Did you ever read these weekly Works for Me Wednesday (WFMW) lists? There's nothing I love better than a tip (or two or three) to make my life easier so I've been really attracted to them lately. It's like reading Heloise on steroids and I've learned everything from how to hand sew button holes (good for the button hole challenged me) to ideas for new songs to sing to the kids on long car trips to how to buy a properly fitting bra. Really, it's like having a couple hundred BFFs who can't wait to e-mail or call with their latest great ideas.

I've actually been tossing around a few canning-related WMFW tips but figured I could wait until gardening and canning season are at hand, to keep things topical and all. Then I had an experience driving home from my parents' last week that I've been talking about since then with all the moms I know and it seemed like a pretty good topic. So here goes, my first Works for Me Wednesday tip, from my house to yours.

The kids and I take a few car trips a year without Brainiac. For this reason (and because our cars are always wretchedly old specimens - no in-car movies here!) we've always carried AAA. The expense has proven useful over the years and, whenever I'm tempted to drop the coverage, I'm reminded of being on the Beltway pulled over, pregnant and in the rain, with a flat. Or the time that I drove over some big old construction bolt and lost a tire. And just last week I had my front driver's side tire changed just a couple miles from the Lehigh Tunnel - there was a two-inch bulge in the sidewall that developed after I hit the Mother of All Potholes and immediately knew that I could not drive my babies another mile with that tire. (At this point I'd love to say that my tip is that I learned to change my own tires, but no.)

It's with this backdrop that I make my little WFMW offering to the world: Make sure you have an operational spare tire, and if at all possible keep a full-size spare. If you don't have a working spare, AAA can't help you. So even a "donut" spare is a good idea and I'm a little surprised at how many people I found in a short, totally unscientific survey that don't keep even this minimal solution around.

A full-size spare is helpful because not only can you resume your driving at a normal speed and with normal conditions, but because it buys you some time in having to get a new tire. Since I resent automotive-related expenditures of just about any kind and the need to purchase new tires always seems to come just when I have something more fun I'd like to do, having the full-size tire as a back-up can give us some breathing room to complete the trip without seeing the inside of an tire dealership, shop for price or gather the money from the budget without worry.

In a WFMW nutshell: Keep a full-size spare if you can (or make sure your donut is workable if you can't).