Conference and Wheeler Cousins

On Saturday, we headed to Brian and Maryn's house to enjoy some cousin time and watch General Conference. They invited us to join them for breakfast and I'm sure our kids were so excited when they realized that they got donuts for breakfast(one of their family traditions for Conference). They also got to play Conference Bingo for prizes. I think the adults all got to listen to Conference better than usual since most of the kids disappeared upstairs to watch and we didn't have all the extra noise around us since they entertained each other so well. The weather was perfect, so the kids enjoyed playing outside in between the first 2 sessions.

These 3 boys claimed the trampoline for "the boys" and did not like when Alyssa invaded their territory.

In between the afternoon session and the priesthood session, we went to dinner at Fuddruckers(our request since there is no longer Fuddruckers in Utah and we miss it).

During priesthood session, Alyssa, Catherine, and Maryn made snickerdoodles while I took the rest of the kids over to the park. I also ran a little with Alyssa for her daily track workout.

We stayed until about 7:30 and then headed back to Grandma and Grandpa's to get a good nights rest for our drive home the next day.
On Sunday we were up and on the road shortly after 6. We didn't even bother getting the kids dressed, just loaded them and all of our stuff in the car and left. We stopped in Barstow for breakfast and got everyone(except Alyssa) dressed there. We listened to the first session of Conference by streaming through our phone. Our lunch stop didn't work out as well and we ended up having to stop as the second session was starting. In hindsight, this was probably a mistake. We probably should have skipped the stop and listened to Conference. We ate as quickly as possible. Danny and the girls finished first, so they got in the car as the first speaker was starting. The boys took a little longer, but finally finished and we were on our way. The traffic was heavy on the freeway and Danny was commenting about how the next few hours were not going to be fun if it was going to be like that all the way home. The car in front of us stopped quickly and we barely were able to stop in time, but fortunately we did. Unfortunately, the car behind us did not. We heard squealing tires and then we were forced forward. Danny swerved to avoid hitting the car in front of us and somehow managed to maneuver our car in between the car in front of us and the truck hauling a trailer to our right. I still don't know how we fit in that space without hitting any of them. We pulled off to the side with a car full of crying kids. Danny dealt with the people who hit us(their car hardly had a scratch on it), the police officer who finally responded to the accident(like 30 minutes later), and our insurance company. I calmed the kids down. We were all wearing seat belts and no one was injured, except Ashley having a little pain in her neck(mostly from the seat belt rubbing on it). There was a bigger accident not too far behind us(probably a chain reaction from our accident) that the officers responded to first, so we had to wait for them for awhile. After filling out a report with the officer, we were on our way. We tried to listen to Conference through it all, but it was quite difficult. I guess we will need to re listen to those talks. Our car is now in the shop being repaired. Not sure how long it will take, but we are grateful for insurance and that no one was hurt. We still made it home around 6:30, even with the delay.