Thank goodness for happy endings

There are many things I could write about since the last time I've posted. We surprised the kids with a new puppy, Christmas came and went, we rang in a new year, celebrated a few birthdays and sadly we said goodbye to my Mom after her battle with dementia and all that accompanies it finally ended on September 19th. Some of those things definitely deserve their own blog post and I hope to get to some of that. But for today I am going to share a story from this week.

Like I mentioned, we got a new puppy, which is definitely worth its own blog post. I really will try to do that, but no promises. On Thursday, she escaped! I'm not sure the details of who let her escape (me) are important so I won't bore you with those. She ran out the garage door, across the street and into the trails. The trails that go on forever and come out at various places around our neighborhood. I immediately ran after her, but she was gone into the forest. The size of her (about 6 lbs) and her color (exactly the same as all the leaves on the forest floor) made the task of finding her very overwhelming. After looking for a while, I called Tony in a panic. I thought he might be mad but his voice of calm really helped me. He told me to get people to help as soon as I could so we could cover more ground. I ran over to my neighbor's house and asked her to help. I called Cooper and Hudson out of school and they ran home to help. I called another friend and she drove right down. Once school was out, we had even more help. The kids' friends, more friends and neighbors of mine all came and we searched those woods. I was getting more and more worried that we wouldn't find her before we lost the daylight. I was really worried about how upset the kids would all be if we didn't get her back. I was pretty much a mess. And after being out in the trails for over 3 hours now, I was really feeling the cold and knew she must be feeling it too.
Then as I started walking up the trail for the hundredth time, I watched the reaction of my friend Jackie further down the path. Smiling, trying to call me, almost doing a little happy dance. She sees Lily!! I run down and there she is...in the arms of another friend of mine. Can't even explain how relieved I was. The adventure was over and the ending was a happy one. We all shared some tears, lots of hugs and for me, an overwhelming gratefulness for the kindness of friends. We had people just drop whatever they were doing to come help. Friends that stayed positive for my sake never giving up the hope that all would be well.
I went to bed that night exhausted from our adventure but feeling so blessed for the good people that I have in my life. And Lily was right where she belonged.