My Year in Review part 1

    I haven't done a very good job keeping up my blog, and I haven't been good about sending out Christmas cards or Christmas letters, so everyone can consider this my one big Christmas card/year-end update.    A lot of things happened this year, so I'm going to break it up into parts for easy reading/easy composing.

Our year started off with a bang- literally.  We made the trek down to SE Idaho to see my family and to send Mark off to his Vegas CES conference  in January.  On the 15th of January, we were making the voyage back home.  We were originally going to start off early in the morning since it takes 10 or 11 hours for us to drive from there to here.   Our plans were delayed a bit since Jayden and I had been sick- throwing up during the night. By the afternoon, the vomiting had stopped, so we decided to chance it.  I hunkered down in the middle row of our van with Jayden and some bags in case we experienced aftershocks.  Jayden and I fell asleep quickly after we started off.  The next thing I knew, I woke up to the sound of a bang, and saw the road coming up at us.

I'm not sure how many times we rolled, but I know it was several.  Thankfully, we didn't crash into any other vehicles.  Mark and I were Life Flighted to Boise, and the kids were taken by ambulance to a county hospital before they were reunited with us in Boise- thanks to my mom and sister coming up to get them and our stuff out of our now heap of scrap metal.  The kids ended up with bruises and lacerations.  Kyrie needed staples in her scalp.  Jayden broke his humerus-  thankfully it was not bad enough to need surgery or a cast.  They gave him a splint and a sling, but it didn't hold him back.  The worst injuries were sustained by Mark and me.  Mark had a small brain bleed that healed on its own, but he was sedated in the ICU for a day.  He received a cut on the back of his head that they superglued.  I broke a few ribs and my ankle- along with a laceration on my face requiring stitches, and bruises and other lacerations.  I was in the hospital a couple of days, and Mark was in for a day longer.  My mom took the kids back to her house and cared for them while we were recovering in Boise.  I'm grateful to friends in Boise who brought us into their home and took us back to Pocatello to be reunited with our children. We had more nice people who drove from Boise down to Pocatello to pick us up and drove us back up to Pullman.

Over the past year, we have all recovered from our injuries, although we still have some physical scars and the emotions still well up when thinking back on it.  I was just looking back at pictures and reading all the comments left on my Facebook wall, and my eyes start to well up all over again.  I definitely felt loved and supported through the whole thing.  We had very generous friends who saw that we were well taken care of,  and I'm so grateful for them!

The tire that started it all...

Our poor Honda Odyssey

Looking at these pictures really makes me glad that our whole family survived, and with injuries not as severe as they could have been.

So that was the beginning of our year of 2012.  I'll be adding more to our family's year soon, so check back!  And treasure your loved ones, and the time you have with them.   I've treasured our family moments even more this year since we went through this experience.