I have the world's best kids (although I may be biased)

Today was Lego Club day for the boys. This is a once-a-month thing they do with other homeschoolers. It's mostly boys (some sisters tag along), and they are all rabid Lego builders. For the summer months, the club meets in Stark, which is a little bit beyond Cambridge. Actually, it's Fishlake Township, but Stark is the closest... Not a city or town... The closest place where the 50 mph goes down to 30 mph for about a quarter of a mile. It takes over an hour to get there. In all honesty, Lego Club was the reason we bought the Subaru Forester. The Chevy wasn't going to hold up for that long haul.

Well, today was the last Lego Club in Stark; we'll be back in the Hennepin County Libraries in the fall. All of the other trips had been uneventful. From weather reports I was expecting to be driving in the rain today, but the storms had blown past by 9 a.m. when we left the house, so the trip out there was fine.

On the way home, I was driving behind a minivan when something fell out of (or off of, not really sure) the truck in front of the mini van. It was a pipe, maybe the truck's exhaust pipe because that's what it looked like. The minivan tried to swerve, but we were against one of those road construction concrete walls so there was no where to go. He had to go over the pipe. I tried to take it between the wheels but I nicked the passenger tires. Both of them.

So there we are on the side of the road somewhere in the vicinity of Forest Lake (almost made it back to civilization) (that's a joke, those towns are practically suburbs nowadays). AAA says it will be an hour before anyone will be out to get us. When we had left the house, it had just finished raining and was maybe 60, but now it's full sun and getting over 80 sitting in the car. Aidan was a little freaked out a first because you can feel the car move when trucks go by (and because he really doesn't think Mom can deal with these situations on her own, there was a lot of "when are you going to call Dad? You need to call Dad!"). Aidan being Aidan, though, once I got him involved in a conversation about wind resistance and car design he forgot to be scared. Also, since we were on our way home from Lego Club that had brand new Legos with them (Dinosaurs this month), so that helped.

We sat there for more than 45 minutes before a man stopped to ask if we needed any help. I have stranger fear in a big way, and this guy clearly wasn't from AAA. He had two bumperstickers on his truck. One was really faded and ended with GUNS, the other said "I (heart) Minnesota". I decided to attach him to the second one and think of him as the "I (heart) Minnesota" guy. He had a jack in the truck and changed the front tire, which was completely flat. He was one of those guys who does this and that (he talked the whole time he was changing the tire) and had seen us on the side of the road when he was heading North to do a job. When he saw us again going South after finishing his job he knew we'd been there awhile, which was why he stopped.

So now I had the spare in place of the completely flat tire, but the back tire was barely holding on, so we limped up to the next exit, only that was just a gas station. If we wanted to patch the tire, we would have to go back to Forest Lake where the service station was.

Aidan wasn't happy to see us heading North again. He wanted to be home, and we were going the wrong way. Not to mention it was pretty nervewracking driving on an iffy tire. I had inflated it as much as possible at the gas station, but it was hissing like mad. I was scarcely surprised when the service station said it wasn't patchable; it would have to be replaced.

So we spent another 20 minutes waiting at the station, only this time we were waiting in the cool indoors with cold water and M&Ms. And Aidan finally got to talk to Dad on the cellphone.

All told, it took three hours to get home, and we missed half of naptime, but they were both very good about it. I would have expected sitting confined in a nonmoving car for nearly an hour would drive them bonkers. It drove me bonkers. But, you know, they're just really cool.