A Year of Prayers

This last year has flown by so fast that Jillian and I were left wondering yesterday, on Easter, what we had done with it. Apparently the one thing we didn't do too well is blog regularly.
But we finally have evidence of Addi's first California trip that we took her on just about a year ago. You see, last year my brother, Nate, got married in the Newport Beach temple in sunny Southern California. We spent a day on the beach, celebrated Addi's first Easter, spent a week with my entire family (yes, all 10 of us together- a small miracle orchestrated by Mom I'm sure), took Addi to Sea World, and made at least 337 other memories. Some of you may remember reading about it a year ago. But we were never able to show the pictures of our adventures!
Somewhere on our way home we lost our camera. We were sick about it, and spent at least 6 months calling every gas station, restaurant, theme park, hotel, and bodega we could think that we might have gone to on our way home. I even had my sister turn her car (the last car we rode in) inside out. There were days nearly 8 months after the trip that one of us would think of a place we hadn't called. We would Google the number, call them and interrogate some poor minimum wage teenage boy that probably didn't even work there when we came through. This became our life.
Just when we had finally given up, and given reprieve to every I-15 stop between here and San Diego, and had gone at least 9 days without thinking about the camera, I got a call from my sister. Her husband had taken their car to get detailed, and when he came back, the camera was sitting on the passenger seat. A thousand prayers from a thousand accused, interrogated, and pleaded with busboys, hostesses, gas station attendants, and possibly even a dolphin trainer or two must have been answered that day.
Gail has no idea what crevice of her car they found the camera in, but when she got it home, she found that the SD card had escaped damage from the un-holy abuse her Arizona summer had exacted on the rest of the camera and the battery. She mailed it to us, and we were able to see the memories we had almost deleted from our lives. I am here to tell you that a picture is worth a thousand prayers.