New Fun Celebrating A Birthday!

We just got back from a fun trip to Houston. I'll blog about that soon, but I have to write about today before I forget. So, today was my awesome friend Tiffanie's birthday. It started out great. We had a stake Relief Society temple day with a delicious lunch served to us afterwards, and babysitting taken care of. Wonderful! Afterwards, Tiffanie wanted to go see a movie to continue the celebration. You know me, any excuse to play and I'm all over it. Well, it just so happened that there were several cute movies we could see while taking three of our children too at a dollar theatre that was supposed to be 3 miles away. So, we raced from the church to try to get to the movie on time. I recall as we left someone wished us luck and hoped we'd be safe. I wasn't quite sure what that was all about. SO, we got loaded into the van to take off on a journey following our wonderful Mapquest directions. Now, I know you all are saying to yourselves, I see where this is headed. It's Mapquest. Mapquest is reliable probably only 75% of the time. We soon found out, these directions were WAY off. We started zooming through the streets trying to get there on time and were wondering where in the world we were. It was taking us on these windy streets that were so weird. I don't even think the signs even knew what they were doing. They had 3 different signs going three different ways showing us that they were the street we were looking for. Tiffanie finally stopped at a Walgreens to ask the guy there where the street was. Besides not understanding the native born Bartlett man, he really didn't seem to know what he was talking about and didn't help us at all. Tiffanie finally realized that we did have an actual map on another piece of paper we had with us. I finally figured out where we were and navigated us in the right direction. I know, amazing. We ended up getting to this theatre, that ended up being in the complete opposite direction that Mapquest said, after all the movies started. We decided to go see the Bee Movie, even though we weren't that excited about it, just because hey- we labored so much to get here. So we get into our seats and hear all of this crunching under our feet from a very unclean theatre. I realized how bizarre it was since we were seeing the first showing of the day. EWW! Did I want to know what was on the floor? A little bit through the movie we ran out of popcorn and I went to go get refills. Kinda took me by surprise to see a big man with a jacket on lying face down on that nasty carpet apparently taking a nap. But, I continued to walk around him to get the refill and then around him again to get back into the theatre, thinking, "That's strange!" Then, a little later,a lady that looked homeless came in right behind us and asked in a very loud voice if we had $2.50 because she wanted to buy some candy. So, I gave her $2.50 since that was really all I had. I'm not much of a cash person. She apparently didn't think it was enough because she proceeded to ask Tiffanie if she had any money. Tiff just happened to be on the phone at the time so she just said, "Thank you. Have a Happy New Year." That was strange, I thought. Then, as we walked out of the movie theatre at the end of the movie, there was a line of about 9 homeless people sitting on some seats in the lobby eating candy from money they must have gotten from all of the other patrons of the movie theatre. "Very Strange!" I thought. But, as we were about to walk out, our homeless lady from earlier recognized us and very enthusiasticly waved and said good-bye to us, obviously very content with the candy she had. Now I think we understand a little more clearly why someone hoped that we'd be safe. All in all I'm sure Tiffanie will think that this is the best birthday she's ever had (ha-ha!) Atleast it will be a memorable one!

Uh-oh Tornados!

So, I'm sure all of you have heard about the never ending tornados that we had here in Tennessee. It was quite a night, to say the least. We first got word of it as the Meteoroligst on the local news said that in all of the 30 years of his career, he had never seen anything like it. That got my attention. Then I sat and watched as 4 major tornados were in the area, some of them starting in Northen Mississippi where some of my dearest friends live. Then, we had the sirens go off in my backyard for hours as we watched them all pass through. When the sirens first went off, I calmly told the kids to get their shoes and go into my bedroom closet with me. That kinda freaked them out. But as I sat there for awhile, I thought...now I've got to take pictures for the BLOG! So, here we are enjoying the time in our closet with the tornado sirens going off. I know, I'm nuts. Brennan, Brooke, and Regan got into it with me. Jadyn, however, sat there near by with her great pouty face and said, "This is not funny Mom!" She was right, but I had to do something to get their minds off of it. It finally dawned on me that we could be in there a while. Although the sirens were going off for our city, I wasn't exactly sure where they were. So, I got out of the closet to check the news to see that they were not close enough to us. One of them was close to the other side of our city at one time, but didn't do anything but knock out the power of some schools and such. So, I got the kids out of the closet and sat for a couple of hours more in amazement of how many tornados there were. I have never seen anything like it. Deep down I knew we would be okay, but was worried about my friends, Jeff driving home, and all others who had to go through this mess. As I'm sure you've seen, it really tore the area up. After seeing how many tornados there were and how many areas were effected, it made me realize how much Heavenly Father was blessing us, and everyone else involved. Really, it was a huge miracle that the death count was so low. I truly believe that it is because the people around here are God fearing people who believe in prayer. I know that all the prayers are what got everyone through. It was truly a miracle. My heart goes out to all those who suffered losses of homes, pets, and loved ones. But, I'm grateful that overall, the damage was minimal compared to how much was going on. I feel very, very blessed! As a side note, Jeff and I sat there watching this all once he got home thinking of the thousands of people who are without power for weeks to come and were grateful we had just bought a huge generator to help us in times like this....until we remembered we hadn't bought gas for it yet. Kinda reminds you of the parable of the 10 virgins, doesn't it?