An Update on the Update

Well, I've been on the job almost 3 weeks now, and so far am loving it! Something touches my heart just about every day. It is such a pleasure to work in a place where the children are taught to love their God and their country! Every day Grace says 3 pledges and sings 3 songs as part of her morning routine: The Pledge of Allegiance/The Star Spangled Banner, The Pledge to the Christian Flag/Onward Christian Soldier, and The Pledge to the Bible/Thy Word. I was able to sit in on the school's chapel time today, and was about moved to tears to be standing there listening to about 250 students say/sing these things and realized that most schools don't even say the Pledge of Allegiance these days much less allow prayer or anything outwardly Christian into their halls. I am so thankful that both of our children will be attending this school next year. I know we may not be able to put the kids through private school forever, but I hope to keep them in there as long as possible so they can arm themselves with the Truth and be able to stand firm when faced with difficult decisions and peer pressure.


Grace is loving her new teacher and her new class. She is such an adaptable child, I know I worry needlessly about how she will handle change. I think she enjoys the different variety of activities they do during the day, and I know she loves the Bible stories she hears, because she listens to them! She is able to tell me so much of what she learns during the day - the Thursday before Easter, it was the crucifixion story, yesterday it was the story of Joseph and the coat of many colors. And the details she remembers! It just blows my mind!! Today she came to me and said, "Mommy, we need to pray for Flutter our little butterfly. He fell off the paper, and we need to pray to God and ask Him for Flutter to live." (They have several caterpillars in jars, and when they make their cocoon, they transfer them into this mesh "treehouse" and wait for them to hatch from their cocoons) I like this school a lot better too - every day she brings home a paper that shows they actually did some school work instead of just doing art or playing all day. The teachers love her too, and keep telling me how good she is - and I just want to ask them "Are you sure you're talking about my kid?"


Tristan has been having a great time at "school" the last week and a half - I think he likes seeing and playing with other kids. About the only time he got to do that was at his gymnastics class and at Sunday School. Guess I shouldn't have been so selfish with my baby the last 10 months! He always comes home with some sort of art project, and is so proud of what he did that day. "Mommy, look what I did today!" "See?!?!" I think he'll really enjoy going to preschool in the Fall.


David is doing well also. He is recovering well from his surgery on his eye socket - is still a little black and blue, but looks a lot better. He went to a doctor today and is in the process of getting some x-rays to "make sure they got it out and there's no metal in his head" so he can finally get another MRI done and we can see what the next step is in treating his back. Hopefully that will happen this week.

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In other news, after David's follow up last Monday, we took the kids to the zoo in Tucson. They are so tolerant when we go up there, and we have never done anything for them while there (its always doctor appts and shopping), so we decided that we needed to let them have a little fun. Here's a few pictures from that day:







There were some monkeys there that were absolutely entertaining - speed swinging around their enclosure! The kids loved it.

























Then there were the giraffes - you can actually feed them at certain times of the day (which we had to promise to do next time, since David and I didn't have any cash on hand).

Finally, there was this really odd two headed tortoise: