Home...Thankfully!

In case there's any friends or family that are wondering if I ever made it out of Farmington and back to Missouri, I want to say praise the Lord I am back home! I will spare the details on the car, which would take like ten pages, but on Tuesday, the third establishment that I took my car to looking for answers determined that indeed the car's computer was causing the transmission to malfunction, and the computer was bad and needed to be replaced. But they went ahead and un-plugged the computer from the transmission so it could shift on its own without computer input. Man! Had I only known that was possible two weeks ago! I was outta there so fast! I had never been more excited to leave someplace in my life!! The car did fine all the way home. I spent tuesday afternoon driving through the beautiful high and winding desert roads of New Mexico, headed towards Albuquerque. I spent the night in Santa Rosa, New Mexico and got started very early the next day in hopes of making it home in time to see Elise before she went to bed that night. As I made it into texas, any types of hills, plateaus or mountains gradually went away, as did the desert red dirt and plants, and it was replaced by green farm pasture lands and rolling hills. Eventually the hills went away and around Amarillo it was unbelievably flat. As I made it North from Oklahoma City up into Kansas, the trees, rolling hills, and green grass began to intensify. So did the smell of that grass. It was amazing! Going up into kansas there were some amazing cattle farms with cows scattered across thousands of acres of what I described to Heather as a "cow heaven" with amazing rolling hills of grass, streams, even some trees, and a special bridge for the cows to cross above the highway if they wish! When I left missouri five weeks ago everything was brown and the trees were sticks. Now as I made it into Kansas City and on up to Saint Joseph, I was blown away with the fluffy green trees, and very green grass everywhere, and the smell of it all! I was sad to leave the beauty of the west, but was met by a whole different kind of amazing natural beauty out here!. The best was when I pulled into the house, and Heather and Elise were in the kitchen. Elise was standing there in her diaper and let out a scream of excitement, kept saying "Daddy! Daddy!" and even asked me for kisses throughout the evening. It's good to be home. In a way I am thankful for this whole thing because it gives me a perspective of how much of a blessing it is just to be together, and how blessed we are when things go smoothly.