Balloon Launch Take 1

Friday was our big day to wake up at 5:00 in the morning, drag 6 kids and a pregnant woman (and not just ANY pregnant woman, ME) out of bed, and drive down to Sandy to watch the Hot Air Balloons take off.  Everyone got up pretty easily, I miraculously made french toast, and things went really well.  I even had the thought cross my mind, that I could have totally done this morning on my own, had Nate been working or something (since he was still in bed).  It was kind of a cool thought because I rarely think I'm capable of those kinds of activities on my own.  Mainly because Nate's the fun one.  He keeps things exciting.  But anyway, it was a nice motivating thought.  Things went swimmingly until about 6:35 when we had buckled everyone in the car and put it in reverse to leave.  We heard the little dings from our car that mean "something is wrong".  It's difficult to care too much about these little dings because they chime for everything.  Low fuel, passenger not wearing a seat belt, low pressure in the tires.  Well, it was that last one that was causing it to ding this time.  And normally we take that with a grain of salt too, since a few little drops in pressure mean, we just stop at the gas station on our way out to the freeway and filler up.  Well, luckily Nate thought about it a little harder this time and noticed the car felt a little different in those few inches he had backed out, because our back driver's side tire was COMPLETELY flat!  And I'm not exaggerating like I thought Nate was, it was the flattest I think I've ever seen a tire!  RATS!!!  We were totally bummed.  But we joked about timing Nate to see how long it would take him to change it, I went and got my Kindle to keep me entertained and out of Nate's hair, and he went on to changing the tire.  Well, a while later, Nate came around to my side and said that he was having a hard time getting the hub cap off because the tool they had given us with our new vehicle was the wrong size.  That was annoying.  So we got the idea to go and steal one from our Expedition sitting in the driveway next door.  That worked.  But then we had complications with the jack.  Apparently they had given us the wrong jack too!  And it was totally lame, took Nate forever to get the car high enough to remove the completely flat tire!  So THEN we went to unlatch our spare and surprise surprise! the dealership had given us the wrong size tool to unlatch that too!!  UGH!!  By then Nate and I were totally frustrated.  I decided to get the kids out of the car since things started getting stressful for them too, and we got the bright idea to just go get the spare from the Expedition.  (Nice that we have this extra car with all these extra things in it just lying around :) )  We needed a different jack though, so we called up my Dad and Nate and Bradley went up to get his hydraulic lift.  By this time we knew we weren't going to make it to the balloon launch and we were all pretty disappointed, but it was at this time that I realized, there is another launching tomorrow.... the problem being that Nate would have to miss it to work.  I would have to take the kids on my own.  I wasn't sure if I was prepared to accept that idea, so I didn't say anything, but it helped that I had had that thought earlier that maybe it wouldn't be such a hard thing to do on my own.  So, Nate got the lift, got the car up, and found out that the rims on the Expedition tire didn't fit on our Suburban.  It was all over there.  There were no more solutions.  We had hit that brick wall, and until 9:00 when the dealership opened, we were just stuck with all these unuseful tools and a jacked up car.  I was really bummed.  I mean, my body hasn't seen 5:00 am except to trudge up the stairs and use the toilet and then crawl back down and into bed.  So it was a HUGE deal to me that we'd made it that far so early in the morning.  It was total disappointment.  Well, lucky for me, Nate took care of everything else from that point on.  He took the tire to the shop and had them fix it (apparently he "knows a guy" and got it done for free), then put that on, then drove down to the dealership and chewed them out pretty good and got them to order us the right parts.  All the while I was konked out on the couch.  It was nice that he was so willing and able to take care of everything!  I'm a very lucky girl.  By 10:00 the boys were almost late for their water party up at the Adamsons and our day just kind of took over.  Things just started happening.  But the Balloon Launch was no longer an option.  I am grateful for these incidences because they remind me that I have it real good most of the time.  It's really been a while since we had something like this happen, so it was a good chance for us to rethink how we needed to react and adjust our attitudes.  Took me a while, but I'll blame that on the early rising.  Better luck tomorrow!  If we go....  8-10-12