Update and a Book Review

I am kind of alarmed at my lack of summer. When I decided to take the summer off from swim team, I envisioned time to do things that don't normally happen during the school year. So far, most of them still haven't happened. At the moment, my hurt back, thanks to the cooler on vacation, has limited my tear-through-the-house-and-get-rid-of-junk campaign. Other than that, I have tons to do to prepare Gabriel for his school-year move to Colorado and the school year with my other six school-aged children. I really want to start the school year early, so we can have a nice, long break at Christmas (to do all the things that we normally don't get done at Christmas - notice a theme here?)

So, the last few days, I have been trying to wrap up lots of loose ends; everything from scheduling Alei's wisdom teeth removal to preparing the guinea keet cage. Once I work through this list, I'm going to update Gabriel and Alei's transcripts and order my homeschool curriculum. Then, while I wait for it's arrival, we are going to do a deep clean and organize house campaign before we start school.

Grandma is here until Saturday; yesterday she read Julia to sleep, which was great since she has VBS every evening.

On a separate note, we had a HUGE blessing with our rental home. This month marks the one year anniversary that our nightmare renters moved into our house. They lived month after month paying nothing, or very little, and conjuring up lie after lie. We finally evicted them in the spring. We had friends move in for three months - the only three months of dependable rent the entire year. The house has been sitting empty since they moved out. We have had three different people commit to the house and back out for three different reasons. The third was not supposed to move in until the end of August, so we still had 1/2 of July and all of August to pay the mortgage, utilities, water and lawn care. They backed out Saturday night; Sunday morning, we showed it to a military family just moving to the area. They took it, PAID and are moving in today. As an added blessing, they signed a three year lease. I can't even tell you how wonderful it will be to have dependable rent-payers for three years!

Lastly, I have to recommend this book -

It is a true story about the International Justice Mission (IJM.) They are located in the D.C. area but are a Christian organization that is devoted to freeing human slaves around the world. This particular story is about a little girl brothel in Cambodia. It sends chills down my spine that people will exploit little girls for money, but it is happening in abundance all over the globe.

One more reason that Christians have to stand up for widows and orphans; to prevent them from being sold into a life of slavery!