Life in Rural California

I recently received a story explaining what life used to be in our small community 50 yrs ago...and you know what? little has changed :-) The article describes the long windy drive up the mountians to a small valley community surrounded by trees. Today all the timber mills are gone, but the trees still stand. People enjoy to live in this rural community because they really don't want to be bothered by civilization, they are very independently minded & figure they can do it for themselves. Today we got our first rain in over 6 mos. I'm told that the winter months involve a lot of heavy rains, but I haven't seen much of that.

Last weekend we took an exciting drive over to Eureka, on the California coast. It was beautiful & reminded us a lot of the NW (which we miss so much). You would have loved to be a fly on the wall as Micah exclaimed from the back seat, "Wow, it's beautiful!! Look at that!!! It's amazing!!," as we drove into the town of Eureka. Our little Micah has spent so much time in rural America that he gets excited when he sees the "bright lights of the big city" :-)

Well, I origionally started this post as an excuse to update many of you with some pictures from the last couple months, but it seems like I haven't been taking too many since Family Camp. But we have been busy!!! After Family Camp we all went down to Monterey to do promotions for Teen Missions at Spirit West Coast. Then we had a lovely visit from Ryan's parents (Ryan's mom agrees that it's not that much fun to drive the windy roads to get here :-). Finally we all traveled back up to Oregon to join the family camping at Ft. Stevens. Micah had a blast playing with his cousins & Ryan even joined us for a couple days. Since then, life has slowed down a bit, the fires have died out & Micah & I have been exploring the area.

So here's some pictures of life in rural Northern California:


Micah after playing in the sprinklers after a hot day


Micah is obsessed with watering the plants although I don't know how much good it has done, we were gone so much & it was soooo hot this summer most look like they've lost the battle.


Micah building a "castle" while mom works on the computer


Me at 32 wks, some of you have asked to see how it's coming along