A Weekend I’ll Be Happy Never to Repeat Again -

So.

BLEGH.

Sigh.

Oof.

AAAAAGGGGHHHH!!!

*runs and grabs Hershey kisses for comfort*

Okay, guys—

This was just not the best of weekends.

Of course, whenever anything bad happens that’s unexpected, my first instinct is to cry, and then that’s usually followed pretty quickly thereafter with gratitude that it wasn’t so much worse.

And this weekend was no exception—

Yesterday morning at approximately 9:36 A.M., you would have found me sobbing (while trying not to sob) off to the side of the freeway in the middle of nowhere Idaho.

Basically, I had reached my stress threshold for the weekend and was running on WAY too little sleep and just needed a good old-fashioned pity party for a good solid 20 minutes or so.

But let me back up.

For starters, we had our huge yard sale on Saturday morning (with all the stuff we’d extracted from the two storage sheds we’d bought at auction three weeks ago). Basically all our free time and all of our weekend time the past three weekends had been leading up to this huge yard sale, which started promptly at 8 a.m. on Saturday, with Matt, myself, and my mom working it while having only gotten about 2.5 hours of sleep the night before (since we went to bed around 3 and woke up around 5:30).

That alone would have been enough to push my stress level to the edge for the next little while, at least.

But then, the next morning (Sunday), we woke up at 6 a.m. in order to make the 2.5-hour drive up to Twin Falls so we could go be at the baby blessing of our newest niece. We were already running a bit late because that’s life with a kid when you’re all functioning off of too-little sleep, and thirty minutes into the drive, we took the wrong turn onto the wrong freeway/highway, which tacked a solid 35 minutes onto our time.

It was looking more and more likely that we wouldn’t make the blessing, and we were both just grumpy and sleep deprived and anxious about the whole thing (although, luckily, Raven was in the backseat babbling away to herself, happy as could be).

Thirty minutes from our destination, however, our engine started to rev and rev without actually “catching” on anything every time Matt pushed the gas pedal. We watched as the speedometer dropped from 80 MPH to 70, to 60, to 50…and down, down, down until we came to a shuddering halt on the side of the freeway in the middle of massive fields and farms somewhere around mile marker 204 (and that’s all we knew).

We tried restarting the car. Nothing.

We tried restarting the car and seeing if it would at least go into reverse (since it wasn’t engaging with any of the other gears). Nothing.

Then we got a call from Matt’s brother asking if we needed directions in order to make it to the church.

And, as he told us later, his heart sank as he heard Matt’s voice as he answered because he knew exactly what had happened (since the same thing had happened to them only a year or two ago).

A $117 tow later (which—thankfulness of all thankfulness-es, Matt’s grandma actually paid for us), we were at Matt’s brother and sister-in-law’s house, slightly worse for wear but at least we were out of the car and not on the side of some freeway.

And there was lots and lots of food and company to keep our spirits from sinking *too* deep in the mire of our situation.

We talked about having me and Raven stay the night (though we had absolutely nothing with us in which to pull off such a feat), but thankfully, Matt’s family pulled through again and got us all home (and offered to drive us all back up there in a few days time, when our car is fixed).

SO.

There was our weekend.

Boy, oh boy.

Because I can’t think about it *too* much more without getting a headache, I’ll leave you with my three main thoughts on the matter:

1 – Matt and I have firmly decided to NEVER buy a storage shed as large as the ones we bought a few weeks ago until we have a house of our own where we can store all the stuff. It’s just been beyond stressful to try and coordinate our efforts while having all the stuff be so far removed from us (over an hour away). IF we continue to attempt to buy storage sheds at auction, we will stick to much smaller ones for the next long while.

2 – Although the fact that we’ll shortly be spending around $1000 to replace the clutch in our car (which is what the problem was) is enough to make me want to tear my hair out, I am SO GLAD that we’ve been working our tails off to save so much money in our emergency fund over the past year. Because even though our fund will now be down $1000 instead of up $1000 (like our plan was for after the storage shed sales), at least we actually HAD the money to cover this. I can’t even imagine the stress we’d be in if we had no money in savings at all.

3 – I will never be able to express how grateful I am for the goodness of both of our families. My mom and stepdad worked so many hours this weekend (especially my mom) to help us pull off this yard sale, and then Matt’s family totally pulled through to help us out of our car emergency and make sure that we were able to all get back home (even though it means that his parents now need to drive an extra 7 hours one day this week and totally rearrange their schedule to take us back up there to retrieve our vehicle). The fact is, we couldn’t have done anything that we’d tried to do this weekend without the help of our families, and it’s wildly comforting to know that no matter what, our families have our backs 100%.

So last night, as we sank into our very own bed in our very own apartment, I felt pretty grateful to be there, even if it had been a weekend that was seemingly out to kill me with stress and lack of sleep. (And today, it felt like a real treat just to be outside on a walk with Raven with nowhere to be, running on a full NINE BEAUTIFUL HOURS of uninterrupted sleep.)

Also, we were glad to finally be able to see our new niece for the first time and get some pictures, as well as spend some time catching up with Matt’s family.