hide yo kids, hide yo wife

First off, if you don't know what the title of this post is, you really need a good laugh so watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzNhaLUT520 and then watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMtZfW2z9dw

Now that you have had a good laugh, time to get serious, but really. We came home last Saturday night after being gone all day to an open front door, every light in our house on, and every door inside open. Not the best feeling. We were smart enough not to go in (although Randy did yell in there and kick his foot against the front door) until the cops got there. While we were waiting, Randy looked through our bedroom window and asked, "Your wedding ring isn't in there right? Because everything is torn apart." I seriously wanted to throw up as I replied to him that yes in fact, it was on our dresser. We had been hiking then went boating so why would I have my ring? I knew it was gone and I was absolutely sick about it.

After the police officer cleared our house and said we could go in we went straight to our bedroom. Our night stand drawers were wide open with all my jewelry from inside it missing. All of my shoes were thrown out of the boxes on the floor of the closet and every drawer from the dresser was emptied onto the floor as well. We looked on top of the dresser and my ring box was sitting there. I knew it was empty and I didn't have the stomach to look. All I wanted to do was break down. Randy opened my ring box and yelled, "Oh my gosh it's still here!" Somehow, after they tore our whole room apart, they missed my wedding ring. Blessing? I would have to say yes because there is no other explanation that I can think of.

As we surveyed the rest of our house we saw that Randy's laptop was missing. This has ALL of his application stuff for medical school on it which he has been working on for months and a ton of personal information like our taxes saved on it. Not good. His watch was also missing and all of my jewelry except my wedding ring, of course. They also stole a bag of mine that I use when I go to the temple (with all my stuff in it).

The police left around 1am and we were sitting in our room changing all of Randy's passwords from my laptop when he asked where he had left his keys that morning. His keys to his car and our house were gone! Saying I freaked out at this point is an understatement. We were both scared to death and didn't know what to do. These people not only violated our personal lives, but they had keys to get back into our house. Locking it was no good. I got online and clicked on the first 24 hour locksmith that came up on google and they told me they would be there in 30 minutes. I felt like we were sitting there waiting for this person to walk back into our house. We decided we needed to have a cop watch our house until the locksmith came so we called the cop and locked ourselves in my car until he got there.

At 3am we finally had the locks changed to our front door. I can't explain the feeling I had every time I walked into our house and especially into our closet, since that is where everything was thrown on the floor. I hated it here. I felt violated and scared. It was not my home anymore, it did not feel safe what-so-ever. I emotionally could not clean up the mess they left. I wanted to throw everything that was on the floor away. It felt like it did not belong to me anymore. We decided we couldn't stay at our house that night (and we had to do something with his car anyways so that it didn't get stolen) so we drove to his parents house and stayed there.

When we came back home on Sunday it didn't feel better until I cleaned everything. It started to feel like home again after that but we were still scared about every noise. Even now we are very aware of everything. I do feel better here and I don't want to move anymore like I did that night, but I still think about it all the time.

Now we are putting everything back together. We have secured our house better (the doors were all locked, they broke in through our sliding door), we have changed locks, recorded all our missing stuff with the police, and talked to all our neighbors. I hope that we never have to experience anything like this again.

Here is a picture of what our closet should look like and then what it looked like when we got home:




I do have good things to post like a Lake Powell trip and another hike, so I will post those soon :).