The youth trip to the beach was awesome. We had a great time, and the girls from Minnesota had a blast finding sand dollars. Josh (our church's worship leader) and I swam out to the buoys and were "orange flagged" by the lifeguards for doing it. LOL It was a blast though, and I'd do it again! (Said in my defiant voice.) It made me realize how much I miss having a pool at my daily disposal...need to take care of that soon.... Anyway, Jerry did this cool little devotional where you close your eyes and think about God while he's talking and just at the time he was saying something about imagining you're a seagull...flying wherever you want to... a huge flock of seagulls came up to the pavillion and started squawking because Elisabeth was feeding them a hamburger bun! It was quite funny, but also made the point a little stronger. (They all had their eyes closed, so they didn't see "why" all of the birds were there all of a sudden..., but I was watching Elisabeth because she'd been mischevious most of the afternoon.) It's so good to do youth ministry. I absolutely love it, and even though this is totally different since we're starting with a brand new church, it's still great.
Tomorrow we leave for "vacation". We're heading northward for a class reunion for two days, and on the way back we're going to be camping at a state park and taking in some area attractions. It will be so nice to actually do something as a family that is not centered around visiting family (though we will be seeing some for the first couple of days), and having a vacation together doing some fun stuff. We need to plan family vacations more often, even if it is just camping. Maybe we can take off this Fall and camp some, once it cools off here...and the alligators aren't quite so active. We enjoy canoeing, but not here, not in the summer at least! Of course, once it cools off, the mosquitoes won't be as likely to carry someone off either!
Hopefully I'll have some great photos to post when we return! We'll have a couple of days of vacation left when we get home (we're renting a car, but only for a week), so we'll probably head to the beach or something around here too. After that, it's only a week until school starts and life will get back to "normal" with our schedules....which is usually crazy/busy, especially with cheer and football getting into full swing by then.
