Youth Conference

Our quiet summer hasn't turned out quite so quiet as we'd thought. Rather, it's been a blur of travels and small moments stolen at home before running off again. The activity we admittedly dreaded the most was youth conference -- four days off work, four days away from our Jed, four days with Zoe far from home, four days with a passel of teenagers and separate rooms. Sounded exhausting.

But we promised to go. So we packed Jed off to Grandma's house. I'd never been away from my baby boy for more than a night before and the separation was traumatic. For me, at least. I bawled, he was fine. And then we were off to this place:

Look familiar? Good ol' Nauvoo, the happiest place on earth. I drove Zoe in my own mobile while Michael rode on:

The Bus. With these guys:
Aren't they darling?
Within ten minutes of arrival, a tornado touched down a few minutes north. So what DO you do with a hundred something teenagers next to a bus with a tornado warning, a severe thunderstorm warning, and a flood warning? This:
Stuff them in the basement. Really less of a basement and more of a maze of maintenance tunnels beneath a hotel. We hopped over sump pumps and scooted beneath pipes, til finally finding our settling place in a quiet stack of boards and folding chairs. Fortunately after twenty minutes we were free to go up and see the carnage. Just kidding, no carnage, just a lot of water. No time to go back to the hotel room, we were off and running. More updates later on Youth Conference in Nauvoo.