Oh my goodness, I will NEVER forget Nathan’s sixth birthday!

We left that morning from the cabin in Colorado and hugged our friends Clint, Leigh Ann and the girls goodbye. We’d told Nathan we were just driving back home. But, then we stopped for lunch at Chick-fil-a and who should open the door but this sweet friend:

Noah!!! 🙂 Our dear, dear friends Greg, Jen, Noah and Emma drove to meet us like two hours after Jen and Greg had gotten back in town from Hawaii. That’s the sign of a good friend!! 😉 We were SO excited to see them! Nathan went ballistic.

Then, because we figured one late night wouldn’t hurt, we stopped off by Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs. Nathan loves, loves, LOVES Adventures in Odyssey and when we turned the corner and saw the Whit’s End sign, he freaked out. Like, was jumping up and down and going crazy freaked out.

Yay for Whit’s End!!!

The boys in front of the soda shoppe. 😉 Parker was right smack in the middle of nap time and he still did fantastic. If we lived in the Springs, we would be here every single weekend.

Eugene is Nathan’s favorite character and so he was SO excited to be Eugene!

Little Miss in Whit’s End!

The boys ordered their ice cream sundaes and Nathan asked if Whit was in and told them it was his birthday. The staff was so cute. They told him Whit was working on the Imagination Station and gave him a special card that let him download whatever episode of the show he wanted. He was in heaven.

Like literally, heaven.

This dude was stoked to not be napping and eating ice cream instead. 😉

SIX!!!

 Us. Oh how I love this crazy, loud, obnoxious and adorable family of mine!!

Nathan was so cute. He said, “THANK YOU MOM” like 400 times that day. He was SO sweet. I think this was the best birthday ever. 😉

We left through the bookstore and I decided to check just out of curiosity and found the Maya and Paige books there! So, I signed them all. 😉 So much fun! It never gets old. 🙂

We got back on the highway with three very tired children and made great time and were looking at getting back to Gammy and Pops’ house by nine, if not earlier.

Then, at eight o’clock, about an hour or so outside Albuquerque, all of traffic just stopped. Dead, right in the middle of the road. There was absolutely nowhere to go, because we were stuck and the other direction was across a giant, wooded median. At first we thought it would only be a few minutes, but then people started turning their cars off and we started fearing the worst.

We had no cell signal, since we were in the middle of nowhere and it was now dark, so Jon got out and hiked a few miles up the road and finally got a signal and we found out there was a police standoff in the next town and they had closed the interstate.

Guys. We sat there until after 3AM.

The kids were AMAZING. I think I did worse than they did! I was so nervous, so anxious. And we were trying our hardest to conserve our phone batteries and gas, so we tried to keep everything off. It got so so so cold. And we didn’t have hardly anything to cover up with or eat. AND – I had to pee IN THE WOODS.

A part of me died that night. 😉

Jon finally fell asleep about 2AM, but I couldn’t sleep no matter how hard I tried. I just prayed the entire night. Right after 3, the headlights behind us all turned on and we went from kids and Jon being asleep to throwing kids in car seats and driving in about five minutes. We drove straight to Mom and Dad’s and both of us were so paranoid about falling asleep driving!

We finally got in about 4:30AM and the kids were up and ready to go at 6. 😉

So thankful God took care of us! We will be waiting awhile for another road trip. You never know what is going to happen when we get in the car. 😉 Ha!