Busy weekend

This will be a rather boring blog entry, with no pictures (sorry!), but I promise to post some pictures shortly. For all of you who have been emailing....I apologize that it's taken me so long to reply. I'll hopefully have a little more time to work on that during the rest of this week.
We rented a pop-up camper last Tuesday and got it all packed and ready for the (nearly) 3 hour trip to Vanderbilt for convention. The plan was to leave Wednesday morning at 10am so we could get up there in good time to set up the camper and visit with everyone. As is usually the case around here...we were about 3 hours late getting started. The morning was really quite interesting, and fortunately the day stopped being so interesting before we actually arrived on the grounds! To start things off, I left my cell phone in the shopping cart at Wal-mart while doing last minute errands that morning. I didn't discover it was missing until we were ready to leave for convention. After scrambling around for 15 minutes, I figured out where I must have left it and called the store to see if it had been turned in. Luckily, it was there, and luckily the store is within 2 miles of our house. I got back home just in time to hop in the car with the rest of the crew for the trip. We also had an extra rider with us whom I will not name so that his privacy is maintained! ha
Since it was lunchtime we stopped at McDonald's on the way out of town. We all got lunch and settled in to eat it in the car when Ray pulled out of the parking lot....a little quickly.....and our friend's giant Dr. Pepper completely dumped on the floor. LESSON: the cupholders in the backseat of Trailblazers will not adequately hold a super-sized beverage from McDonalds.
Okay, so not a HUGE deal since the pop just soaked the carpet and none of our stuff. We stopped and got him another Dr. Pepper and then headed toward the expressway. About 10 minutes up the road, a guy hauling another pop-up pulls along side of us and signals that our camper door is open. WONDERFUL!!! We had, of course, completely packed with thing with most of our stuff so we would have more room in the truck. Ray stopped right away and he and I got out to investigate. Right away, I asked if anything was missing. Ray didn't look at me. He says, "You're not going to like this. Your Sunday dress is gone". I had purposely put my Sunday dress in a separate dry cleaning bag and tied the bottom of it because it was so much longer than the rest of my hanging clothes and I didn't want it to get all wrinkled up in the garment bag. He had carefully laid it on the top of everything else when he put the stuff in the camper. Evidently the air pressure when the camper door opened just whipped that bag out in nothing flat. The problem was, we didn't know when the door opened. So....betting we would waste a lot of time trying to look for it, we decided to just go on without it. I didn't bring extra clothes for myself, but I knew my mom was coming for the day Thursday so I decided to give her a call. She agreed to try and find it, and incredibly, she did! It was completely intact lying in the ditch along the highway. I was so thankful! I did have a backup dress at home that she could have brought, but I was so glad she actually found the one I had planned to wear. After all that, I was beginning to wonder what else would happen on our trip. Fortunately, we did make it to the convention grounds with no other major problems. The convention itself was wonderful inspite of the 3 days of rainy cold weather, and having to take Lauren to the ER in Gaylord (8 miles away) on Friday night to diagnose and treat a urinary tract infection (she's fine now). Sunday was sunny and nice, perfect for packing the camper back up for the trip home.
The only regret I have is that I took almost no pictures the entire weekend. We had our camera with us, but with all the rain I kept it in the camper. I did take one picture, though, of Owen with Aleya Falb. I'll try to post that one this week. Today I spent the entire day battling my allergies (so glad they were okay at convention!) and cleaning the camper to return it. Ray has a sleep study tonight, so he's gone all night for that. It's strange to have him gone. I'm lucky that he's almost always home every night. It'll be interesting to see what the study shows, though. He does snore and has some sleep apnea. Hopefully the end result of all this will be someway to help him get better rest at night so he's not so tired during the day.
So...that's a not-so-brief run down of the last several days. Hopefully things around here will begin to get more organized so I can post some pictures and answer some email.
One gem from convention that has really stayed with me and I hope to practice it this year:
"One little change everyday can make a big change for the whole year. Sometimes we aim for big changes and we get overwhelmed early on and never accomplish anything. Just 5 more minutes of prayer or one more verse everyday can help us grow in the year ahead."
The convention was so good! It's true that it just keeps getting better!