Pinewood Derby 2010

This is our first year that we had a son old enough for the Pinewood Derby. Cooper and Austin worked hard on Cooper's car (with the help of many friends -- Thanks Bro. Coombs) - a camouflage "Humvee". He managed to win a few races and come in fourth place out of 15 participants. But the most adorable event of the night was seeing Will watch the races intently and then cheer like crazy when Cooper won.

Thank Goodness for Good Samaritans

It's been a pretty rotten day. I took a boot camp class at the YMCA two days ago that has left me hammered - I have never been this tremble-when-you-see-a-set-of-stairs-sore in my life - and I have taken the opportunity to let anyone I talk to know about it. So just getting around the house, cleaning and dealing with whiny children that want to be held has not been great. Add to that PMS and school off today and I think you can imagine what a monster mom I have been.

So to top it off, tonight at 9:30 Cooper and I went to Target to get him a pair of water sandals to take with him to the beach this weekend with a friend. As we were casually inspecting the sandals and perusing the 75 percent off aisle, I hear over the loud speaker, "Will the owner of the black BMW with the license plate #1UMFan come to the customer service desk?" My heart sunk, but I thought it was just because I left the lights on again - this is Austin's car and I don't drive it very often and tend to leave lights on and run the battery down and then need a jump and such. Well, it was a bit worse than that. Apparently I left the car, a standard, in neutral and forgot to engage the emergency brake. So while we were nonchalantly shopping, our car started to roll across the parking lot, scraping the cart corral on its way to Panera Bread - not real close to Target by the way. Then a stranger saw the problem, jumped into the car while it was rolling, pulled the E-brake and then pushed it into a new parking spot. Then he left.

He didn't steal the car or anything in it, or laugh as it rolled into a building or another car. A complete stranger put himself in danger by running after the car, stopping it and then pushing it to a new spot. Probably not what he was planning when he set out for Target tonight. And the car was nowhere close to where I originally parked it, it moved nearly half the parking lot away. The car isn't wrecked, there is a scrape along the side from the cart corral but nothing like what could have happened.

I feel so much gratitude for this person who did this. I never got to meet him, he was gone before I found out what happened. So all I could do is thank my Heavenly Father for putting someone in place to help me avoid a major catastrophe. It just shows how much he loves me, this could have been significantly worse and instead it was minor.