Updates

I've been meaning to post but life just keeps interrupting, haha. The children are so excited the new school books arrived this week. I found a book shelf for 17.00 at Office Depot and am going to set that up as the school book shelves.
Our La Leche League Family Fun Day was yesterday. It was slow starting but the children had fun playing and the food was really good.

I never did post about our A&W disappointment in Ruston. For the past few years, maybe 5, we have always stopped in Ruston on our trips to Nana and Papas. Jesse has this way of rubbing his stomach and licking his lips, saying, "Oh please are we stopping for some of that yummy rootbeer." Personally, I want some of the cheese curds which I have to fight Cynthia for! Well, we had promised we'd stop on our way home from AZ and when we got to the gas station, Exit 85 in Ruston there was NO A&W restaurant, sometime in the 10 weeks since we last stopped they closed! Jesse was utterly disappointed and was almost crying. I wish I had a camera to capture Loren's jaw drop. He wondered why we weren't ordering after the potty break! I said, um it's gone.
We ended up getting the kids each a kids meal at Burger King to try and lighten the mood. We've not been doing the kids meals because it is really starting to get expensive and they don't finish all the meal plus I'm tired of the junky toys. We usually just share a couple of combos between the family.

John and I have been sick, it started on the trip and got worse the further East we came. I guess my sinuses don't like Mississippi. One of the nights on the trip we had a scary night with John, he got croupy. Loren and I took turns walking outside with him and trying to sleep sitting the van. We were very thankful the next night was much better. Rebecca has also had a diaper rash since we've come back. I'm not sure its coincidence or has something to do with my increased soy lecithin consumption for plugged ducts.
Loren, Cynthia and Jesse have gone to church, they are having a big meal with barbecue meat provided by the church with church members bringing the side dishes. I wish I was up to going but John and I are under the weather.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

We arrived home safely from Arizona to find this....

The tree decided it needed to drop another limb, this one didn't stop at the roof, it went 3 feet into the attic and punctured the ceiling of the boys room. Oh fun! At least it didn't take the power lines off the house this time.

I'll be blogging more when I come back from the fog of this cough I have plus unpacking and dealing with insurance.

Adieu Tucson

Wow, so many mixed emotions as we spend the day cleaning and packing. We are down to our last 24 hours in Tucson.
Yesterday, I had a new friend come over and our children played together. It will be so hard to leave our new friends and Sunday School class. Thankfully there is always email for communication, and I'll be back to my regular phone. I never dreamed that we'd find a church home in 10 weeks, but God is good and he meets all our needs. You become closer to people as you pray for them!

Skype has been frustrating me today, the ringer and voice mail isn't working today. It is the last day of our service and they have a big, "extend your SkypeIn number now", Umm NO, not with such difficulty in maintaining a connection, voices being distorted and echos. I guess you get what you pay for.

We will be out of pocket until the end of next week when we will be back in Mississippi. We will be starting our school year and putting things away. I will try to get some of our recent pictures organized and probably write some more about our adventures and reflections.

My La Leche League Group is holding a Family Fun Day on Aug 25, hopefully I'll get to see a lot of my friends from back home there. So drop by the Park Baptist church on Hwy 80.

Sabino Canyon Flash Flood Deaths

http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/hourlyupdate/195285.php
This article about the flash flood in Sabino Creek flash flood happened the weekend of our trip into Sabino Canyon. This shakes me even more about our experiece and even more thankful for getting away from the Sabino Creek unharmed. I'm praying for the families of these two hikers.

Sabino Canyon Flash Flood

Have you ever played the game telephone, where one person starts a phrase and people whisper it to their neighbor and the last person tells what they heard? I had a version of telephone happen to me this weekend. We were in the Sabino Canyon, the upper roads were blocked due to recent flooding and the tram only went up to stop number 4. It was a nice little price drop that went with the decreased 'tram tour'. The driver let us off at stop 4 and said if it started raining we needed to get down to stop 2 because they wouldn't be able to cross any of the 'bridges'. I think it was 3 or maybe 4 bridges that we did cross and they had anywhere from 6-10 inches of water flowing over the top of them. The word bridge is used loosely, it was basically a flat road with rocks stuck on the edges to keep the tram from being pushed over the edge.

This is water at the edge of the bridge.

We noticed that there were dark clouds and it looked like it was raining up in the mountains. We figured we had 20 minutes until the next tram came through so we took off our shoes and splashed in the stream.
At one point I asked Loren if he thought the stream was higher, I said it felt a bit stronger to me. I walked to the edge to try and dry off my feet and put on my shoes while keeping Rebecca asleep in the sling. Loren walked the children downstream about 15 feet to the bridge.

I see a Park Ranger come through in a truck and talk to a gentleman at the edge of the stream, who hurried to his wife near me and told us that the ranger said a Flash Flood is coming down the mountain NOW and we need to get away NOW. I grab as many of the shoes as I can and yell at the kids to HURRY and get out of the water. Loren is calm, he said he was told it was a Flash Flood Advisory. He calmly gathers the rest of the things, but I can't wrap my mind around any other words than FLASH FLOOD. I've seen how quickly water floods streets here in the desert. We hurried down the road, I bruised my feet on the rocks and burnt them on the asphalt, only stopping when we are on high ground. We quickly stuffed our feet in shoes, and I dropped Rebecca halfway out of the sling, thankfully I managed to catch her, and amazingly she stayed asleep. We walked down the road until we saw a gathering of people at one the stops right before the next bridge. We compared stories, and everyone had 'heard' a different thing. One of the families had been waiting for 35 minutes for the tram and they are supposed to run every 20 minutes. We were just about to cross the next bridge to try and get to stop 2, before the water increased too much and we couldn't cross, when we heard a tram coming. I was very thankful to see that tram because now we were getting wet from the increasing rain. On the ride back, the tram was pushed close the the edge of the bridge and in the driver's words "The water pushed us further than I anticipated, and we just squeezed by" Oh Lovely!! That tram was the last one of the morning that went past stop 2.
I'm trying not to be overdramatic in my posting. I wanted to write. How fast would you run away from an incoming flash flood, but that would be pushing the limits of truthfulness!!

Blessing others

God touches our lives in so many different ways. We listened to a sermon on Sunday about just stopping and marvelling about the greatness of God.
The 3 points were;
1. God is God
2. We are Not,
3. Therefore do NOT put God in a box
A we wind up our summer in Tucson, I am thankful for God's blessings on us, and for meeting our needs and even some of our wants. We had not been paid since the beginning of June, the paycheck was waylaid somewhere between DC and AZ. The last week of July, it arrived just in time for us to meet our financial obligations.
I have recently started reading a blog of a great family living out their faith in the midst of trials. http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/ourquiverfull/369070/ many were blessed by helping them through a homeschooling resource benefit.
Today, I read about another family who is in need of a helping hand. http://www.chirotoons.com/cardwell/ Reading this will touch your heart and I would urge you to consider being a blessing to this family.

88 cents worth of fun,... sorta

Got you wondering? I don't have pictures, yet.. I'm a bit overwhelmed with the volume of pictures to sort and upload.
But, we bought a loaf of bread and went to Reid Park and fed the ducks. Shh, don't tell the ducks they didn't get the whole grain bread. The kids LOVED feeding the ducks. We plan on going back this week but the kids want to take 2 loafs, so I guess it will be 1.76 worth of fun well, sort of (plus tax and gas).

Life

We've been out enjoying life and our last couple of weeks in Tucson, there are not enough hours in the day to write about it too. Haha!
Today we went to Reid Park Zoo. The exhibits were great, we've never been so up close to the animals before. The tigers were the most active exhibit. The two males were pouncing on each other. Then one went swimming while the other came up to the glass were we were and he stood on his back legs and placed his paws on the glass right in front of us. You could have done paw to hand through the glass. We saw giraffes but missed feeding them by 5 minutes, anteaters, llamas, rhinos, and we watched the otters being fed. The polar bear was doing laps in his pool, he was a very impressive and powerful animal. Jesse wanted to see the lions, but all they were doing was sleeping. He just said his favorite part was the tigers.
John's favorite part was the train ride before hand. For 2.00 a person you get to ride the train, and it drives around the pond where all the ducks and birds are. We brought bread to feed the ducks, but by the time we finished the zoo we were hungry, HOT and sticky. Rebecca nursed and then slept in the sling for most of the zoo excursion. I was thankful I had rented a stroller and John rode in style, it was a bit of a pain because he wanted out at each exhibit.

Yesterday we had planned on going to the zoo, but it was a good thing we didn't, we would have been rained out. As we were all loaded up in the van, I noticed we needed gas. While we were getting gas I noticed the sky darkening and decided to get some groceries. We brought Loren a treat at work and I quickly checked out the U of A bookstore on the ground floor of his building. The parking meter allowed us 15 minutes. It was starting to rain so we headed for home. It is one mile and it was raining buckets by the time we got home. I was so thankful for the umbrella Loren's grandmother gave me for my birthday, but we still got drenched. Loren said that if I hadn't left when I did, I might not have got home. Less than 10 minutes after we left the street where I had been parked was flooded with 2 feet of water, and left a couple of cars stranded.
We had rain come down inside the air conditioner vent and I placed a bucket underneath. Arizona monsoon storms can be pretty extreme.