Mission Accomplished!

Well, as you can see from this blog time, it is 1:40am and I cannot sleep. Even tho I am so tired that my eyes are watering! We survived this week, but just barely! Monday, we went down to Salt Lake to paint the "Missionary Wall" that we always paint when our kids come home from their LDS Mission. It is an old abandoned sugar factory and everyone paints on it when their missionary comes home as you can read it from the highway as you drive home from the airport. Austins flight was scheduled to fly into Pocatello, but when I asked where he wanted to be picked up, he said "Salt Lake, I gotta read my wall!" When Derek came home, we painted the Peruvian flag as he went to Peru, when Emily came home, we painted an alien, (No, she did not go to Mars!) and with Austin, we painted a llama. Long story behind that just trust me, it suits him! When you paint the wall (we call it art, the police call it vandalism...) you put a date on your picture so that no one paints over it before your missionary gets to read it. The day we went to paint ours, the big spaces on the end were taken and their dates said not to paint over them until 2-21. So we went and painted on the side wall. While we were painting our picture, some people came and painted over the two messages on the end walls! I can't tell you how much trauma this is as it is hard work- it's alot of time and energy to paint this thing. I guess some people just can't read the writing on the wall! The next day I had a few thousand things to finish up. I was thinking things were going pretty well, until I got a phone call from the National Guard asking when Austin was coming home. Silly me, I thought they were just welcoming him home--No, they called to inform me that he had drills this weekend in Boise. This was slightly distressing as we had 24 people staying at our home to hear Austin report on his mission plus another 50-60 coming for the dinner at our house. That was the first time I cried. (He ended up being able to change it to another weekend-but not before I was sure I was going to have to take on the whole army!!) The second time I cried was when I went down to throw my chicken and bread into the freezer after I had gone grocery shopping and found out it had stopped working!!! Some of the meat had thawed and so there was blood all over the bottom. (Yes, the freezer I had just cleaned the week before!) It soaked into the flour I had put in there to freeze to kill any weevil, plus I had about 5 casseroles and about 10 loaves of homemade bread that I had put in ahead of time for this weekend while my company was here-all of that wasted time, energy and food! Not to mention we were leaving for Salt Lake in an hour. Okay, so it was more than crying. It was probably more like uncontrollable hysteria! Scott sent me upstairs while he assessed the damage. He worked a miracle and managed to save most of the meat and casseroles by finding places in my 3 other freezers to put them. But, if any of my family turns up dead from salmonella... Third time I cried was when Derek and Kristi and my 3 precious grand babies were flying in from Maine. They fly standby as Kristi's sister works for an airline and they get $45 dollar flights but they have to be prepared to be bumped if their are too many passengers. They had already been seated on the plane for 45 minutes, when their flight got delayed because of wind. This caused them to miss their connecting flight so they had to get off of the plane since there were no more flights. They had to throw a fit to get their bags off of the plane as the airlines were just going to send their bags on to Salt Lake. However, Derek and Kristi weren't sure they would be able to get another flight, so they had to get their bags off of the plane. Keep in mind all of this was done while they were entertaining a 4 year old, a 2 1/2 year old an an 11 month old!!! Whew! They did make it in the next night but Derek only gets to stay a day and a half as he has to get back to his program by Tuesday. Kristi will stay a couple of weeks and then I get to fly back with her and the babies! Oh, and one other disaster I forgot about. When I was cleaning the tops of my cupboards (Mine don't go clear to the ceiling so I have plants and jars and junk on top of them) I was thinking how you could smell smoke up on top of the cupboards where I was scrubbing. It got stronger the more I scrubbed it, kind of like a scratch-n-sniff. Suddenly, I realized not only did it smell like smoke, there was smoke! I guess when I had stepped across the stove to get to another counter, I kicked this big plastic tub that my bread was raising in, it turned on the burner of the stove, melted a big hole in the plastic and burned the bottom of the bread b-l-a-c-k! (Eureka-that's why I smelled burned toast!) In my haste, to turn it off, I jumped off of the counter and knocked one of those tall, pretty jars with the fruit in them over. This one happened to have lemons in it with some kind of oil and vinegar to preserve it. When it broke, it spilled into my drawer and underneath into my pots and pans. No, I did not cry over spilt lemon oil, but I did think a few bad thoughts! I guess I needed to be humbled as I was thinking I was so in control and pretty darned organized, if I do say so myself! I think that is the reason I cannot sleep tonight...I am just plain scared about tomorrow and what else could go wrong! But, no matter what, my son is home safely and nothing can take that away! We are all so happy to be together again, and nothing was better than going to bed tonight and hearing all of my children, their spouses and our exchange students laughing hysterically and playing games together. My cup is full, even if my lemon jar is empty!!!