the thought of what could have happened. If I had gone only one more mile an hour down that street my husband and sweet Ella would have been seriously injured.

There are moments in life when you can literally feel someone watching over you...and that was certainly one of them.

The moral of the story is...nothing like a near death experience to make you forget all about the chunks of beef stew in your hair.