To our friends scattered here and there,

Hello from the beautiful Shenandoah Valley! Life continues to busy and full of adventure.. I found this past week to be full of short stories.. So bear with me, as I share a few of them here..

Mother was reminded again of the foreknowledge of the God we serve.. Several weeks ago she sent a daughter and one of the daughter’s friends to Wal-Mart with the sole purpose of purchasing instant pudding.. Not sure what happened, but somehow they returned with 4 boxes of cook and serve pudding. So Mother went to plan B on her dessert and stuck the pudding on the shelf. Last weekend we were blessed with lots of out of state company, and after serving multiple breakfasts, Mother discovered that her egg supply had been greatly diminished, causing her cream pie plans to be an impossibility.. Until she opened the cupboard and remembered the mistake from several weeks ago.. The moral of the story is- we had Peanut Butter Cream Pies for lunch to the credit of our Great Master Planner.. Praise Him!! I love it when His Hand is visible in small things like that..

Julia has had a definite opinion on the necessity of Facebook for a long time.. Sunday night she was expounding a little on her opinion, and before she knew what to do- our hired man had created her an account.. Emily rapidly got on board and tagged her in a number of pics, and everybody hastened to friend request her.. That lasted for about a day, until he shut her account down again. Very short lived.. 🙂 Maybe Sherman can convince her of its beauty yet..

Deborah’s best friend is her chocolate lab, Rolo.. She spends a lot of time working with her, and I’ll admit- it’s paying off. She sits, shakes, rolls over.. And my favorite trick- will wait until given permission to eat.. So Deb will set the food in front of the dog, and walk off.. Rolo sits at rapt attention, watching painstakingly as Deborah heads off-sometimes out of sight-waiting.. Then springs into action whenever Deborah FINALLY gives the go-ahead.. Makes me smile every time.. Anyhow Deborah decided to teach her to growl.. Ferocious growling on the part of Deb was to no avail.. But then, as she was feeding both dogs, she realized Rolo was in a spat with Detroit.. biting his neck and growling.. So she praised the growl effort and rewarded the brown eared dog accordingly. A little while later, she decided to test the new skill.. “Growl, Rolo..”  The brilliant one obediently got up, ran over to poor Detroit, bit his neck and growled.. With friends like that, who needs enemies.. 🙂

Emily had yet another emergency claim to fame.. She responded to a midnight wreck, where a car had landed in the field of pigs. As all the emergency workers were preparing to leave the scene, she noticed the poor farmer out trying to herd his 500 lbs pigs off the road.. So she rose to the occasion, and helped him. Somewhere along the line, she was body slammed by a bacon and was almost sent airborne.. She is currently sporting a very impressive bruise.. Emergency work keeps you on your toes or in the air or something.. 🙂

After hearing many tales of the event- I have finally witnessed it first hand.. This week, I survived an Amish wedding.. Amos- the guy who worked for us in 06 and was killed in a manure pit- had a niece get married. I’m good friends with his family- so this van trip meant more to me than sometimes.. The whole event seemed somewhat surreal.. Until we sat on a backless bench listening to German for an hr.. No need to pinch yourself to see if its reality by that point- the back pain takes care of that.. The wedding had started 2.5 hrs before we arrived.. Wow.. The last song they sang consisted of 26 verses.( I was just thankful they hadn’t selected the next one in the songbook- that one had 32) They had constructed a shop just for the occasion. They called it “Organized Confusion”.. And it was- so much going on, yet it ran smoothly. The food was unbelievable.. We ate all day. The main meal was traditional, then came soft pretzels and 30(?) different platters of food that had been given as gifts, and shortly after, a huge supper complete with homemade chips and ice cream.. What amazed me the most was watching the youth pair off to sing in the afternoon. The girls go out and stand on the “Auction Block” as one of my friends called it, and the guys come out and one by one select their singing partner. There was about 5 girls at the end who didn’t end up with a partner, and I had to laugh at one of the ladies from our group.. “Oh look, they are just heartbroken!! I sure wish I had brought some of my sons up here to sing with those poor girls.. ” I was just glad to see that part of the event completed.. Amos’s brother was sure he was going to get me out there to enjoy the festivities.. Woosh that was close.. lol

And my take home experience from the week.. Just a mile up the road from the wedding, lived a man that my vanload knew, so we stopped in for a visit. His parents are both carriers of a genetic eye weakness, and out of 16 children they have 5 that are blind.. Three of them completely, and 2 that the doctors are working with to frantically salvage what eyesight they have.. Two of the children had such incredible uncontrolled eye pain, that they had surgery to remove the offensive eyes.. They had story after story- like how all eyes must be removed before they go swimming, so they place them in a container on top of the fridge. And one time an eye was missing. So they looked every where, and finally opened the freezer door- to discover an eyeball staring at them.. The parents told us that the vision impaired children can do basically everything the sight children can- cooking, baking, sewing, whatever. But they had a problem when it came time to go downstairs and retrieve can goods from the cellar- because its impossible to smell what’s in a can. So Abigail- one of the impaired ones- spent a lot of time down there this summer- arranging every thing in alphabetical order.. All 2214.5 quarts.. I just shake my head..

So I drove out the lane- appreciating the fact that I could see the deer that almost hit our van.. Thinking about how blessed I am, and what an incredible inspiration it is- to meet people who face hard things head on.. That family’s testimony was beautiful..

Thanks for reading clear to the end of yet another lengthy epistle.. Blessings on your week, Kendra

Bonus pic:

Visited a taxidermist that did a lot of unique animals from Africa.. Travelling there sometime was tentatively on my bucket list.. I’m suspicious that has been added as a permanent bucket list agenda now.. 🙂