Tomorrow is Taryn's birthday #20! Happy Birthday to my sushi-lovin' girl!! She went out tonight and sent me pics of her dinner. All I can say is YUCK. But she is adventurous with her food. Bless her heart. I hope she has a GREAT birthday and enjoys all the little packages we sent along with bday cards and candy! It was an odd assortment of postal surprises! I also hope she enjoys using all the yummy gift cards to local places to help mitigate the sparse cafeteria offerings! It's hard to be away from home on your birthday so we tried to give her some of her favorite things!
Gib has been gone with a friend to the lake this weekend. I keep thinking I should go wake him up to eat dinner and stuff. He is missed.... eventually. I am used to the older girls not living here, but it is weird when Gib or Mariah aren't here. July will be interesting, that's for sure! Gib is also signed up for an ACT prep class that will end shortly before the September test. When he returns from Hawaii he will hit the books and start working on acing that exam! I will be working on identifying colleges that will be a good fit for applications and provide him with good choices this Winter/Spring. It's so hard to believe Gib is a senior and will be heading to a college orientation this time next year! Hopefully he will have the chance to hike Philmont next summer. His troop will have a repeat opportunity and he would love to be in on it! The other thing I have to do is book his Senior Pics! WOW!!! I think I will take an August appointment to give myself time to adjust.
Mariah has agreed to try to readjust to the European time zone, so she is heading to bed a little earlier each day. The goal is to have her sleeping 8PM to 4 AM by July 1st or so. She leaves for France on July 6. They are 7 hours ahead of us so that would put her close to "normal". We are in final discussions of what she hopes to gain from this adventure, how to act, how to be safe, how to give the impression that we have some class! Haha... we love repeating that quote. Before we know it she will be on her way!
Indy and Jeff came by this weekend. Indy got home a few days ago from the Kenya 2.0 trip. She had a good time. Worked alot harder and they improved on the water filtration systems. It was fortunate they had a chance to test the water in the units they provided because it turned out that while the water was 98% free of contaminants, the people in the community didn't realize that if they put clean water in unclean buckets they no longer had safe drinking water. For the Kenyan people, a bucket is used for many things and it is unnatural for them to have a bucket used only for clean, filtered water. When the group arrived and tested water, they discovered that after the people put clean water in the bucket (that had animal feces in it at some point) and it sat in a hot hut all day, the water was worse than untreated water from the river. It was a heartbreaking discovery but the group endeavored to instruct the village as to the importance of a clean bucket for their clean water. They did so by performing a skit. A guy dressed as a village woman which was absolutely hilarious to the people, and thus very memorable, and the rest had parts as animals who did their thing and dropped "poop rocks" into the buckets. Indy played the part of a bleeting goat and she had an oscar worthy performance of pooping and bleating at the same time. Nobody here was surprised to hear that!!! The village "woman" renacted what happened next - drink the water, get a stomach ache, and run to the toilet. I think the college students got their point across, and I KNOW the community is still chuckling when they think about it, and another couple dozen families have home filtration systems.
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