The Grand Tour

Finally, some pictures! Today I got around to taking some pictures of the apartment and actually got them loaded on to my computer. We love the new place. It feels so nice and homey. We are really starting to get settled in and we are working on getting everything put away and decorated the way we want it.

Its finally summer! Or is it?

We have been pretty busy since school got out a few weeks ago, but we have been having fun. We moved in to our new apartment, which we love. I still need to take some pictures to post on here, but now that things have settled down a little I should have some more time to do that. We also had a good visit with John's parents when they were here a week ago. We went to Philipsburg, which is an old mining town. We also drove up into the mountains to see a ghost town. It was pretty cool, but we wish we would have had more time to hike around and see all of the buildings since you couldn't drive to all of them.
The weather has been kind of nasty the last couple of weeks. It rained almost every day for a week and was just cold, and then last week it got REALLY cold and snowed 4 inches overnight. It stuck around for most of the day, but the next morning it was gone and it started to warm up right away. Now its about 80 and it looks like summer might be here to stay, at least for awhile. We had vacation bible school last week. It went pretty well. It is by far the biggest outreach our church does. We have close to 100 kids I would guess, and only about 30 of them are from Pinehaven, and there aren't very many kids in our church other than PH, so most of those kids are just kids in the community.
This week summer school began. Summer school here is a chance for the kids who didn't get their work done during the school year to get caught up. I am teaching the girls class, and I have 10 girls right now. It has been busy, so I'm glad its only a half day of school. John is working up in the woods with the logging crew this summer. He is cutting down trees for firewood for the winter. Now that summer work groups and school have started we are settling into our regular routine. That is until camp starts at least.

School is Out

We finally got around to moving into the new apartment last week, but we haven't taken any pictures of it yet. It looks great though! We are so excited to finally be in the new apartment instead of the huge old house.

We've been really busy the last few weeks with finishing school and all of the extra stuff that goes along with that, in addition to moving into a new place. We had roundup on Memorial Day, so I will be sure to get some pictures posted from that soon. It is always a lot of fun to watch the kids tackling calves. And this year no one got hurt, so that was good. We had to finish grading book reports and finalizing report cards all week, I was making a slideshow for graduation, a scrapbook of my class for my classroom helper who is graduating, and John was working with the seniors on a song they sang at graduation.

Last night was graduation. We had 7 seniors graduating this year, which is a pretty good sized class for our school. It was a wonderful ceremony. The song that John led the seniors in (Mountain of God, by Third Day) sounded great. The kids did a really good job, and one of the girls played guitar with John. They all did an awesome job. Since we have so few students, all of the graduates give a speech each year, and they were all very well done.
Well, John's parents are here, so I should be getting back to the house. They also got us a TomTom GPS system for our car, so I'm playing with that right now. Its pretty cool.

Hot Springs, Bike Rides, and Bears

This weekend we went to Lolo Hot Springs to celebrate our 3rd anniversary. This is the first time that we actually went away for our anniversary and we had a good time. We rented a cabin, did some hiking in the mountains behind the resort, and soaked in the hot springs, which was wonderful.
We also took our bikes with us, and Saturday we drove to Lolo and did a forty mile ride on a pretty nice paved trail. It was only supposed to be a 30 mile ride, but about 5 miles in John asked me where my sunglasses were. I then realized that I had left them on the trunk of the car, so we turned around to get them before someone else decided they liked them. We have been doing quite a bit of riding this spring since it has warmed up. We ride often in St. Ignatius, but we also did a 50 mile charity ride in Missoula last weekend which was a lot of fun. We love riding with groups, so it was nice to be around so many people riding. Cyclists are great people.

After we got home Saturday evening, we planned to just hang out at home Sunday afternoon to get some stuff done around the house. We have a group from Lincoln Christian College here right now, and they were going on the hike to Mission Falls, so we decided to go too. (We've only been once before today since we've been here. Unbelievable.) I'm really glad we did. We took Scout and he stayed right with us. He was great. We also spotted a bear and a cub on the next ridge. We had binoculars with us, so we could see it really well, all from a safe distance. The cub was so cute and little. It kept running around back and forth behind the mom. (The picture is a little blurry because I had to zoom it in so much.)

Altogether it was a wonderful weekend. We have 2 weeks until school is out, and a few of those days we have off from school, so the time is going by pretty quickly. We are excited for summer, and finally having warm weather (it was 90 yesterday! What happened to spring?)

Oh, and be looking for a post about moving to our new apartment any day now.

Kidnapped!

A few weeks ago was our friend Jeremy's birthday. He leads the youth group, so the kids wanted to throw a surprise birthday party for him. We helped them get it all together, but we couldn't figure out how to get him to our house. Sooo... the best idea we could come up with was to go up to the house where he was hanging out and kidnap him. John and two of the boys dressed up with ski masks and sunglasses and all black and stormed in and made him come with them. He of course knew who they were so he made it really hard for them and made them carry him up the stairs. It was pretty funny. They all had a good time.

Snowstorm in April

Yes, we certainly did get some snow on Saturday/Sunday. Our friend Jeremy said he measured 10 inches on his picnic table in the morning. That is a lot of snow for April 20th! Living in Indiana we always thought that the weather did some crazy things there, but I'm not sure I've ever seen that drastic of a change in such a short period of time. Thursday it was probably in the 60's and Saturday it got down to 18 and we got 10 inches of snow. Incredible.

I took the younger staff kids sledding in our yard yesterday. I'll try to post some pictures later. We had a lot of fun.

Signs of Spring

I know this is not a fitting picture for a post title "Signs of Spring" but even as I write this, I am looking outside at a snowstorm. I just took this picture today. It is supposed to snow most of the day with accumulation up to 5 inches I think. So far this month, it has snowed at least a little bit almost every day. There have been a few exceptions, including last weekend and we definitely took advantage of the nice weather. My poor tulips which have been coming up nicely keep getting covered in snow.

A few weeks ago we had a college group here and we took them on a hike on the ranch. It was a nice day and its always beautiful at the top of the ranch.

We went on a bike ride on Friday evening and on Sunday afternoon, John played tennis, and we went to Missoula to enjoy some fishing and shopping, and also watched part of a triathlon. We didn't catch any fish, but it was a nice day down by the river anyway. John had planned a fishing trip with another guy for today, but obviously that didn't work out. We are really looking forward to the warm weather sticking around, but are glad to have the snow because any precipitation we can get now will help this summer. So, I guess we will just wait a little longer for spring to really stick here. I think spring is the season that just gets pushed aside. One day its still winter and the next thing you know its summer. Spring is not really a season, but more of a few random days spread out through the "spring" months. We will enjoy what nice weather we do have, and appreciate the snow and rain while it is still coming. Aren't the mountains beautiful?



We have less than 6 weeks of school left! We are excited for a change of responsibility for awhile. Summer break also brings many exciting things, such as family visiting, summer work groups, camp, fishing, etc.

One last thing... This is a rough time of the year for many of our students. I don't know what causes it, but many of them are really struggling right now. Keep them (and the houseparents, and the rest of the staff trying to work with them) in your prayers.


Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen. ~Ephesians 3:20-21