So, I guess I have to start from the beginning. Last Monday, Peter and Dad went to their first Boy Scouts meeting. Peter just turned 11, (the necessary age for starting Boy Scouts) so they decided Monday was the night. They got there and, as it turns out, once a month the Scouts go on some sort of trip together. This past weekend there was a canoe trip on the Hiwasse river. Peter and Dad went. Obviously, I wasn't there, but it sounds like they had a good time. It turns out that Peter's troop leader was a friend of ours, which was really good, because he only knew one other boy on the trip. Meanwhile, at the place-of-much-stress (a.k.a. HOME) we were having quite a different experience. Stored in our basement were numerous boxes of pictures. 20+ years of boxes, actually. We were assigned to sort through and organize them by year so that we could have them scanned and put on external hard drives. We did that (most painfully) on Friday night. Saturday morning came, and we thought we were in the home stretch. When we woke up, we discovered that Mom had only slept 5 hours that night. Fun, right? Don't get me wrong, she wasn't grumpy, just......tired. So, Saturday, she took a nap, and then we were finishing up pictures. Mainly putting the pictures in labeled boxes and bags. We realized that all our hard work the night before didn't do much because we didn't really know what year some of the pictures belonged to. So, it took all of Saturday night to finish those pictures, but we all went to bed with a feeling of accomplishment. All of us, that is, except Mom. She realized that we had photo albums with all of the pictures we had just sorted through that were already in order, (thus eradicating the need for Friday nights' 6 hours of work) and that we also had negatives of all of the pictures (thus erasing the need for Saturday's work). So, she didn't sleep at all on Saturday night, and come Sunday morning was exhausted. After church, we came home and worked on photo albums all morning and afternoon. We cleaned everything up and, at 3 o'clock we had ice cream to celebrate being DONE!!!! For real, this time. YAY! Then Mom took a nap. She wook up at about five and we ate, cleaned up again, and played spades until Dad and Peter got home at about 9. So, which weekend would you have chosen?

camping/canoeing:

home: (no pictures available)

Sorry for the long break in posting. Not too much has been happening around here lately. Swimming is over for the summer, and we have been organizing our upcoming school year. Oh, fun. I have started piano lessons again and am much discouraged by the amount of technique etc. that I have lost over the summer. So sad. Anyway, tomorrow Mary and I have a rafting trip with our year round swim team. YAY! We're sooo excited! I'll write more about that later.

Sorry I don't have more of these....I was hesitant to take my camera for fear of it coming home broken. :)


Playing in the gym (soccer, volleyball, basketball):

Basketball in the (new!) gym:

The playground:

Some people from the trip:

Our assistant pastor (left) and youth pastor (right) in the dining hall:

Robby Holt, our assistant pastor:

Okay, Hannah. My favorite part was roller skating with the kids, mainly because I realized that guys can't skate. Thus, I did see quite a few fall on their faces. Yes, I wanted to pet a zebra, but they didn't have any. Just dogs and cats and rabbits. We didn't pick any blackberries, but they had peach trees and we picked peaches. No one there spoke any foreign languages. :( We had biscuits, eggs, bacon & sausage for breakfast every day, and we had meatloaf one day, tacos one day, burgers one day, some kind of steak thingy another night, and red beans and rice another day. We had something different every day for lunch and dinner so I missed some, but hey, I can't remember everything. I tried to post pictures yesterday, but our card reader didn't work.
:( However I shall try again soon.

As many of you know, this last week we went on a mission trip with North Shore Fellowship (our church) to an orphanage called Palmer Home in Columbus, Mississippi. It was soooo GREAT!!!!!! We drove down in a huge bus last Sunday afternoon. We saw a movie all together in Columbus before going on campus and unpacking. We had a worship time together and went to bed. This is what our schedule looked like Monday thru Thursday: wake up at 6:30, have a quiet time from 7 to 8, eat breakfast at 8, work from 9 to 11:30, clean up for lunch, eat lunch at 12, go back to work at 1, work and work and work again until 4:30, clean up for dinner, eat at 5:30, then FREE TIME with the kids from 6:30 to 8:30, after which we did a worship time and small groups and then we went to bed at any time between 11:30 and 12:30 to get up and do it again in 6-7 hours the next morning. On Monday and Tuesday night we played at the pool on campus with the kids. Wednesday, we took the kids to a skating rink, and Thursday we went to the pool at the Ranch (additional housing for the kids built in 2005). All day Friday we went to Lake Tiak-O'Khata (pronounced tee-a-cata) and had a picnic lunch. We returned to campus Friday night, ate dinner, packed up the bus, and left. :( We had a 4 hour bus ride and, at 11:30 p.m., the trip officially ended at our youth building. If you have any specific questions about the trip, feel free to ask. :)