3 tires and a spare

At nine months old, Austin can now say babble that he's ridden in the back of a police car. Ridden, pitched a fit, begged for mercy- typical back of the cop car business I suppose. 

Let's rewind to Thursday around three in the afternoon- we finally finished packing and hurried out the door for a weekend visit to Fort Pierce to see grandmommy and grandpa. 

Austin and I had gotten halfway between Jacksonville and Fort Pierce. Literally, smack dab in the middle. My cell phone was dead and my car charger had just bit the dust that morning. Go figure. Basically, we're cruising down the coast going about '99 with one bottle, one diaper, and a dead cell phone on three tires and a spare. My knowledge of automobile "can's and cannot's" is apparently very limited- because, no you cannot make a 3 hour road trip on a spare tire.

We sat on the side of 95 for over an hour, and would you believe that not one police man drove by in that hour. What would you have done? I considered hiking along the side of the interstate, baby in tow, to the next exit. I tried to hack into someone's blocked wifi from my laptop, password was not  their password. I flashed my brights at north-bounders, hoping someone would call for help. Nada.

We made ourselves comfortable and thanked our lucky stars for the Mickey Mouse DVD in the laptop, then quickly cursed my bad luck for Austin's wet diaper and the one lone diaper left in our bag. And wouldn't you know it, my kid decides he's going to relieve a day's worth of stress into his fresh diaper, leaving me no choice but to put the pee one back on. That also left me with no choice but to dump out the rest of my coffee so that I could stick his dirty diaper in the cup to avoid the stink bomb that was slowly building around us. Nasty? I call it convenient and brilliant. TMI? Try living this. With no coffee. 

Eventually, someone stopped and I called Juan, my parents, and a tow truck. In that order. Which then led to great grandma calling 911 from Fort Pierce, my husband calling Triple A, and the tow truck coming to the rescue (without an additional vehicle to transport Austin and myself, despite my request). Car seat laws, people. A highway patrol man was sent out to us, we kind of weighed options and oogled over Austin's bulging diaper flirty smiles until finally deciding he'd give us a ride to Walmart where we would wait for my mom.

We stayed at the world's friendliest Walmart in a small town in Florida for a solid hour and a half before being rescued. You wouldn't believe the brave folk casually carting their kids around Walmart at 9:30 on a school night. Maybe you would. Colonel Sanders asked us if this whole trip would be worth it- all the mishaps we went through. I think it was.

We joined grandma at the weekend Farmer's Market.

We read Halloween stories at great grandma's.

And someone even made a friend.

This weekend was well worth it.
And Austins never allowed in another police car.