Adventures in Parenting & Marriage: Thanksgiving, Snow in Houston and Fender Benders

Hi everyone!

Our first Thanksgiving went pretty well and it was good to see family again :) I didn't end up burning the food or catching the house on fire so that was a big victory in my book! We also went Black Friday shopping which went ok...it's not particularly my favorite thing to do since there are long lines and crowds of people...and I try to avoid spending money unless I have to but since there are sales and my mom likes to shop, we all ventured out into the chaos for a few hours. Mom and Dad bought us a steam mop (which I have yet to use but I hear works really well on tile) and Sterling picked us out some lamps for our living room - my husband has good taste :) And we got a great deal on them so that made me feel better about spending the money for them. Unfortunately (also) over the holiday, one of my dogs from home in Tennessee (Sampson) was killed. Two big dogs from in the neighborhood attacked him in our yard and he later died at the pet ET during surgery :( We had Sampson since he was born - he was our other dog Merry's puppy. It was pretty shocking and it will be sad visiting home without Sampson coming to greet us in the driveway. That event put a damper on the last day of the holiday vacation but we were still glad to get to spend time with everyone and happy that everyone made it back home safely.

Continuing with the bad luck of the holiday, I was in a minor wreck coming home from clinic last Tuesday. It started raining and traffic was crawling (~10 mph) on 59. There was plenty of space between me and the car in front of me and I was going really slow but I went to put on my brakes upon seeing brake lights come on in front of me and my car didn't respond at all and I went straight into the car in front of me. It was a very scary experience. I initially thought that my gas pedal had gotten stuck but now that I think about it, it is probably more likely that I hydroplaned and that's why my brakes didn't help at all. Anyways, since I was moving so slowly, the damage caused was minimal. It caused some rear bumper damage to the car in front of me (and he hit the guy in front of him because he was following too closely but damage wasn't bad) and there was very minor damage to the underside of my front fender. All cars involved were able to be driven away and there weren't any citations issued so hopefully my insurance won't go up too much because of this. It's pretty frustrating that there was really nothing I could do to avoid the wreck and it's probably still going to raise our rates...I mean, I would certainly understand if I had been talking on the cell phone or playing with the radio or messing with makeup or any of the other stuff that I occasionally do that's not safe driving practices...but oh well. I'm glad no one was hurt and the damage is only minor. I'm taking it in to get repaired this morning.

On a happier note, The Cummings family took their first Christmas pictures this weekend! We were feeling pretty Christmas-inspired with all of the snow on the ground so we decided to give it a go :) It was quite the time getting the dogs to cooperate AND using the delayed timer on my camera but the pictures turned out nicely and we are using the middle one below for our Christmas card this year :)