First, a Funny Story

Yesterday was a sweet yet emotional day for our oldest daughter Eva, and by extension for our entire family. A post on that subject will hopefully be coming soon. But first, a funny story. These are the times we shake our heads and think, "This would only happen to us!"

I should preface this by saying it was not our first encounter with uniformed officers this furlough, but lest my readers think the worst I will quickly add that in both cases it involved stopped cars and sick children. I described the first incident on a New York highway in an earlier post. This time, our poor little Silas was traveling after five days of feeling really unwell. What we first assumed was teething later was diagnosed as strep throat, but after five doses of antibiotics not much had changed. His gums were painfully red and swollen and he refused anything but liquids. 

Growing increasingly worried and dissatisfied with his diagnosis, as we drove through the dark night I reached out to a doctor friend by text message. She asked me for a picture of his gums. So we pulled off the road into the nearest closed shopping center to acquiesce. I squeezed between the front seats to lean over our sleeping toddler with my cell phone camera, while Pedro held his cell phone flashlight over the driver's seat to illuminate my shot. Meanwhile, Isabel reached forward from the back seat to help me position Silas' mouth. We must have made an interesting sight.

And then, the police arrived!

Thankfully, it was once again a very kind young officer who appeared at my husband's driver's side window. Amazingly he took our scene in stride as he informed us that we just happened to park in front of a jewelry store that had been twice burglarized in recent weeks! (And here we were in our full-size "getaway" van.) When we assured him we had no intention of doing the same, he joked that we would have to be the dumbest criminals to try and pull off a jewelry heist with a bunch of kids in the car! And he added that he was really glad we weren't as he was twenty minutes from ending his shift and the last robbery added four hours to his work day. What can I say, we aim to please ... and entertain, apparently!

It's all in a day's memories for this crazy Garcia gang.