Not Again!

One of my biggest fears in raising children is when the time comes for me to hand the car keys to them.  It's kind of difficult, in a selfish way, to watch my kids become more independent.  However, the hardest part of giving car keys to my offspring is knowing that they have the potential to be in an accident.  Fortunately, my three oldest have been very good, attentive drivers, at least when they are around me.  (I'm not naive enough to think that they've never done anything risky.)  Unfortunately, Matt sometimes seems to have a magnet on the car when he drives.  Witness:

He's been in a couple of other fender benders.  He got drilled in the high school parking lot by a teenage girl who wasn't paying a whole lot of attention.  Not surprising. I expected at least one of our children to get in a mishap in the school parking lot because I've driven in a high school parking lot.  Enough said.  That crunch was pretty easily fixed, and we even allowed the father of the girl to take care of it without insurance getting involved so that her rates wouldn't go through the roof.

In December 2008, Matt was driving home from school one day and was stopped at a light.  He looked up in his rearview mirror and saw a car approaching.  It just kept coming and coming and coming.  Matt said it was a pretty helpless feeling.  Fortunately, the guy did slow down a little and swerve to the left before rear-ending our little white Civic.  Fixing the damage would have cost more than the car was worth, so we took the insurance settlement and purchased the above blue Civic.  I guess it stayed pretty nice for over two years. . .

Anyway, Mike and Matt have been talking with the insurance company over the past two weeks, and while we have yet to hear anything concrete, we are hopeful.  Matt wasn't cited in the accident--someone was trying to sneak through a couple of lanes of through traffic and t-boned him in the turn lane--and we think the other driver did get a ticket.  We shall see. . .

I did realize a few days after he had the accident that a car is a just car and can be replaced or fixed.  Two days after he was in his crash, the 16-year-old son of one of the doctors I work with was killed in a one-car rollover.  I'm thinking his parents wouldn't have minded replacing or repairing the car a hundred times over if they could just have their son back.  Kinda helped me put things in perspective.  Last but not least, Adam starts driver's ed next month.  Buckle up!