Forced Family Time

Doesn't sound good, does it? Forced family time--like when my mom made me eat black bean soup. And it wasn't that bad, really. Vince had taken Et into Salt Lake for Cub Scout Day Camp and I needed a few things at a craft store. We don't have a craft store near so I had to go to Salt Lake. Ev, Iv, and N and I ran in for a quick trip, but it didn't turn out that way. First of all, it was a fairly nice day and I was enjoying myself and so I took some back roads to get home. We left Salt Lake around 11 and we got on the 201 and were turned around because the road was closed for some reason. No big deal. I turned around, got on I-80 only to find out that it was CLOSED. Yes, they had closed all major routes to our town and we were stuck in the middle of it. We couldn't turn around or go forward, we could only sit there. For a really LONG time. We must have got in this line around 11:45 or so. At 3:30 we finally reached a turn around point where we were given a choice to either go back to Salt Lake or wait some more. After 4.5 hours of being in the car we decided to turn around and do something unique like, use a bathroom and find something to eat/drink. I had a cell phone with me and had been in touch with Vince and so we met up with him and did last minute trek shopping. All our "family" trek gear was due that day at 8:00. So we finished our shopping, filled up our cars with gas, (yes, I was almost out on the interstate and that was a little stressing) and then heard on the radio that they had opened a westbound lane so we decided to just go home. We should have stayed and gone to a movie and dinner or something, because as I feared, the 10-mile line of two lane cars plus the one lane coming from 201 meant that I-80 was still a parking lot and so poor Ev, Iv, and N had to spend several more hours in the car. We reached the end of the line at about 4:45 and we got home at 7:30. Ev made mac and cheese for dinner while Vince and I hurriedly worked on packing our stuff. We didn't deliver our trek stuff until almost 9:30 after which we had to run to the store for groceries. When we got home we had family prayer and put the kids to bed. Iv said the prayer and I thought the best part was when she prayed that tomorrow "everyone would get to eat breakfast AND lunch AND dinner".

The kids were really good in the car--I was impressed. We actually had a rather pleasant day in spite of everything. We kept counting our blessings. Truthfully, if I hadn't felt so peaceful that morning we would have been a little closer to the accident and I wouldn't have liked the kids to witness it. It was really awful. Every time we would start to feel sorry for ourselves, we would think of a reason to be thankful. Once we passed a pig truck and we were SOOOO grateful that we hadn't had to spend hours next to it--what a smell! The funniest part of the day was when Iv (after listening to the radio off and on all day trying to hear news) asked "Mom, what is MY sleep number?"