swimm lessons

OH my girl!

It's been a couple of months since I talked much about school. It's summer after all, so I didn't have to think about it. But last week a woman from school called and offered to have Anora come to a play time at school. I jumped at the chance. Not to mention the chance to have some over due quiet/cleaning time, but Anora does much better being prepared before starting anything new. It starts today and lasts all week, just for a couple of hours. So this morning we got ready early and went out 5 minutes early for the bus. Apparently the bus was also 5 minutes early, cause it met us at the sidewalk! I snapped a couple of pictures and she was off. So many new things for her.

We even have swimming lessons this week. We had to move them later in the morning due to school. So it'll be a busy week!

I figured we'd have a hard time getting use to being ready 1 full hour earlier than we had to for preschool. But we really didn't. I didn't let her watch cartoons during breakfast like she usually would. That cut a 1/2 hour right there. I think she is ready for this.

I can't believe how fast she is growing!

On another topic, the floods of Iowa. We are ok. We're not really effected yet. If the river Jeremy crosses to get to the cities goes over the 4 lane highway, we'll have problems. But so far so good. Even our family is ok so far as we know. But a lot of our church friends, have friends and kids that are displaced due to the floods. Or even in once case, they don't have much water, so came a very long way home to wash clothes and take showers.

Please keep praying for those who have been evacuated or losing their possessions. I pray they turn to God. He can't be washed away or mold or mildew.

guess what we did today

We started the day camping but came home cause we were all crabby, and there was a chance of storms. Well the chance arrived! We had a little cell move through and took out 1/2 of our back pine tree and tons of our maple tree!
But her are the miracles! We were home, not camping, we moved the truck just in time. The camper wasn't hurt at all. The trees didn't do any real damage to the garage, porch or house. A few object like our umbrella were broken, but hey, that's fine. And that back pine, we hate, so I'm glad so much is gone.

And Praise God for helpful neighbors, and God parents. Our God Father and Mother and their son Caleb came and helped a ton!
Speaking of ton, we took 14 trucks to the compost. There was a line at the compost heap, and an endloader pushing the existing piles back to make room for more.

Though I don't know for sure, thank God no one in the storms was hurt.


This is copied out of local news. Where they 80 mph winds, is where we were camping this a.m. !


Severe weather pops up in the Quad Cities

QUAD CITIES -- This afternoon, doppler radar indicated a tornado, and a warning was issued. That initial warning expired at 2:30pm. At 1:50 this afternoon, a trained spotter reported a funnel cloud near Mediapolis, Iowa. Heavy rain and 60MPH wind gusts were reported at the Walmart in Muscatine at 2:06.

Trees were reported down in Oakville, Iowa at 2:22pm. A trained spotter reported 80MPH winds, damaging gas pumps in Parkview, Iowa.

Trees and powerlines were also reported down just northwest of Davenport along Highway 130.

out of school

Well it's 3 days and counting. And it has been very interesting. Today is the first day Anora hasn't asked if we're going to school today.
We've done a lot of things. She helped me clean the Sunday school rooms at church, visited the playground of her new school, and then helped make decorations for Vacation Bible School (vbs). I have a lot of things planned. But we've also had a lot of time outs, and a new unique punishment.
She is still having a lot of wetting accidents, just because she doesn't want to go when we tell her, but she won't go on her own either. Several wise mom's said just let it do herself and it'll turn around, doesn't work for Anora. She likes washing her own pants, and doesn't mind wetting herself. So she knows enough letters to write "ITS NOT OK TO PEE ON ME" I made her do it 5 times. We worked on letters and subliminal messaging and torture of sitting that long, all at the same time. It was torture for both of us at one time, but I think I would do it again.
In my free time, I've been trying to figure out and set up, with Jeremy's help, a new computer music system. We're replacing one that starts with an "i" cause it's too hard on the computer, it freezes up too much. This new one is so much better! But it's made for people who speak computer. So there were a lot of thing I didn't understand at first. But I'm really liking it. We listen to podcasts a lot, but sometimes we get behind on them. With the new one we can preview it before we download it. Saving us a ton of disk space. And the new one we can make look how we want. It has all kinds of nifty gadgets. And works with both of our music players. I'm excited and it hasn't crashed anything yet.

Please pray for VBS and all the kids attending one. May God speak loud shouts of joy to them.