CRACK!

Before I started my blog I knew I had a LOT to write about.  I've actually considered writing a book before, just about my first 10 years of life.  You see, my parents were missionaries with Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) and we lived overseas until I was in the 5th grade.  SO much happened to me in those short 10 years! Interspersed with regular mommy life, I'll be adding some of the highlights of those wonderful years overseas.

Tonight's story is one that works great when playing "2 Truths and 1 Lie." It's a fun game. In a party setting you each write down two things that are true about you and one that is a lie.  Then you put all these papers in a basket and draw them out and everybody has to guess which one of your things is the lie.  I have so many bizarre things that happened to me that I could come up with 50 truths and one lie.  My one lie is that I've been sky diving - just something I want to do someday but still haven't come up with the nerve to do it yet.  Maybe that will be a blog post later.

So here's what happened - when I was 8 we lived in Siguatepeque (kinda shocked I spelled that right, had to look it up), Honduras. Betcha can't say that correctly! Anyway, it was a beautiful tropical town full of lychee trees and palm trees and mango trees.  It was a nice afternoon and there were a bunch of us playing outside.  We had several other missionary families that lived on the same street and the kids pretty much always played in our yard because we had the best climbing tree.  There was also a pick-up volleyball game going on in our backyard with a bunch of locals.

Okay, back to this climbing tree.  It was superb!  It was absolutely gigantic - 10 kids could easily fit in it.  It was so huge that we could play like it was a house complete with separate rooms for everybody.  It was a space ship, a mall, a restaurant (that was my favorite because there was one place that made a perfect serving bar and I always got to be the waitress), a doctor's office, an airport terminal, the list goes on and on.  On this particular day we were pretending it was a pirate ship and we were raising the sails because a storm was a 'brewin! Not really, there was hardly a cloud in the sky. Which is why this next occurrence is so bizarre.

We were playing happily and then CRACK! Next thing we know we are all laying on the ground.  All of us.  All 10 kids out of the tree and laying on the ground.  All 20 locals who had been playing volleyball laying on the ground.  Every single one of us had been knocked out cold. Key freaky music. We slowly came to our senses and then all realized just what had happened.  We'd been hit by lightening! Every single one of us jumped up and ran screaming into our house.  Not sure why we reacted like that but it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

My mom had been in the house, working in the kitchen with a perfect view of the backyard and saw the whole thing. She ran to us as we came inside and checked us all out.  Nobody had even a scratch. Now isn't that bizarre?  30 people hit by one bolt and nobody hurt.  10 kids fell out of a giant tree and nobody hurt.  We were all pretty buzzed for a while though.

Honduras circa 1984. I'm the girl with the (original) Cabbage Patch Kid.