One afternoon last week, this was my sister Hannah's status update on Facebook:

Is anyone in Nashville free and able to help me change a flat? I should have learned this in high school, I know... I was too busy with show choir. Why don't I ever have an emergency in which I need to dance to "Superstition"?

I laughed so hard I started crying. Hannah has that effect on me a lot, and it kills me that I don't live closer to her. It also reminded me of a story that I meant to blog and didn't. So here it is.

One day week before last, Kate and I went to Burger King for lunch. This pretty much means it was a weird day to start with, because I can't remember the last time I went to a Burger King. But after a morning that featured several mini-crises, I had a starving kiddo on my hands, no real food in the house and Burger King was the only place I could think of in a two mile radius that would be fast and did not have a playground attached. At this point in my life "restaurant playground" is code for "half-hour of my life that WILL end in me climbing my giant pregnant self up a purple plastic tube to drag out my two-year-old." I have decided that I have to stop doing this, since I can see the headline now: "Fire Department Called to Dislodge Pregnant West Sider from Chik-Fil-A Slide. SUBHEAD: Hose deployed; playground flooded." And I just didn't have time for that on this particular day. So off to Burger King we went.

I mentioned recently that the pregnancy is starting to make me tired, but it's also making me stupider. By the minute. In the course of four days, I set off our smoke alarm twice while cooking. Kate had never heard it before, was totally traumatized and still occasionally points to it on the ceiling and says "No more youd! (loud) No more youd, OK Mommy?" The other day when Kate and I went to the museum, I lost my keys, a fact I failed to notice until I was leaving ... three hours later. Thank goodness lost and found had them. And I pretty much cannot be trusted to grocery shop these days, since every single time I try to leave the register without either the groceries or my wallet.

So on Burger King Day, Kate and I got some lunch and headed home about ten minutes before I was going to need to put her down for her nap. Shortly after we got on the road, we got to a four-way stop. Now I do not wish to make generalizations, but in seven years of living in New Mexico Dan and I have decided that the rules for four way stops must not be covered in whatever driver's education course is offered here. It's just a free-for-all. Maybe the other drivers know the rules. Maybe they don't. Thus, I usually pay pretty close attention when we get to a four-way. But I am willing to admit that Pregnancy Stupidity may even be affecting my driving, because I can't honestly say who was at fault in what happened next.

I pulled out into the intersection to make my left turn, truly under the impression that it was my turn to go, but all the sudden there was this giant truck RIGHT on my bumper and then pulling around me on the left while I was still getting out of the intersection and straightening out for the turn. I don't know if I pulled out in front of him or if he was just driving really aggressively. What I do know is that I did the one thing you should never do -- I looked away from the road, lost track of where I was in the turn, and as a result I ran into the curb. Actually I didn't run into the curb so much as I ran all up onto the curb and then came back down. One whole side of our car jumped up, and there was a terrible loud BANG. I got the car straightened out and driving in the right direction again quickly, but I could tell our tire was flat immediately because of the WHUMPA WHUMPA sound it was making over the sound of Kate screaming "Too YOUD mommy! Too YOUD!" from the backseat. Poor child is developing a fear of sudden loud noises and it's all my fault.

I pulled over into a residential neighborhood and got out just to visually confirm that the tire was flat. Then I called our roadside assistance number. We have been paying for this service through USAA, our insurer, for more than five years, but in that entire time I have never had so much as a fender bender. So it was with some sheepishness that I told the woman on the phone that why, yes I did have a flat tire, and yes it was because I ran into a curb. But that moment of humiliation was just the start, because after getting all the basic information on where we were so the assistance vehicle could find us, she threw this one at me:

Insurance lady: "Do you have a working spare tire?"
Blink. Blink. Dogs bark in the background. Birds chirp. Kate screeches about wanting to get out of the car.

Me: "Umm. I think so. I don't know for sure."
Her: "Well do you think you could check?"
Me: "OK. Stay on the line. I'll be right back."

I left Insurance Lady to enjoy the peaceful Muzak of Kate's whining and tried to think about where in the world a spare tire might be stowed on my car. I am not proud to say that it took me about ten minutes to find it, a fact I'm sure made it painfully obvious to Insurance Lady that she was dealing with a genuine idiot of a motorist. I imagined her typing notes into our customer file while the minutes ticked by: "Wife is obvious liberal arts major. Cannot be trusted. Clearly a liability."

For the record, the spare tire is under the floor in the trunk of our car. We haven't cleaned out our trunk since about 2006, a fact that did not help my search, so I had to conduct an archeological dig to find it. When I finally got the floor clean enough to lift it up and saw the spare tire, I wanted to high five someone, but Kate did not seem to be in the mood, and somehow I felt that Insurance Lady was not sufficiently impressed with my accomplishments. But she did send out the guys in the truck, and they fixed us right up. They only made a little bit of fun of me about running over the curb. They did say "Wow. This looks like a brand new tire," which it totally was. Dan had the tires on our car replaced not three weeks before this happened. He was really nice about it.

Not that I'm happy I blew out the tire, but really the whole thing wasn't that bad. Our roadside assistance service is clearly worth the money, and they had us fixed up in a matter of minutes. It turned out that the tire was under warranty, so the tire shop gave us a new one for no charge and it was fixed by the end of the day. Almost two weeks later, Kate has even stopped talking about how "Mommy broke the car! It YOUD!"

But I am sure the whole thing would have been much more fun if Hannah had been there to sing and dance to a Stevie Wonder song while we waited for the truck.