Gotta Love the Grand Caravan's

Just a quick posting here tonight.

I haven't been able to get around to posting lately due to an automobile accident my family and I had last Saturday.

We were on the way home from my girls swim meet and traveling on a country road when our vehicle became caught in some slush and ice on the side of the road and started pulling our van off the road, my wife tried to keep up on the road but over corrected a bit and we flew across the road head first into a telephone pole breaking it in half. The back end of our vehicle flipped over and we were on the roof and then started rolling finally ending up on the passenger side of the vehicle.

When we finally stopped I figured out that I really wasn't hurt but then became the scariest part of it, getting ready to look around and see if my wife and 4 kids were ok or horribly hurt, possibly even worse. First I looked up to see my wife hanging from her seat and she had blood running down her face and was very swollen but she was alert and talking to me. I then tried to get her to stop moving but as a mother she yelled at me to get her unhooked from the seatbelts so she could go see how the kids are, so I did and pushed her up and out of her window which had broken out. She went around back to get the girls out and they were fine, just a little big banged up and scared because of the crash and how their mother looked. I unbuckled and crawled through the van to get my boys out of the middle from their car seats, these two were perfectly fine but crying, hell who can blame them. So I was able to get them out of the back of the van also. When I finally was able to get out there was a couple from the house we landed in front of there with blankets and were taking the kids and my wife into their house and started dressing wounds along with calling 911 for us which I also had done on my cellphone while crawling out of the vehicle.

EMS and police responded fast and before we knew it we were off in the ambulances. Overall we only spent 3 hours in the ER with my oldest and wife getting CT Scans and xrays and the rest of us were fine, my left hand was pretty cut up plus I had glass all over my face but none of it cut me. My oldest (11) has a headache and a swollen knee, my 10 year old was just a bit shook up, my 3 year old was fine as was my 11 month old, the car seats worked well.

Now my wife had multiple cuts on her head and the right side was very swollen. Her left hand needed stiches and she had a concussion. The next day she ended having 2 black eyes and a bruised face. We also noticed that a area in the front of her head her hair was sliced off to about 1/2 inches instead of her normal 6 inch long bangs. Something sharp flew over her head.

In the end we did $15,000 in damage to our van, some of us here banged up, we were all sore the next day and a little leary to drive anywhere so we ordered in pizza. My wife of course made a hair appointment for the next day to fix the area where she lost some hair, funny I did find the hair when I went to get what I could out of the vehicle.

Amazingly we were very lucky and I put a lot of that luck on how our vehicle was made and how safe it was, also the importance of seatbelts and carseats was totally proven to me and my family, yep we all had them on. My kids are now especially good now about putting on their seatbelts and making sure everyone else has them on.

Probably wondering what this vehicle was, well it was a 2001 Dodge Grand Caravan and it held up wonderfully, so much so that we went out and bought another, only this time it's the new 2008 model.

I will be back with more posting this week, thanks for reading.