My mom-in-law is turning 70 this month. She wanted to have all her sons and their families together so that we could sing “Happy Birthday” together (not just separate calls from each of us). So we all agreed to get together for a week long vacation in NH around her birthday.
We spent most of the week swimming, kayaking, rowing, barbecuing and shopping (I found out that NH doesn’t have a sales tax, I’m ready to move there 🙂 We went to the Polar Caves and spent much of the day climbing over rocks and hitting our heads on boulders. We played miniature golf (I got trounced by my 14 year-old nephew and both my daughters). We went shopping in the local craft and gift shops and in the outlet malls. (I was able to get a Coach bag for $125!) We even hit an antique store (I hate antiques).
So, for the most part it was a fun time for the whole family. Sometimes we went places on our own and sometimes we went somewhere together. But we usually tried to eat dinner together, we didn’t always make it but at least we tried. We picked on night to celebrate her birthday together with lobsters and ice cream cake. We sang “Happy Birthday” and she was so happy, she made us do it again. I was having a hard time keeping the “7” and “0” candle on the ice cream cake that I was too distracted to sing 🙁
One night we were going to have a camp fire and I had purchased the ingredients for S’mores. My in-laws informed me that they were Boy Scouts and that they didn’t do S’mores, that was more of a Girl Scout thing. They assumed I was a Girl Scout, which I wasn’t. I just knew about S’mores because everyone knows about S’mores. You see the ingredients advertised in the stores in the summer time.
But before we even finished eating dinner, it became overcast. I wasn’t too concerned because all week it looked like we would get an evening shower but didn’t. I had just finished eating when the wind picked up and the rain started and the sound of the thunder grew increasingly louder. We ran inside and started to move some of the furniture from the porch into the kitchen.
The noise of the storm was scaring the kids so we decided to gather them together to watch a DVD in the living room. My daughter had her DVD player, it’s small but I thought it would distract them.
Earlier in the day our nephew caught a trout and my husband cleaned it and was grilling it when the storm hit. He pulled it from the grill when the wind picked up and the rain started to come down. He was in the kitchen pulling the meat off of it and putting it on a plate and my daughter, Sarah was next to him waiting for a taste. Just as he was taking his second bite. We heard a noise and suddenly debris was raining down upon us. People were screaming, “take the kids out of here” and I started to move with the kids into the living room. Just as we got into the living room a beam came shooting out from the wall and showered us with more debris. Samantha was hit in the arm with a small piece of wood. The kids were screaming and freaking out so we ran into the furtherest bedroom and tried to comfort the crying kids. The parents of the youngest weren’t with us so my husband ran through the storm to get them. All of the kids were crying except the two oldest and the youngest one.
I asked what happened and found out that a large tree had fallen on top of the kitchen. It had stopped because it was resting on the strongest part of the structure. If it had fallen just a little to the left or right it would have collapsed the roof and hit whoever was standing under it, which would have been my daughter, husband, brother-in-law and mom-in-law. And the rest of us would have been under the rest of the debris from the collapsed roof.
What is truly amazing about the incident is that no one was hurt. Not even a scratch. As I was comforting my youngest daughter (it took me most of the night to comfort my daughters), I told her that she is really blessed to have seen the hand of God protecting her and her family. That her sister could have been killed but God protected her and kept her family safe from harm. It is a blessing to see an act of God like that. We all knew that and kept telling each other that God had protected us and wasn’t it great to be part of a miracle like this?
It was hard to sleep that night and I still feel a little uneasy about almost losing my husband and daughter but I also feel incredibly blessed that God protected them from harm and now we had a wonderful experience of the power of God that we could share with others. We knew from experience that God protects his people.
When it was time to leave, we decided to take a family shot next to the tree. I thought it said something about the vacation that no other place in NH would have said: we survived our family vacation 🙂 That picture is our Ebenezer.