On November 8th we woke up to the most horrific news. Late the night before there was a shooting at a local bar. 12 people were killed on college night, including one police officer. You never think it will happen in your town, and then it does.
After learning the news around 6:00 am I had about an hour to decide if I wanted to send the kids to school and if I should tell them what had happened. After a group text with a bunch of moms from school I decided to tell them since it seemed most kids at school knew and I would rather have them hear it from me. Nothing prepares you for that conversation. I decided to send the boys to school for the day even though I just wanted to keep them home and feel safe. When we pulled up to school I will never forget what was waiting for us. The entire school staff was out front greeting kids. Principal, teachers, office managers...all of them. There aren't words to express my gratitude to our community on this morning.
The teachers addressed it in their morning circles that morning and there happened to already be a meditation circle for parents planned at school for later that day.
After the meditation we came out to pick up our kids from class and we all smelled smoke. Come to find out there were several wildfires starting in the area, but honestly this was nothing new. After the Thomas fire in 2017 we were all used to wild fires. Little did we know...
I went to work that night and had most of my patients cancel or get stuck in traffic. At the time I worked on the third floor of my building and could see the freeway and surrounding mountains. Traffic was piling up, smoke was getting thicker and there was an eerie glow of fire all around.
By the time I left the smoke smell was pretty strong, but again, nothing new, we had school cancelled the year before during the Thomas fire which was in Ventura and Santa Barbara because we could smell the smoke.
That night around 2 in the morning we had a few friends call us saying they were being evacuated. At first we told them to come on over....until we checked my phone and saw this:
So we loaded up the car with the kids, a change of clothes and our computer (all of our pictures and documents) and headed out.
And this is what we saw while we drove:
We are lucky to have family all around us and we didn't have to search all night for hotel rooms like many of our friends. We ended up at Brian's dad's in Santa Monica for the next few days.
The smoke in the distance is what you could see the next morning as the fire burned through Thousand Oaks, Westlake, Agoura and towards Malibu.
Luckily we had good air quality in Santa Monica and lots to do. We walked around town, played at the park, went to the bookstore and to the movies that night.
I did not take these next two pictures, they were floating around the internet for days of what it looked like in Malibu.
By Sunday we were back home and safe, although the air quality was terrible all week keeping us indoors and wearing masks. We kept busy by checking on our friends houses and feeding pets that were left behind. Many friends weren't allowed back for almost a week.
A fire that popped up behind our house the day we got home.
We were lucky. All of our friends were lucky. So so many people were not. It was truly devastating and our community is still healing from all of it.
