Windy Week

We started the week with a fun Family Night to see the lights at Temple Square. It was cold, but beautiful! We were talking to a sweet Temple Square employee and he said that the church is so glad there are LED lights available - it makes the power used significantly less for all of these beautiful trees.



The kids' favorite part was the nativity displays from around the world.
We thought we had a pretty low key week, but the weather had other plans. On Thursday night we had a massive wind storm with winds in Centerville reaching 102 miles per hour! Justin was going out to work early that morning and since it was garbage day all of our street's recycling/garbage cans were down at the elementary school. He and other awesome dads began collecting them and storing them against the west sides of our homes so they wouldn't blow away again. We had no power from late in that night until 11:00 p.m. so it was a long day at home. After a morning of Justin going around to check on people he headed into work and Bridget and the kids tried to think of things to do in the cold and dark. These are some of the pictures that our neighbor Paula took of damage close to our home.

It really was incredible to see the damage and what is so miraculous about all of this is that no one was injured! We only had shingles and park of our fence damaged, but it really was a huge blessing that no one was hurt.
Here are the kids trying to keep busy during the power outage. We headed to Farmington where they had a natural gas fire and luckily they got power at 7:30 so we were able to put kids to sleep in warm beds. We headed back home and collected a garbage can and a half of shingles (the kids and Bridget did this in their pj's to get it to the garbage collectors in time) and then they raked 3 garbage cans full of garbage, sticks, and leaves during the day.
We started Saturday morning early with a ward Christmas party that turned out to be tons of fun. In the picture our kids are with neighbors Bennett, Nora, Blake, and Holly. Justin sang a Christmas Song that was pretty funny, especially around 3:20 in the video (please forgive the cinematography, Bridget was trying to unwrap candy - yes, the kids had candy with their breakfast. It's a party, right?). Then the Bishop gave a sweet message and everyone got to work! The ward really worked hard on Saturday and we had a great experience getting to know one of our neighbors that has been hard to get to know. It was amazing to see neighbors working together and the kids helping so much too.
On Sunday it was predicted we'd get another major storm that night, so the National Guard was mobilized and our ward was happy to report we'd cleaned up most of the mess on Saturday. Even so, our meetings were shortened to an hour and a half and everyone was put to work again - we helped a lot of surrounding areas that hadn't been able to finish everything the day before. Justin had a priesthood meeting at 7:00 am that morning, got home and changed clothes and was out all day until dinner. The kids were able to help clean up the school and it made Ian's day that he got "blue Gatorade" on top of working with all of his fun neighbors.
At the end of a busy weekend, our church parking lot along with many others looked like this. It was incredible to see people truly serve one another and made us love our neighborhood even more!