Quick Summer Update

Wow! The last two weeks have flown by!

I have posts started about the road trip we took and about the musical B14 and I are in--Thoroughly Modern Millie--and now we are in tech week already, with the first dress rehearsal tonight! I am so excited--this show is really going to be exceptional. More on that later, I hope!

Another development is that we are going to have a Classical Conversations program in Kenosha beginning this fall, and I am going to be a paid teacher for the Essentials class. The day after we got back from Oklahoma, I was back in the car for a 1.5 hour drive, down to IL and back each day, for a 3-day training session. Tiring, but I was so impressed with the program and I'm excited to do it this year with Chicklet and B8! More on that later, too!

Since I've been gone so much (I also spent the last night of the conference in IL with my father-in-law, helping sort Mom's things, and saw a couple of friends for dinner and breakfast), and now it's tech week--it was great timing to let Chicklet and B8 go home from Oklahoma with their grandparents. They've been in Ohio for a week now, having a blast with their cousins on the farm. I am supposed to go pick them up next week, coinciding my visit with the county fair as I always do, but if worse comes to worse, my parents are coming to WI for the second weekend of Millie, so they'll get home one way or another!

Blondechick is doing well, enjoying a leave of absence from her job. It has given her time to be on the set of the movie almost every day! She has been an extra, a personal shopper and wardrobe assistant, and set photographer, standing in for her dad sometimes. She has also enjoyed welcoming the stars to Chicago and showing them some of the sights downtown! (For more info on the movie--this article lists some of the bigger names that are starring in the film, and if you watch the short "Meet the Characters" movie, you'll get the gist of the plot).

For the fall, she has been accepted to this worship school here in Kenosha, a 9-month program of daily musical training as well as discipleship and Bible study. She'll live at home while she attends. She went on their worship retreat a couple weekends ago, and God spoke to her in significant ways while she was there.

Thank you so much for your prayers, all who have been praying for her and for our family. They have made such a difference. The short-term crisis I alluded to earlier has been averted, thanks be to God, but there are ongoing issues as well and our family is in a period of adjustment, if you can continue to pray.

Pray for my husband too, if the Lord leads. He is trying to discern job-related things, especially the desire and conviction from the Lord that he needs to stop traveling so much with his job as the senior director of a revenue analytics firm. (I have never known how to succinctly describe his job, but he was just quoted in an industry publication and that's how they summarized it!) Our church is also desiring to bring him on full-time, as soon as the funds are there, which is uncertain but likely in the next year or so.  When that happens, it will mean living on about half the income we have now, so we are trying to discern how best to prepare for that transition, too. Thank you!

Okay--and she's off! You can't imagine how the stuff has piled up while I was gone all last week and then, really, all weekend, with rehearsals, a church picnic and more.

So beat the drums 
'cause here comes
Thoroughly Modern Millie now!!