Dawn's Senior year without wisdom??!

From the Hawthorne Summit, Dan, Dawn and I drove to South Carolina where we are staying with my mom and sister for a short visit.  Thursday we drove to Gastonia, NC for our annual dental visit.  A dentist there has helped us out each summer with needed dental work.  This year Dan and I had our teeth cleaned.  Dawn spent 4 hours in the chair having 8 cavities filled (remember, she grew up in Haiti where the water is NOT treated with fluoride!) AND had all 4 of her wisdom teeth taken out.  Yes, we said all 4 of her wisdom teeth taken out!!!!  Wow.  What a trooper she was to have all this work done at once.  And what a fantastic gift this special dentist has given us in doing the work! 

She had a really rough evening with pain, etc.  But had a good night's sleep and was doing better today.  She has been able to eat soft food and the swelling hasn't been bad at all.  We have wondered how on earth she can go through her senior year with all her wisdom gone!  She didn't find that little joke very funny....but then again, she was in awful pain at the moment.

 

She's going to stay here in Columbia over the weekend with her grandma (not a bad deal - she is going to learn to do beading and make her own necklaces.  She's already picked out some amazing beads and such to put together!  She's very creative and artsy.).  Dan and I will be going to speak at Church on the Cape in Wilmington, NC.  They are a new sister church and are heading to Haiti this fall.

 

By the way, Dan is NOT experiencing much pain so far in his shoulder!  His recovery seems to be going well.

Hawthorne Summit

RMI missionaries Billy & Debbie Moses, Gary & Marilyn McLaughlin and Jenn Rogan met RMI staff Herb & Shirley Shoemaker, Dan, Dawn and I and Rob Thompson in Hawthorne, Florida Saturday, June 21 to Tuesday, June 24.  One of RMI's Board members, Billy Byrd, owns a small camp that he has renovated in this small central Florida town.  Dawn and I cooked for the crowd for 3 days as they met together.  It was a great time of catching up with one another and then doing extensive, strategic planning for the future for the Haiti field. 

It was a great place to relax, fellowship, get away from the every day routine and spend time together.  God did bless our time and we are excited about what He has for us all in the future.

 

When Dawn wasn't in the cookhouse, she was on the dock.  Herb and Shirley pitched in, with Shirley catching the most!  The last evening we had enough catfish for everyone to have a bite!  She was a real trooper and fed us well.

It was a wonderful place to have an RMI Summit!!

Dan is a real "cut up"

Thursday, yesterday, Dan had his rotator cuff surgery. He was glad to get it over with to be able to get on with the recovery.

Here he is at the day surgery center before. The surgery took longer than they thought because when the doctor got in there, he found that Dan's biceps muscles were attached to the wrong part of his body. Sounds weird doesn't it?! So he reattached them to where they were supposed to be as well as doing the rotator cuff repair as planned. It won't result in any longer or different recovery for him. He explained that it was a genetic anomaly. And there's no way of knowing if his other arm is the same way.

It's really odd that after more than 25 years of lifting 70 lbs.+ luggage and all the hard Haiti driving and all the hard physical work he's been doing that this injury happens now. All we can figure is that God held him together! He has had a strong physical makeup, but over the years it's worn down to the level that lifting a 17 lbs. cat was the proverbial straw that tore the rotator cuff muscle.

Trying to wake up afterward was hard and took a while!

Ready to head home.

As I write this, he's already had one physical therapy and the drain taken out. Sunday he'll have the local anesthesia pump taken out and the bandages taken off. Then he'll be down to that massive sling for a month. Ice will have to be applied often and therapy several times a day.

Here's the part you may not believe...tomorrow, Saturday, we (Dan, Dawn and I) are leaving for 3 weeks! RMI is having a RMI missionary/staff retreat in Central Florida for 3 days, then we will head to North and South Carolina where we will have dental work done, see family, and have meetings with several individuals and churches. It's a combined business/vacation trip.

I'm just glad that Dawn has her driving permit and wants to do a lot of the driving!! It'll be an interesting trip under the circumstances. Pray for us!! We'll give you updates as we can along the road.

A Father's Day like no other

For a year Dawn has had an unusual, special gift in mind for her dad, but it wasn't until this year that we were able to find a way to pull it off.

 

Last Saturday night, Devon came over and we were all together when we answered a knock on the door.  In walked a professional chef.  Grant isn't just any chef.  He is a sushi chef.  He came to the house with all the food and tools to give Dan and  Dawn private lessons in how to make sushi!!  Quite a bit of sushi is made as one learns to make several kinds with many different ingredients. 

We invited another couple, James and Debbie Propp, from church (who live 3 streets away) to help us eat it...but there was so much we could have had others over too!

It was quite an unforgettable evening!!

  Happy Father's Day to a wonderful dad!!

 

P.S. Dawn has made sushi for us twice since then - by herself!!

Devon is 21!!!!

I know it is hard to believe, but yes, our firstborn is now 21.  He wasn't working on his birthday, so he came over to Ft. Myers Beach where we were on a week of vacation.  We all spent the day together.  It was a treat to have bison meatloaf for lunch and sushi for supper.   2 friends from Haiti, Kyle and Andrew Vrooman, came over from Titusville, FL  for the weekend and when we came home, they were already there at the house.  Mom and Dad and one cousin, Caleb, came for the evening and we had a great cookout and party (despite the air conditioning being broken when we got home).  Growing up in Haiti he was our tarantula guys.  He used to capture and sell them to the visiting teams.  In honor of that, I baked a plastic spider in each cupcake that I made him!  :)  Once he bit into one and found it, the others had to have their spidercakes.

He had told me he wanted me to make him a quilt in January (totally clueless as to what he was asking!!)  I found the quilt I'd made in Haiti for my kids and showed it to him at the party, just to prove that I had made him a quilt once.  But it was 20 years old and about 36 inches square.  After several other presents, we gave him ours.  It was so big that we had to put it in a plastic bin.

He was shocked to find a queen sized, handmade, down filled John Deere quilt that I'd made!  (It was so big that I had to work on it spread all over the house and had to have help to move it around.  It was a tie quilt, not a patchwork quilt, so it was "easier" to make.)

Dawn made him a John Deere pillow to go with it.

Yes, he loves John Deere!

 

It was a great celebration and he was one happy 21 year old.  God has given a good job with a specialty cement company.  He lives most of the with his grandparents in Naples, staying occasionally here with us.

Happy Birthday Devon!!  We love you!

Notes & Images from a vacation

School is out for Dawn...that means she is officially a senior!!  [She'll take congratulations if you are of a mind to send them!]  Our personal thoughts on that center around making our way through the maze of senior pictures, senor trip, senior announcements, senior yearbook, senior this and senior that!  In the meantime, she is very excited.

Since gas is so expensive and our schedule is so full, we decided to take a week of vacation close to home.  We are in Ft. Myers Beach, on the other side of the county.  It's worked out very nicely!  Devon's new job (with a cement company) had a work site 2 blocks away, so he dropped by tonight for a little bit.  Dawn has had friends over for the day for the past 2 days.  It's a nice place, right on the beach.  Now that she's good and sunburned, we're going to "prowl" some consignment stores and an outlet mall that we don't usually get to.  Devon isn't working tomorrow so he may join us.  We told he didn't have a choice!!!  Tomorrow is his 21st birthday!!!  This coming weekend we'll have a bigger blowout party for him, but tomorrow it'll just be the 4 of us.

Here are some of Dawn's pictures of our time so far.