oh. so this is joy.

Before leaving for our 4-day trip to Colorado for Thanksgiving, I asked my friends to pray for two specific things: (1) Safety and (2) Sanity.

And God answered one of those prayers.

The picture below really says it all as Elise and our two oldest were ready to throw in the towel by day 4. This is not to say that there weren't great moments (such as Papa and Hadley sharing the Karaoke machine - post pending) nor that Butde and Papa didn't bend over backwards to make our time as relaxing as possible. It's just that the girls got sick. All of them. Fevers and snot galore.

One moment rises above the rest in my head, however, and it happened to be within the first hour of our 12-hour drive home. Our mini-van's dvd went on the fritz and we couldn't get it to work at all for the first 6 hours of our trip. So I just remember driving down the mountain with Hadley screaming, Mia sneezing, Brianna crying, Elise wacking on the DVD player - all the while a Veggie Tale's CD blared through all 8 speakers: "I've got JOY JOY JOY JOY down in my heart. Where? Down in my heart. Where? Down in my heart. I've got JOY JOY JOY JOY down in my heart - where?...."


If only we had brought the dogs.

P.S. We later got the dvd player to work after the girls fixed it. No kidding. It still required Elise to whack it every 5-10 minutes in order to make it work which prompted me to say "score one for the team" each time.