Excuse Me

Not that anyone has noticed, but I've been absent from the blogging world lately. Hopefully that will change soon. James is out of town at Doug's wedding, but next weekend I'm going to barricade myself in the office and get down to blog business. I want to get all caught up before Owen turns the big 0-1 (which is coming up way too soon!).

So, where have I been? Right here.

Are we ok? Medically we are fit as fiddles.

Then what's the deal? Well, to be honest (without actually being honest) I've been preoccupied with some stuff but I'm just not ready to share it in blog-land yet. And I might not ever. But since I didn't want to talk about it here I just didn't feel like talking about anything else.

Then, the last two weeks of August I found myself consumed with helping to plan our ward's Youth Conference. It was going to be amazing - literally. We had 15 different activities at different locations scattered around Payson and Provo that the kids were going to have to complete in teams, a la The Amazing Race. Then we would have a Guitar Hero Tournament. The next day would be a fireside, awards ceremony and slide show. We all worked so hard. I spent hours writing clues, designing a logo, then printing it out and gluing it to 140 envelopes (for the clues), picking music for a slide show, etc. It was going to be perfect.

The big day came - August 29. Almost all of our youth were there. I hadn't been able to sleep for 2 days I was so excited. Our first challenge was a ropes course at the state hospital in Provo. The weather was perfect, we were all having a blast. And then it happened.

A woman who works at the ropes course made a mistake. A boy fell 30 feet. We all watched him drop.

The bishopric advised us to try and press on, at least until we got more information. The kids were troopers, and we went on to bowling, the Bean Museum, and Frisbee Golf before stopping for lunch. As far as anyone knew, the boy was doing ok. Not great, of course, but not as bad as it could have been. He was being taken to Primary Children's Hospital for more tests.

Within a couple hours everything changed. The leaders were calling parents, asking them to come to the church. We rerouted our activites and brought all the youth there as well. The young man had more wrong with him than we initially knew about. He was in critical condition. We couldn't ask the kids to press on anymore so we cancelled the rest of the weekend's events.

Since then, we've just been trying to cope. The boy is doing better and will most likely heal, though it will be an arduous process. The kids who were there are amazing. They have come closer together to support each other and the boy's family, while extending forgiveness to the woman who made the mistake. Life is going on. There is an article about it here, but they got a few facst wrong; most importantly that the woman was distracted by the kids. Our kids were very well behaved and we had a relatively small group (about 30 people). This was a freak accident and no blame should be placed on the kids. It should not have happened, but it did and now we're handling it as best as we can.

Anyway, I just wanted to fill people in (if there's anyone left who reads this) on what's been going on. One more week and I should have things up and running around here.