: "We can't die, mom is not here!"

There are times when the full weight of parenthood has fallen on my shoulders. Luckily these have been few since they show how incompetent I am. We were living outside of Boulder when my wife's grandfather died. We decided that she would fly back home to Indiana alone since four of our six children were in school and child number six was a new born. Also traveling with that many children is, shall we say, slightly stressful. We made her flight arrangements for the following nights red eye. After an emotional farewell at the airport where the youngest kids could not grasp that mommy was only leaving for a few days I managed to load them all back into the trusty 1976 Suburban at a little after midnight. The airport was about an hours drive for us and about 30 minutes into the return trip the trusty old burb is not sounding so trusty. I get off the freeway and start heading through the back roads hoping to nurse the burb back home. No such luck, the drive shaft decides to go on strike and fall out of the truck with a loud thump that fully wakes all the kids. The roads we are on are fairly rural and pretty desolate at that time of the night. As we come to a stop my eldest, 12 at the time, looks around and says "Great, we will probably die out here before someone comes by" The others all start yelling and crying expecting death. Out of the chaos my boy yells "We can't die, mom is not here!" Evidently dad is not fully trusted to handle much. Embrace the chaos.