To the End of the Earth

Last weekend we traveled to Portugal. It was the most amazing trip!! We did absolutely nothing... just relaxed! I had to force Jay to sit on the beach and just let time go by. This wasn't our normal vacation, but it sure was fantastic. We spent almost all of our time playing in the water, playing on the beach, or sleeping in the sun! So great!

I'll let the pictures do the rest of the talking.


Ok.... maybe not. It's been sitting here spinning for over an hour and it's time for me to leave!

Jay and I are heading to Romania this afternoon. We will be spending the next two weeks serving God in a very exciting way. Jay will be working hard the whole time, building play grounds, painting, and doing other odd jobs to make the place look nice. I will be keeping the kids busy. I will be leading Vacation Bible School for the younger kids, Club for the older kids (like a BASIC concept for those familiar with that), and then a sports ministry for all the kids! Our location is very poor and has nothing, but they are the happiest happy! I'm excited and neverous at the same time! It's going to be a great week of seeing God at work. Please pray for us!!

I'll try to post Portugal pictures when we get back. They are beautiful, so I have to share!

School's Out for Summer!

I'm just getting ready to leave the house for my last day of school!!! Yesterday we had our awards ceremony with the kids and then sent them home for the afternoon. We had the rest of the day to work in our classroom. I could have been done easily, but I decided to dive into the unknown wall of closests and do some MAJOR cleaning. Nothing in these closets is mine and I haven't touched them since I moved into the room. But it was time! It really wasn't that bad. And I'm not afraid to throw things away, so my garbage filled up quickly!

Today we have to go in to do our final clearing and checkout. I get my room inspected at 8:50 this morning, and then will have the rest of the day to do...... Club Beyond planning. We leave for our mission trip in Romania in one week and I have tons I need to do before then. It will be a good time for me to stick myself behind a desk and get some planning done.

But that will only last so long, as we are jumping on a plane to head here this afternoon...

This would be the wonderful, sandy beaches of Portugal! I'm so excited to get away for a few days, slow life down, and simply relax. Jay and I tend to forget what that word means, so we'll see how long we last. We have two options..... we can spend hours on the beach doing absolutely nothing, or we can go inland and tour the country. I'm sure we'll do some of both as neither of us can sit still that long!

The weather is supposed to be absolutely perfect! High of 80, perfect sun, and no chance of rain!!! I can't wait to get there!!

Undefeated Season

The end has come to our softball season. We finished this past weekend with a tournament. Back to March when we started practicing, I would have told you we wouldn't win a single game. I was so scared with the team I had. The first few practices we had to start with the very basics.... I'm talking the things that you think everyone knows about softball. When I asked the girls to run after they hit the ball, they asked where to run to. When they fielded a ball and I said to go two... the left fielder left the ball rolling and started running to the infield. I had to remind myself that even though these are middle schoolers, some of them had never touched a ball before.

As the season went on, I saw more and more progress out of the girls. They were getting so much better! They could throw, they could catch, they were running aggressively. We were winning one game after another. Up until this past weekend, we were undefeated. We wanted to finish off the season that way! I made sure the girls were focused and ready for their last two games of the season.

Here's how focused we were...
Can you find me? I got piled on!

 Then it was pay backs!

The first game we pulled off with an 8 point advantage. The second game.... well, it wasn't much of a challenge. We ended up winning 16-1. It could have been much worse, but I forced my girls to stay at third base instead of stealing home. They are hard to hold back because they've been taught to be aggressive, but enough is enough. I had to remind them about sportsmanship. That's a difficult concept at that age. They just want to play their game and win, they don't care much about the score.

It turned out to be a great season. I'm so glad I had the opportunity to coach these girls. They are such a joy to me. This is my third year of coaching several of these girls. A few of the parents are begging me to move up to coach the next age group next year so their daughters can stay with me. We'll see what next spring brings.

Beautiful Norway

Over Memorial Day weekend, Jay and I traveled up to the beautiful land of Norway. It is quite an expensive country, one of the most expensive in the world. We did our best to keep it cheap, but it sure wasn't easy!

We were there for three nights and spent two of those nights in the car. The one night we were in a hotel, we paid $180 for a simple two twin bed room. It sure wasn't anything speial for that price! But it was nice to shower and sit on a toilet (not squat in the trees).

Many beautiful country churches. A perfect setting with the mountains in the background.

 Also a church, but from 2000 years ago!

We also had to eat very cheap. We ate one meal of McDonalds and one meal of pizza. For the rest of the meals we went to the grocery store and bought bread, peanut butter, and jelly. I was definitely ready for real food by the end of the trip.

It stayed light most of the day and night. At 2:00 in the morning it was still somewhat light. Made it quite hard to sleep in the car! This picture was taken at 10:00 at night. We didn't even realize how late it was.

Unfortunately the weather wasn't the greatest for us while we were there. It rained quite a bit, which made for not such great viewing. There were some things that we wanted to see but didn't get to because of the rain and fog. Nonetheless, it was still beautiful. The mountains, the water, the farm land, everything was so pretty.

This is what we saw a lot of the time! Looking out the window as we waited for the ferry to arrive.

Finally, an almost clear day!

 The torch from the Lillihammer 1994 Olympics. We also saw the ski jump and speed skating arena.

Jay and I really enjoyed looking at all the barns. They were so beautiful! We took lots of pictures of them. Several times we felt like we were in Iowa!

As we were driving up a mountain, we passed a bus that had blown a tire. We got about 200 meters up the road and heard a strange sound. We too had a flat!! I went to the trunk to get out the spare, and there wasn't one! Instead, it was a repair kit. After looking at the pictures of the directions, we finally figured out what to do. We had to pour a glue like mixture into the tire, swish it around, pump up the tire (with an electric pump that plugged into the car), and then drive for 10 minutes to let it harden. We checked it after 10 minutes and it was still holding. Two days later when we turned the car in, it was still good!! We were so lucky to not have any more problems. Buying a new tire would have cost a pretty penny!

This is the valley where Jay's Grandma's family came from. It was an absolutely beautiful area, with a stream running through, trees all around.

Overall, we had a good trip. It wasn't my favorite country, but the bad weather and the high prices had a lot to do with that. I'm glad we went though, as it is a great way to remember the awesome creation that God blessed us with.

Night at the Oscars

Well folks.... it's finally over! Many months of hard work all paid off! Last night was the Schweinfurt Garrison and Community Ball. It was a great time!! The theme for the night was a "Night at the Oscars". We had a red carpet, sidewalk of fame, a big Hollywood sign, and many other decorations to set the mood. We had a fantastic turn out and had to set up two more tables before we ate. What a great problem to have!

Jay and I spent all day at the Mercure setting up. We had a lot of things to build and place. I finally left at 4:00 to come home and shower. Jay came home about 4:20. We were both dressed and back in the car by 5:00 to head back to the Mercure. I left with a wet head, but it all worked. Once we got there, we finished setting up, turned all the candles on, and made sure everything was ready to go. We spent the past month making most of the decorations. We didn't have much money to work with, so lots of handmade things this year. We cut out nearly two hundred stars when all was said and done. But it all still looked good!

This was out in the entryway, before going into the dance hall. you can see the walk of fame. A red carpet ran down it, but you can't really see that. The Hollywood sign is 8 feet long and hanging from the second story. It was to help set the mood as soon as people walked in the door.

 I forgot to take a picture before the table was all messed up, but you can still get an idea of the centerpiece!

It was a great night of being with our friends! I really didn't see much of Jay. He was running around with his head cut off! He was the MC for the night, so didn't really sit with us. I'm glad I had other people to be with. Instead of having a speaker this year, we played a trivia game. We had 20 trivia questions about movies along with 20 movie clips. Everyone guessed the answers and we totaled the points. The winning table earned themselves an oscar trophy! I nearly crashed in the middle of the evening, but got another burst of energy at the end! We had a great time dancing all night. A lot of great songs were played. Especially toward the end of the night, I was having a lot of fun on the dance floor!

Here I am with my date! I didn't see him too much more than this!! If I wanted to dance with him I had to force him to slow down!!! I held on tight to him while dancing, otherwise he would have ran away, not because he didn't want to dance, but because he wanted to make sure everything was going well.

Being the MC

Overall, it was so much fun! But I'm also so glad it's over! We put a lot of time and energy to make it a perfect night! I sure hope everyone had a lot of fun!

This is me with my second wind of energy! It was close to midnight around this point!

Crazy Running Man!

Who wakes up on a Sunday morning and thinks to themselves..... sure, I'll run the half-marathon today! Why not!!! Definitely not me!!

There were a group of peeps heading to Wurzburg to run their annual half-marathon. I was going to watch some kiddos while their mom and dad ran. Jay wasn't sure if he wanted to run or not. He surely didn't want to get out of bed and he couldn't stay awake while driving there. But once we got there and he saw everyone, he got the bug! Of course he wanted to run!

Everyone before the race

How did he do.... amazing of course! I'm so jealous that he can not train AT ALL, and then just go run 13 miles and act like it's no big deal! He was still smiling by the end of it! His legs were quite sore, but nothing he couldn't handle! What a man!!

 One-third the way through the race...

Coming in to the final shoot! He made it to the end!

 Geerati and Jay after the race!

While everyone was running, I was part of the cheering crew! I kept these four lil' ones as their mom and dad ran. Thankfully there was a bunch of us together, so I had many eyes on them. I was so glad to have more adults around to help corral the kids. They weren't too excited to stand around for three hours, but we survived. I had to break out the big basket of food for the last two hours to keep them occupied.

It was a fun day overall. Everyone was completely exhausted by the end of the race, those who ran and those who cheered!!

Super Saturday

This weekend flew by oh too fast!! I'll break it up so you don't have to read so much! Saturday will be enough for this post! You'll get Sunday's review soon.

Saturday morning I woke up early and was on the ball diamond by 8:00. We played a double header starting at 9:00. We won the first game 11-9 and then won the second game 15-8. I was so nervous about my girls at the beginning of the season, but they are really pulling it together. I had so many new girls this year so we've had to start from the beginning. The first two weeks of practice were all fundamentals. For example, I would tell the girls to run once they hit the ball. One of them asked me where she was supposed to run to. I had to continually remind myself to stay simple! Nonetheless, they have improved a great deal in the past month. It's been so fun to watch them grow. We have two more games left this season! I hope we can pull them off with two more wins!

We finished our games up by 1:00 in the afternoon. After that I brought two girls home with me to get ready for the middle school formal that night. I did both of their hair for them. I've never done hair like theirs, so it was interesting. They were both pretty cute by the end.

During...

 The final products, even though you can't really see them. I wish I had a before picture. Especially of the lion's mane... (yes Mia, that would be you!)

After dropping them off at their houses, I quickly drove back home, jumped in the shower, and was out the door 30 minutes later. I left again with a wet head to go to the dance. The theme of the dance was a Masquerade. Almost everyone had masks on. Everyone looked so great! We had a good time standing around and watching all the kids. I danced my way around a few times. I love the group of sixth grade girls this year, so had fun with them.

Jay being bored before people really began dancing!

By the time we got out of there at 11:30 we were pretty tired. We crashed quickly once we got home!

It was a fun day full of middle school girls! I sure do love my sixth graders! I love how much fun they are, I love all their giggles, I love their innocense!