Ice-mageddon...

Call it perfect timing, or the worst timing.

An ice storm shut down North Texas the first week of December.  It was the week of the Nativity exhibit and we'd been working ALL week to put the exhibit up.  The storm hit Thursday evening, and the exhibit was to open Friday morning.....

It was slated to be the BEST ever exhibit.  We'd added a bible exhibit (bibles through the centuries) that was worth MILLIONS of dollars, and had caught the interest of some local TV news stations (finally some news coverage of our event!) and we'd printed more invitations than ever and ran out!  It was devastating.

Preparations take months, set up began Monday, things were going so smoothly and we were praying, fasting, pleading that our event would go on.  But it was out of our control and the storm hit.  The storm was so severe they cancelled church, the exhibit stayed up, and we were permitted to open the following Tuesday and Wednesday.  We did our best to spread the word but our attendance wasn't what it would have been.  But I have to believe that there were people that came that wouldn't have come otherwise.

I also had a powerful realization.  There were times during the storm that we didn't think that the exhibit would even open, that we would have set it all up for nothing and would have to take it down.  The idea made me cry every time I thought of it.  But then I remembered an account of those that built the Salt Lake Temple.  Some of the jobs done were in areas that would never be seen by men, but still the craftsmen did their very very best work, because what they did wasn't done to be seen by men, but done as an offering to our Savior.  This was profound to me.  Why did we work so hard for the exhibit, but to give an offering to the Lord as a gift to thank him for his birth and life.  But I was grateful that we did open....

That was the awful part of the timing, but the nice about the timing was the way time stood still, we had a few days to spend as a family, take a much needed break (I'd been running pretty crazy with everything) and it was so nice to rest and reconnect.  We made it a point to go for a walk each day, here are some photos of those adventures....

Kaitlyn didn't notice dad telling her to wait and she slid in a laundry basket right into a pond and got a bit wet.  We're thankful for our Home Teacher who lived close by and let her throw her clothes into the dryer for a bit, and enjoy some yummy pumpkin chocolate chip cookies and milk.  Our next door neighbors lost a tree....