Day 1

SATURDAY

3:49 - beep beep beep. Alarm turned off, I roll out of bed. Today is the day I go to Mexico. I still can't believe it. I've waited the entire year for this to happen again. This time I have memories. Revisit. Relearn. Revitalize. It has all happened before. Or has it?

6:30 - No. Now my brain is awake and I realize it won't be the same. I'm on the plane with friends. Loud friends. That didn't happen last year. The waitress hands me a cup and I give it to the guy in the window seat which is the polite thing to do. Unless the cup spills over.....thankfully it's just water.

Time? - We land in San Diego and wait. Some people are on Alaska, we are on Southwest. We don't get together very quickly. Then the thirty-seven of us flood out to the 3 vans where we head to Costco. The walkie-talkie blares in van 3. Wanted: Avonlea. Wanted: Avonlea. Why? Apparently, I've been recruited to help load up food in Costco! I hook up with one of the moms and look up and down aisles for snacks and candy. We buy a whole cart bursting of nuts, bars, and dried mangos. Carrots are wanted to keep the drivers awake so I find them and put them into cups. The entire way down to our destination I hear the crunches. . .

Halfway to the ranch, we stop for some ponchos and blankets. We pray for the lady we're buying from. Then she gives us a discount!

I'm not pictured in case you're looking for me. This was the lady we prayed for and bought ponchos and blankets from.

5:00 - We reach the ranch well before dark. Dinner is prepared while we scramble into the dorms. Sticky notes are handed out and the showers and bathrooms are named after cities (there are no locks). Moscow and New York are the showers and London and Paris are the toilets. One of the girls knocks on the bathroom stall. "Anyone in Paris?" Mary replies, "Wee, wee."

7:00 - We play tag in the dark under the stars.

10:30 - In bed, goodnight.

Note: This series of my trip in Mexico is in a form of a diary every day. I will write day 2, Sunday, soon.

March Madness

March has been a crazy month. So crazy in fact that Dad (first time ever) and us forgot about March Madness basketball games that go on. It's the only sports event we participate in so it's usually a big deal (for all of us except Mom). Two years ago, I guessed correctly North Carolina all the way to the final 2 team playoffs for the championship. Last year, I put down North Carolina to win the whole tournament and guess what? It did! This year, I'm worried I won't be able achieve my high status of guessing from the past. We'll see what happens with the tournament this year!

In just a few days I head down to Mexico to the ranch I helped out at last year. I'm on the worship team this year and will be singing up on the stage in church along with my two friends Andrew and Brooke. It's been a lot to get ready and I still feel like our team doesn't have everything together so please please be praying. For team unity and for good conversations with the kids down at the ranch and on the streets evangelizing. We'll be going to the beach on Monday and hopefully the orphanage kids will come too (they did last year for the first time with LWS)!

As for school news, although I'm graduated and babysitting, I still love to learn and so I enrolled in Firmly Planted Homeschool Resource Center. I'm taking classes to make an audio drama by the one and only creator of Jonathon Park Adventure Chronicles, an amazing creation science based audio drama. We held auditions last Saturday and Sunday and 78 people filed through 2 rooms while we recorded voices for 12 hours. I needed German accents for my WW2 story set in Germany. One man auditioning for the bad German guy named Gunter changed up my lines a bit. I had Gunter saying, "Fat chance" and instead the man said, "Fat chance as Americans say" in a hardy German accent. I think the guy just won himself a part as Gunter!

I'll probably write another post soon after Mexico so stay tuned!