It's all in the way you see it

This past weekend we made a trip to Montreal to celebrate the Easter holiday. It has been a tradition in my father’s family for the past 44 years. We ventured off on Friday and planned to stay until Monday morning. We wanted to take advantage of also visiting my husband’s family.
We arrived on Friday and we had a very nice weekend with the family. Easter lunch went without a hitch and we all reunited with all of our aunts, uncles, and cousins. We had a wonderful meal and a wonderful weekend filled with family.

On Monday morning we were getting ready to come back home. My husband noticed that the front tires needed some air. As he goes to add air, I hear a panicked husband. Apparently the valve that holds the pin closed at the tire was all corroded. He couldn’t believe what he saw, and as he looked at the other tires, he noticed all 4 tires had the same problem. He began to freak. Apparently if the pin comes out, the whole tire will blow out air at once...obviously not good. The reason why he was angry was because he just brought the car in on Wednesday for a tire rotation to get ready for the long distance drive. It was at that moment that he realized that the dealership did not do their job. When you rotate tires you are supposed to check tire pressure, and if they did that, they would have seen this huge problem. My mommy mobile is not even 2 years old; it should not have this kind of problem.

To fast forward the story, we ended up driving to the closest dealership to get this dangerous problem fixed. We had 4 kids in the car, and the last thing we wanted to do was to take a chance at driving on the 401 with unsafe tires. When we got to the dealership (after driving for over an hour to find it) my husband went into the shop. My kids were already rowdy and fed up. We had already been in the car for almost 2 hours driving, and waiting. My twins were on their second set of clothes and their 4th diaper. The older 2 were fighting because they wanted to choose the next movie. So he comes out...and....it was 12:15 and the only time they were able to squeeze us in....1:30pm!!! Another 1 hour and 15 minutes of waiting, and then at least another hour before the tires were fixed. It started raining so we went t inside, well that didn’t turn out well either. There was a tiny waiting room...with only 4 chairs. 2 were taken and I didn’t think the women waiting would like to be stuck in a tiny room with 4 whining kids.

We made our way back outside, as we were sitting on the bench a man who drove a shuttle service for the dealership asked us if we wanted a ride somewhere. Did we want a ride somewhere????? A yaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!! He was able to drive us to my sister-in-laws place. We were there all day; our truck was ready at 4:30p! The mechanic who fixed our car told my husband we made the right decision to get the tires fixed. He told him he had never seen that before and that all 4 tire vales were damaged. We ended up staying in Montreal 1 more night just not to drive at night.

The day was long, and it was pretty annoying. My kids were tried, wanted to get out of the car, and so did I. My first thought when this all happened was, “Oh great, just our luck.” We planned on going home on Monday but as we all know, sometimes things just don’t work out like we plan. I then paused and tried to look at the “good” in all of it. I then thought, “Thank God Franco noticed something was wrong with the tires because it could have been dangerous.” We were saved from something worse. We were lucky enough to be stuck in the dingy, small, dealership waiting room. We were lucky enough to be eating our packed lunch while we were waiting in the rain for our truck to get fixed.

Life is all about these little “lucky” breaks we get. If we take a situation that sucks and look at it from a different angle, it all seems a lot less crappy. Big deal that we lost a day by sitting and waiting, big deal that my kids had 4 dirty diapers within 1 hour, and big deal that I stepped in the mud before getting into my truck. The end result was that my family was safe. The end result is that we got what we needed and we had the right people to help us do that. I guess for a moment on Monday morning I thought our luck was not our way. If I would have seen it for what it was, I would have known in an instant that we were very lucky on Monday morning.
That’s my peace today!

Panzarotti Mushroom Roll
1 pizza dough
2 cups shredded mozzarella
4 cups mixed mushrooms
1/4 olive oil
salt and pepper
1/4 c chopped parsley
1 clove chopped parsley

Cut dough into 6 pieces. Roll out on counter using flour, make as thin as possible. Meanwhile in a pan add oil, garlic and mushrooms, salt and pepper and parsley. Remove from heat. Divide in 6 parts. In centre of dough add mushrooms and 1/ 6th mozzarella, rolling from one end until completely rolled into a log. Place in oven at 425 degrees for 20 minutes or until golden.