The Door of Change

Today was a long, long Thanksgiving day and Friday morning is coming much sooner than we want. I wanted to go do a little black Friday shopping at Wal-Mart for their midnight specials, so Brian and I loaded the kids up at 11:15 and headed to Colby. Brogan was so giddy in the van ride over saying, “We going shopping it’s dark out there.” We have never been to a black Friday sale at the opening, so none of us quite knew what to expect. Ainsley was mortified that her and Brogan were in their pajamas until she noticed they weren’t the only ones in Wal-Mart in jammies. We scoped out our locations and even had Ainsley standing a few feet away at another location for an item. It was fun!! At 12:00 the workers began cutting the plastic wrap from the items and people began grabbing. Since we were in small town America it was safe, but we did see about 5 police officers patrolling the store just in case. Ainsley and Daddy had something secretive going on and separated from Brogan and I so that they could shop. We all made it out safely around 12:40 and the kids were both in great moods despite the lack of sleep. They stayed awake on the trip home, but crashed quickly after we put them in their bed.


I finished packing the kids and I for our weekend in Denver and Brian finished going through the house and year-long reminders for me. Our 8:00 a.m. deadline was quickly approaching. Neither of us were wanting to go to sleep. We knew we both needed to sleep for the drive to Denver in the morning, but we both were thinking that sleep was of waste of time away from one another. We eventually gave in to sleep around three and the 5:30 alarm came much too quickly. Thank heavens we had a van-full going with us to Denver to keep everyone awake and safe.

Leaving the house was bittersweet. It’s like the young couple that leaves to go to the hospital to have their first baby. They leave as a young couple and return home – forever changed – as a family. We too left our home Friday morning as a family – knowing that we would return home without him – Daddy, my husband, my best friend. We also left knowing that we would have to walk through those doors, separated by thousands of miles, thousands of times before we could walk through once more as our family.