What's going on! :)

Hi everyone - sorry things have been a little quiet here. We are doing well though and will work hard to get our newsletter up and posted by this weekend. Things keep coming up - as always! :) We're excited to have our firsts guests coming in at the end of the month - Jen's parents. We're also looking forward to having a friend from our home church in NC - Rehoboth Baptist Church - join us here on summer staff. Thomas Jones was in the singles group that we led at Rehoboth, a neat young man from a precious family and we're delighted to have friend from home join us here at Timberline.

Reid is staying incredibly busy and is feeling more comfortable with his new responsibilities. Having done payroll and various things now a few times in a row, those things are going faster. Half of the students have returned from their missions trip to Mexico and the other half left at the beginning of the week. So these have been a couple of off weeks with extra days off as well as extra work days for the students. One of the things they do is supply wood to needy families and widows in the area. They also chop wood for staff - the other day, Rob (who is head of maintenane) and bunch of bibleschool students dropped off a truck load of wood for us the other day to replenish or quickly diminishing stack! What a blessing! It's actually much cheaper to heat our home here than it was in SC in spite of the fact that we have more space and it's a lot colder! We usually have a fire going in the living room at all times throughout the day.

Our whole family enjoys sharing meal times with the students and we try to eat at the lodge for supper at least 2x a week. This saves us some on our grocery bill, but more than that it's a great time to catch up with the other staff and keep up with what is going on with the students. The kids especially enjoy seeing the students. Last night as we were coming home they informed us that they had had had a huge ping pong ball fight in the basement with Zane (staff) and Daniel (student).

The girls have started taking gymnastics with some other homeschoolers at the local rec center, something we've wanted to do for years. For whatever reason they offer extremely affordable classes here and we were all excited to learn about this. We have applied for a scholarship to the rec center with our family so if that goes through it would be the perfect time to also get in some exercise while the girls are busy and Ian is at school. Ian's school play went very well and he has even asked to join the school choir now. His schooling for this coming year is great matter of prayer for us right now.

Well, time to get back to history lessons - I think we're continuing with the Roman Empire today! :) The other day we studied Native Americans and had fun building a little "igloo" in our front yard.

Blessings from all of us