We've been taking Jay and Joy to Driver's Ed every day because Illinois laws require it, which really cramps our homeschooling style. Since I work a lot of 2-11s, it works best for me to drop them off there at the high school and for Erick to pick them up. Usually one of the kids drives since they need to get their hours in. Tuesday, a day before my 35th birthday, I stopped by the Petersburg Observer to drop off a press release about a homeschool meeting we are hosting (more about that later). As I was pulling out, I noticed the traffic was all backed from the light. I couldn't see what was going on, because there were semi trucks and oil tankers there, but the light was green and nobody was moving. Instead of turning right, where the traffic was, I decided to just go straight and go down to the next block to turn. When I did, a car coming from the light hit me. I was driving Jay's car. It pushed me into a pole and busted the radiator. The police came out and Erick drove over from the church. I wasn't hurt and neither was the lady that hit me, but both of our front ends were smashed in pretty good. I had to go over and pick up the kids from Driver's Ed and break the news to my son that I wrecked his car. He graciously forgave me. I ended up getting a ticket because it was my fault, too.
Jay is going to part his car out and sell it, and I think he'll be able to make his money back on it. We bought a Suburban from Erick's brother so we would have another vehicle to drive. So overall, it wasn't that big of a tragedy, especially in light of the tornadoes that happened Sunday. They devastated several towns in Illinois and Washington. We were all at church when the storms rolled through. During worship, Erick took off right about the time for offering, and I wondered what he was doing. When he came back, he let us know there was a tornado warning, and he prayed for safety and let us know that one of them was out spotting and that if there was a tornado we were to get under the pews. Then we kept on with the service. We have big glass windows and so we could see it was pretty ugly outside. We had a guest speaker, and halfway through the service the power went out. He was speaking about storms of life, which seemed rather appropriate. Since it was too dark for him to see his notes, he moved the pulpit down by the window to get enough light. After church, we had a potluck, and the food was all still hot. By the time we were done eating the storm was over but the wind was still blowing very hard. It was surreal driving to work because leaves and pieces of corn stalks were dancing all over the road making everything look like an optical illusion. Although there wasn't much serious damage in our area, many places were hit hard.
So as for the homeschool meeting, I mentioned earlier (at least I think I did) that Erick met some other homeschoolers in this area at the library, and we are going to have a meeting at our church tonight to try to organize. We've been handing out flyers and I put an ad in the paper, and we've had a great response so far. I went to a Mom's Night Out with nine other moms last Thursday and we had a great time. We met one family from Colorado with five little ones that live on a farm near here, and our oldest two babysat for them. We are going to watch their farm for them when they go back to Colorado for a week in January. We also met another family last night that owns a pizza place in town. We'd heard they homeschool, so we stopped by with a flyer. They have seven grown kids and ten grandkids, and they just graduated their last daughter recently, but we had a great time talking to them. They invited us to come back with all of our kids and gave us free pizza. It's just been really neat meeting our neighbors here lately!
