Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Surviving a Temple Open House

We had the opportunity to go to a Temple Open House a few days ago. It was beautiful. We were rebels and skipped watching the video at the beginning and just went straight into the temple. We figured this would relieve us of our little boy's potential antsiness.

He loved the chandeliers because they were "sparkly" and had "lots of colors, green, blue, pink, etc." He also wanted to go see the oxen up close and even take a swim in the baptismal font. It was pretty cute. He really did quite well until... he wacked his head on the metal handle of a door which created a crying fest right before we sat down to listen to a couple in one of the sealing rooms. We fought the whining and squirming and little smackings (from him to us not from us to him :) for a few minutes and it was soon over and he was excited to reach the destination of cookies and so was I. We survived.

It really was fun but by the end we were ready to head home. As we got in the car our little boy said, "I wanna go in the temple again." Yeah, right. :) As we pulled away from the temple I realized that we didn't take one single picture of our trip to the temple. I wanted at least one of us outside of it but don't worry we got a few pictures from our trip.



This...

And this...


And This...



Don't worry, we are all okay. So here is what happened. On the way to the temple we felt a little rattle in the car but nothing to be too worried about, or at least we thought. Then on the way home the rattling became more of a shaking and definitely more concerning. Before we knew it our tire had blown into shreds with a loud gun-like sound and we had four lanes to get across. There was smoke and the scraping sound of our front bumper and lack of much of a tire dragging on the ground. Luckily my husband was able to remain in good control of the car and we miraculously had openings to get across the freeway safely. It was getting close to rush hour so the freeway wasn't packed but more congested then it could've been. We were so blessed to not have our car spiral out of control, to not be swiped by another car, and to be able to make it across all of the lanes as smoothly as we did.

We felt so blessed to have a screaming child in the back seat not because of injuries from a horrific accident but simply because he was ready to get out of the car and go play at Daddy's work. The Lord truly is mindful of us and we are so grateful that we were so blessed to be so safe in a scary situation. We also luckily have a ward friend who works at a car place near where we were who was able to send a car to pick us up and a tow truck to get our car. It was indeed an adventure.

Our little boy and I will be carless for the next little while, but we're not complaining. We're just glad we survived a trip to the temple. :)

5 comments:

Stephanie said...

Yikes! Those blessings will show up, and like you said, maybe already have. Glad you could go.

Michaela Stephens said...

I'm curious to see how your little boy would behave if he had had the opportunity to watch the video first. Usually those videos help set the tone for going into the temple.

Maybe an experiment is in order?

Pokemon said...

We actually went to another temple open house with our little boy and watched the video. He was pretty antsy that time, although he was younger.

He actually did quite well this time. Hitting his head was the only thing that made things get a little crazy.

Pokemon said...

While I put my little boy to sleep I thought more about how we skipped the video and I just had to add a few more words.

First of all I completely agree with Michaela that the video is great and definitely sets the tone and brings the Spirit before entering the temple. I believe it is an inspired portion of an open house. We did not plan ahead of time to skip this portion it just kind of ended up happening in the moment.

Then my second thought is that maybe there was a reason we didn't watch the video that day. Had we watched the video we would've gotten back on the road later and definitely hit rush hour traffic. We probably still would've had our tire blow and instead of having the lanes open up for us like they did we may have been stuck in a really tough and scary situation.

You might say that I am justifying our missing the video (and maybe I am :) but maybe it was our little family be looked out for. I hadn't thought about that.

Lori said...

Wow - glad everything turned out so well with the car and glad to hear about your temple open house experience. We're hoping to get there next week.