East Stroudsburg, PA

We are loving the town of East Stroudsburg, PA! The best thing is the temperatures! :) It's low to mid 70's, and so cool in the mornings you need a sweatshirt! (very strange for us, this time of year!) Have no fear, next week we will be in Red Springs, NC where the forecast is upper 90's, not counting any humidity! Maybe we'll finally warm up a little bit!

We are working with a church plant here, and the work is not our usual type of work! So that's taking some adjustment, but we are having a good time and hopefully making a different here in the town! We are working with an environmental project and carefully removing weeds from their riverbeds. I figured little, vein type weeds...oh no! These weeds are 10 ft tall, actually they look a lot like a corn stalk!

We have to remove the seed head with scissors, to prevent the spreading of the plant. Then we knock the things down with our feet. Another crew that comes in will cut up all the stalks that are laying flat all over the ground, and then as a final step, they will remove them by their roots. I guess they really are disrupting to the local wildlife and also does something to the ground soil. SO, we are helping to remove them!

Yesterday Luke and I helped. Luke had a ball knocking those things down! In fact, he chose to keep doing that in place of going to the pool!

We saw a momma duck and five babies fighting the rapids in the river. The kids we were workign with saw two baby deer across the river! Wah, I missed it! The college kid who is running the project this summer said the five in our group did more yesterday than the 12 boys scouts he had all last week! :) Course they were probably 8-10 yrs old and we're highschool and 30+, but we still were proud of ourselves!

Andrew came home from working at the Salvation Army yesterday and fell asleep at 7pm and woke up at 6:30 am for breakfast! Luke went to bed at 12:00 am (as is usual for our summer schedule) and didn't wake up until 10:00am! Think our kids are worn out?

We get to spend the day tomorrow (my birthday) in New York City! I'm excited about that. We're taking the 65 youth+leaders with us, but I'm hoping they will all explore by themselves and we can wander around with our family! Friday we head back to NC for a board meeting for Mike, and then to Red Springs for a week and then Greensboro, NC for a week. THEN a five day break! Then two more weeks!

The summer is flying by, but we are having a blast and we pray we are making some type of difference along the way!

I noticed my blog went over 10,000 the other day! Yahoo! I'm excited about that! Wish I knew who you all were personally! But thanks for reading my blog! I'll do some type of drawing when I get home to celebrate!