Another day, another FUN TIM!!!!

So today was our first full day hanging out with our new resident. To make writing about him easier without violating our confidentiality agreement, I will call him "Ajax".

Ajax is a sweet boy with a winning smile and endless curiosity. He's also one of the most helpful kids I've ever met. He is very kindhearted and quick to make friends.

Today, the highlight of our day was, well, two things:

First was what we call "Community". It's basically a meeting of everyone at the Ranch. we all get together and thank each other for things (we call it "giving compliments"), pass out allowance and mail, and give any announcements for the next week. It's a lot of fun, especially when folks are in a good mood. Today, for example, we must have spent a good ten minutes passing around compliments for everything form "good job mowing the lawn" to "thanks for the help changing our tire". It's really fun to see how, once people start thinking about what they're thankful for, just how MUCH we have to be thankful for.

The second part of our day was consumed by going to, "The Creek". Now, the name is fairly self-explanatory. We have a creek that runs on our property. It's got some fish, and best of all, cold clean swimming water for those sweltering summer days. Now, recently, we had a backhoe out there doing some work, and we asked them to dig our swimming hole a little deeper, and they obliged. It was really nice to have a deep place to swim.

Well, the last few weeks have been a mini-monsoon season here in NW Arkansas. In fact, some places have started measuring rain in feet instead of inches as of late. So, needless to say, we haven't been to the creek for a while for fear of getting a vehicle stuck on the dirt road back to it. Now, it just so happens that the creek runs through a gravel bed, so lo and behold, when we went back today, the creek was no longer a deep gurgling pool of fun, it was a chest-deep strand of rushing water. The WHOLE layout of the creek shifted. Now, it makes for really fun swimming, because you can swim the length of the deepest point in about 10 seconds going downstream, and it's really better to just get out and walk than try to swim upstream (even for me, let alone the 10 year olds we're with). It was a blast though. Found some really neat rocks and driftwood in the wake of the rains, so lots of adventures had all around.

So yeah, quite the fun day, all things considered. Looking forward to even more ahead :)