Help the Stanley family rebuild their lives

Our family had only minutes to evacuate the Marshall fire in Colorado. My husband only had time to grab his work laptop and his wallet, and I only grabbed some basic necessities for the baby and I. We lost everything else. We were featured on Fox31, where an Amazon driver named Lou Ann saved our lives at the last moment.

Having been here so long, you'd think the snow would've arrived months earlier to prevent things like this from happening. But it did.

While I was gathering our belongings, my husband ran out and tried to start the car. It was dead. He then ran to the neighbors house and began banging on the door to no avail. He ran back home and said "we have no way out of here we have to try to make it by foot" while hundred mile an hour winds blew the fire through the shopping center right across the street from our house and smoke covered everything.

Right as we were throwing all of our belongings outside of the gate, by the grace of God, an Amazon driver showed up in that 5 minute window, to deliver a bicycle pump my husband bought because our car is out of commission. She asked if we needed help, and we said we have no way out of the town except on foot, and the fire was getting closer by the minute. A violent gust of wind then slammed against our gate, causing the door to become lodged inwardly. We tried to pry it open and we couldn't, so my husband began throwing items over the 8 foot tall fence and then climbed over it himself. Thank God we had gotten the baby and most of the belongings out before that happened. She then gave us a ride to the community center where we were safe from the smoke, fire and winds until our best friend could come get us.

If everything hadn't happened exactly as it did, we may not have made it out. Without her we might not be here today. We are starting this GoFundMe, so that we can at least begin to rebuild our lives with our beautiful baby boy, and we also want to give money to the Amazon driver Lou Ann, who lost her job as a result of this and has three children. We are not asking for a lot in the context of restarting our lives from scratch. And in the context of this GoFundMe being for two separate families. But she deserves recognition for what she did that day, later on she got trapped because she helped us, and thankfully was able to escape yet again.

All of this has been difficult, but we try to be as positive as possible. That's how you make it through times like this. Our baby is happier than ever and we are so happy nobody got hurt. We never in a million years thought this would happen to us, and certainly, we never imagined that our house would be ground zero for such a horrendous fire, leaving us minutes to evacuate.

With the money raised, we can find a home, buy clothes and toys for our baby, and hopefully start over.

Our home may be in ashes, but our family is safe. That's all that matters to us.

Thank you, and God bless.