IAHE Conference, Vacation part 3

It was wonderful to spend time with Lynette and Fritz. I even got to meet some of their friends. I had the opportunity to enjoy a Sunday service at a home church and met some people who prayed for us and supported us. If any of you happen to read this, I would like to thank you again! It was such a pleasure to finally meet you. You have all be so kind and welcoming. On the 3rd and 4th of June we went to the Indiana Association of Homeschool Educators (IAHE) Conference. It was about as big as the MACHE one here in Minnesota. Oh, it was so nice to once again look at all the books and materials! I didn't make it to the Mache conference in Duluth this year, so the one in Indiana made up for that. It was such a great time to be able to look at curriculum, books and other cool things. I went to workshops and listen to Mike Farris from HSLDA and other keynote speakers. I went to Joyce Herzogs workshop and listen to some others. Fritz and Lynette held several workshops, I got the cd and listened to them on our way home.
Lynette and I held a workshop as well. I thought it was really good and people seemed to like it. We had good questions at the end, that was really fun. People showed quite a bit of interest and seemed encouraged. The lady who organized it was very pleased and stated that she felt greatly encouraged. I am very happy that God can use our story for His glory. It was so good to be able to show how God is still working miracles today. Our workshop was also recorded on cd.

Pastor Fritz, B., Nina, Jamie, Jeremy, me, Lynette

Lynette and me with two very lovely friends of Lynette.

Vacation part 2

After enjoying two days at a very nice campground, it was time to continue our travels to Indiana. After driving for about six hours we arrived :>

It got a pretty warm in the car without a/c

though some of us are too cool to be hot  - lol

We were at our friends house early afternoon. It was so good to see them again! They are missionaries in Germany and they planted the church we went to in Berlin. We missed them and were really happy to see them again. The kids had a good time together as well. It seemed like we had just seen each other. It was such a wonderful time together.

Two sweet, lovely, cheeky girls  ;-)

Well this one can be quite cheeky as well....

Aahh, vacation.....

Well, we are back from our vacation. It was a great time! We were gone for almost two weeks, well, actually it was 13 days. We had a fun time and once again were able to see God at work. Let me start by saying that we decided to go camping in a tent. As I mentioned before, we are used to taking our camper out, so this was going to be a new adventure for us. We started on our trip with a car that was, well, very fully packed.

Luckily we have three rows of benches in the car and did take one out. So we did have enough room ;-)  I don't know what we would have done with a smaller car - lol.
We left much later than we wanted to because it was raining pretty hard and we didn't feel like loading the car in the rain. When it finally stopped we got everything in the car, including the dog. We dropped her of at a friends house, where she was eagerly awaited by her doggy friend. Thank you again Family P. ! Leaving two hours later than planned we were finally on our way. It was a pretty nice trip and sometime in the afternoon we stopped for about 40 min. to eat and stretch our legs for a few minutes.

It was already pretty warm, but still bearable. We finally made to our first campground in Illinois just before they closed. I had booked it before so the registration was quick, unfortunately we had to set up camp in the dark. We didn't know if we should be happy about that since it was only our second time setting up the tent. On one hand it was dark and would be a little harder to find all the pieces, on the other hand we could hide our beginners attempts in the dark :)  We got to meet our new camping neighbors and found out that they were from Spain, they are traveling through the US until the end of June. They were very nice and offered their help, if we needed it.   We were better than we thought and had the tent set up within 10 min! Yeah!  While two of us set up the tent the other two blew up the mattresses and got the sleeping bags out of the car. Everything was set up and done and put away again within 30 min. We were pretty desperate for a cool shower unfortunately it turned out to be a fairly warm shower. We were finally done and ready to turn in for our first night in our new tent.  We woke up early but refreshed. The mattresses held the air, it hadn't rained and tent was still standing! We had a wonderful day and the kids even got to go to the pool.

This is actually our school table  :>

We are working hard on our lunch......

while some are being funny.....

and others -well- are not so busy.....

playtime at the playground right next to us.

fun at the pool

I better get going and will continue with our vacation story tomorrow  :D