Youth As Resources

So, many of you know I run a Juvenile Diversion program working with first-time youth offenders but I also coordinate youth service projects within the county and wanted to share my latest project. I believe it's had a huge impact and could be awesome anywhere so I thought I'd share...

We worked with Century 21 Bremer Agency and AnySoldier.com collecting donations to be sent to troops serving in Iraq from the area. Anyone can do this. It's so great. You just go on the anysoldier.com website and search for a troop and it tells you everything. I had a father with two sons in Iraq come talk to the youth and let us know what supplies we needed to send, baby wipes and ramen noodles being priority items along with feminine products of course.

If you're wondering why baby wipes, this is their shower. The kids couldn't believe it.

So many things we take for granted and so many things they're sacrificing for us.

The kids were able to collect over $600.00 in items and cash to put in care packages for the soldiers and we wrote a grant for $500.00 to help send out the supplies to the troops.

If you look up SPC Stephanie M. Nelson on www.anysoldier.com you can read what one soldier wrote back to us. (you can search by last name) I believe if you click the Where to Send tab that page will bring up a list of soldiers on the left side and you can search from there.

Anyway I just thought I'd share that with all of you. I'm really proud of what these kids did and it's meant so much to the soldiers.

More House Pics

Another picture of our house after we did a lot of work, taking down wallpaper in EVERY room and major painting. You don't get to see much of the deck but it wraps around the east and south side of the house. There's still a lot of work to be done throughout the house. We did more this year to the outside though in landscaping, etc.

Someday we'll get the basement finished.

And here's our crazy dog, Meiko!

Welcome everyone! I'm not exactly sure what I'm doing but I wanted to get some practice at this before I have to do a lot of posting when the baby comes. Several people have asked if we will have a blog and I thought since I had some extra time I'd take a shot at it.

Our Happy Home

Here is our home. We sit on about 2 acres which is more property than we can keep up with. We have a lot of fruit... apple, peach, cherry and pear trees! Sad to say we took out the grapes this year. It's just too hard to maintain. We don't have a clue what to do with all this but the nieces and nephews sure love to pick the peaches in the summer.