I am Woman!!

I changed my first tire today!

This afternoon I was waiting for my kindergartner to get home from school. The carpool was running a bit behind and just as I was thinking maybe it was my day to drive and I'd missed it, the familiar Toyota Sienna pulled up and my daughter climbed out. My friend (the carpool driver for today) called me shortly thereafter to tell me that she had been running late because her car had a flat tire. I told her to drive back over (she just lives a couple houses down) so I could fill her tire with my husband's air compressor -- thinking we could fix it temporarily so she could drive to the tire place.

I hooked up the compressor hose and began filling the tire, but the air wasn't going anywhere. I looked under the car and saw that the tire had come all the way off the rim.

Time to get the spare.

It took us 20 minutes to figure out how to get the spare tire out and another 10 minutes to figure out where to put the jack. You'd think they'd put better diagrams in car manuals. Sheesh!

Once that was accomplished, the next hard part was getting the lug nuts loosened. It took a lot of grunting before either one of us was able to get even one loosened. Thankfully there were only 5 of them!

We managed to get the tire off, the spare on, and clean up all within an hour. And, we did it all without a man! She was able to drive on the spare to Sears to have her tire replaced and all is well. I'm pretty impressed with myself today (although I doubt I could have done it without her).

I am woman, hear me ROAR!!!