God Bless the USA

Happy 4th of July! A few weeks ago my friend lent me this book called Left To Tell. It tells the story of a woman who survived the genocide in Rwanda. Some of the events shocked me and after finishing it, it made me realize how fortunate and blessed we are to live in America. We have so many more opportunities living here and it's a beautiful place!

I spent the weekend in Idaho and celebrated the 4th with my family. We has barbeque's with both sides of the family and watched a great fireworks show put on by my Uncle Russell, and then watched the fireworks in Idaho Falls-which I love! Seriously the best show!

Watching the fireworks in Idaho Falls.

Summer!

I am so excited that it's summer! I love the warm weather and being in the sunshine. Sunshine makes me happy :)
I also love Idaho! I've been home the past two weekends and it's been so nice! I love my small hometown of Aberdeen and especially love being there in the summer. I love going home for Aberdeen Days, too. This is a picture of my Grandpa Duffin and his tractor that he drove in the Aberdeen Days parade this year. What a great looking bunch :)

This is a cute picture of Eden I took last week when we were swimming in her kiddie pool. Isn't she a doll?

Reid Ranch

So, for my teaching job in the fall I had to go to a two week training to learn the reading program. It was so intense! We went to a beautiful place in the mountains called Reid Ranch. This place had the prettiest lodges to stay in and tons of fun activities; horseback riding, swimming, canoeing, paddle boats, volleyball, archery, hiking, miniature golf and tons of other stuff. BUT I didn't get to do any of it :( My schedule for the 2 weeks was breakfast at 7:30, teach the reading camp from 8:30-11:30, Lunch, then training from 1:00-5:15, Dinner, then study, study, study! Each night we had to memorize lessons and pass them off and that stressed me out so bad! Also, we didn't have cell phone service, which was killer! With all that said, I survived and I learned sooooooo much! I'm going to be teaching at Reid School, which was started and still run by Dr. Ethna Reid. Let me tell you that woman is amazing! She is the most knowledgeable person I've ever met. She created the reading program that we will be teaching and she has traveled all over the world doing seminars and teaching others how to implement her program into their schools. She said she's probably taught about one million students and about 16,000 teachers. She's traveling to Oxford this month to do a seminar with her daughter. And she's my boss. No pressure right? But even though the training was stressfull, I feel so lucky to be trained one on one by Dr. Reid. And excited to be teaching at her school. Here's a few pictures of Reid Ranch.

My friend Genevieve is also going to be teaching at Reid School. We both graduated from BYU-Idaho together so it's exciting that we get to work at the same place. We were at the training together. This cute girl was at the first week of camp and is going to be in my 4th grade class in the fall.

We did get to go on a cool hike. These are 2 of the girls that were there the first week.

The view was incredible. This place was so beautiful!

This is the view of Reid Ranch from the hike.

The last night we were there we had a campfire and the kids did skits. These girls were so great!
This was the group for the first week of reading camp.