The weekend ends with a bang. And a bit of a crunch.

So if yesterday taught us about leaving the house with a clear objective in mind, today's lesson was about meandering aimlessly. Which we actually weren't by the time we were rear-ended. We were headed to Target. (And who were we kidding - where else would we be going?)

We had pulled off the freeway and almost into certain doom when Marc came close to pulling out into traffic. There was no lane from which to merge so he stopped suddenly when he realized his mistake. I checked my rear view mirror - there was the obligatory ginormous Southern truck behind. We sat long enough for traffic to clear and just as Marc lifted his foot from the break....BAM!! It was a hard hit. I knew the truck behind us had been stopped. Had someone hit him hard enough from behind to knock his tonnage into us? No. Apparently he had also been watching the traffic, but thought that we had pulled out. When everything cleared, he saw his chance and hit the accelerator. We were in his way. I got O out. She was bug-eyed but didn't cry or get upset. In fact, she seemed really excited to see the guy who hit us when he climbed down out of his truck. (He was, by the way, very apologetic.) I was shaken up - not only was my head already hurting, but I was sandwiched a few feet between a ditch and rivers of raging traffic with my baby in my arms. Marc insisted on calling the police, though the damage to both cars was minimal. They weren't terribly long in coming and we were all soon on our way. I was by this point mired in catastrophic thoughts about death and carnage and how it all comes out of nowhere and what it really might feel like to be crushed to death by any given idiot with the wherewithal to get a key in the ignition.

And none of this touches on the worst of it: even just the smallest thought of something happening to Olivia.