"Bye-bye Daddy Broken Car!"

About 3 minutes after Paul drove away to work this morning, he was in a car accident. He was going about 50 mph on Redwood Rd. when a moving truck (like a U-haul) tried to drive across the road, but stalled (or just stopped) right in front of Paul's car in his lane. He hardly had a chance to try to swerve or stop, so he hit it pretty hard.

When Paul knew that he was about to hit the truck, he thought he was going to die or get badly injured. When you see these pictures, you'll probably agree with us that it was a miracle that he walked away without a cut or broken bone--just a sore neck, shoulders and back. The weird thing is, the air bags didn't even go off! (...hmm...maybe he was better off because of that!) And we think if he would have hit the truck a little further to the right, his car probably would have gone under it, and he would have been more hurt. He was also lucky that there wasn't any oncoming traffic, because the impact of his car sent both vehicles across the two lanes to the left.

Here are some pics:




Paul's girls made it to the scene of the accident just in time to see "whitey" (as we affectionately referred to this car that Jen has owned since 2001) getting loaded onto the towing truck. It's most likely totaled.

On the way to the accident, I (Jen) explained to Millie that Daddy's car got broken, but Daddy didn't get hurt. Her first response was, "Daddy car...broken...new batteries!" If only it was that easy to fix it! So I explained that we couldn't fix it, and we would have to say "bye-bye to Daddy's broken car." She finally understood! But it must have still been traumatic for her to see the wrecked car, because she insisted many times throughout the day to see the pictures of Daddy's broken car, and just out of the blue, she'd repeat, "bye-bye Daddy broken car." Tonight she finally thought to ask, "what happened? Daddy broken car...what happened?"

Anyway, as you can imagine, we feel really blessed. We know that Heavenly Father is involved in our lives, and that He protected Paul this morning. We feel a greater desire to serve Him and keep His commandments. We've also been reminded that life is fragile, that family is most important, and that material things have no value in comparison to eternal things.