A weekend to remember. Since I don't know html well enough to figure out how to have a title and am too lazy to figure it out...the first line of my blog will be my title. This weekend was great...let me tell you why. Friday morning we decided to take a trip to St. Louis...again...we were just there last weekend....and we figured since we have such a reliable car....why not. Anyway Friday afternoon we went to the temple and then got to spend the night at a hotel which included swimming in the indoor pool and getting less sleep than we would have liked since all five of us were in the same hotel room....it turns out Ashley snores quite loudly. Today...we woke up and got ready and then headed out to the Great Forest Park hot air balloon race. To our surprise my mom called and said she'd be coming down to meet us...which we were all excited about. So she met us at the festival....where we ate overpriced food and the kids got to bounce in a few bounce houses. After a couple of hours the kids got wrestless though and we were wondering if there really were going to be hot air balloons since there were none in sight so we decided to head to the st. louis science center nearby. What a great science center they have...and it's FREE. While there we got to see tons of dinosaur exhibits and watched an omnimax movie all on dinosaurs(Andrew's favorite). Did you know velociraptors actually had feathers unlike the ones you see in Jurrasic Park? Did you further know that the chubby skeptical kid in the beginning of Jurrasic park was the missionary who taught me?...moving on.

After a fun day at the festival and science center we headed home in our reliable car. On the way home 'ol reliable's lights started flickering and all of gauges suddenly stopped working. Soon she shut down completely right while we were passing through a small town called Pinckneyville. Since our battery was essentially dead we pretty much just had to stop in the middle of the road with no warning to anyone. Luckily two guys in a truck pulled up and helped us push the car into what looked like an abandoned wearhouse's parking lot.....come to find out it was an auto repair shop that was open on a Saturday night....hoooray. The mechanic that was there said he'd be happy to charge our battery so we could at least make it home....but since the alternator isn't working we weren't allowed to turn anything on...ac...radio.....anything that would take extra volts. Anyway, the point is....we are so blessed. Imagine if it'd stopped a mile earlier......we would have had to get it towed and to who knows where and the kids would have been crabby...or if it'd stopped in St. Louis rush hour traffic on the interstate and the list goes on as to what could have gone wrong, but our car died essentially in a mechanic's garage where a very honest and friendly mechanic was working on a Saturday night. God knows us, knows what we're going through, watches out for us, and blesses us......we are so grateful. So it was a weekend to remember....full of fun memories. Is this the end of the white car?....stayed tuned.