Friday

Our 4-4 1/2 hour trip to grandma's turned into a grueling 7 hour drive. We had felt pretty good about ourselves because we managed to get out of the house by 9:18. We had promised the kids Mickey D's for breakfast so that was our first stop. Within the next half hour we had two potty breaks (one of which was daddy's :). It was already 10:15 and we hadn't even made it to the county line yet! We should have known it was going to be a long trip. We had at least two more potty breaks and a stop for lunch. About 2 hours away from my mom's house we ran into a terrible storm. Daddy and I were looking ahead down the road. We could see the storm coming up to us. It was black, the rain was falling sideways and it was moving really, really fast. The next thing we knew we were right in it. The rain was unbelievable. The wind was incredible. We could see just a couple of feet ahead of us. Boop was scared, Little Mama was crying and Nature Girl said she wanted to go home. I don't usually worry about driving in the rain but I even asked daddy to pull off to the side of the road. All of a sudden there was a loud thud like crash into the windshield and the wiper broke off. Now we really couldn't see. Daddy slowly eased off the road into a parking lot. As we were talking about what happened daddy confided in me that he thought there was a tornado. I thought a branch or something had smashed into the windshield. Apparently there was just a very, very strong wind that just ripped the wiper right off the blade arm. As soon as the rain let up daddy got an umbrella and went out and fixed the wiper. Once again I was thankful for the man I had married. I think we had one more potty stop and a stop for gas before we finally made it to grandma's. I still can't believe it took us a whole day to get where we were going. More pleasant stories about our weekend tomorrow . . .