Like a Phoenix

with the help of God's love and compassion shane and i were able to rise from the ashes of ending a tough school year and the loss of tristan. since then God blessed us with two amazing events in our lives.

first, we were able to go to hawaii this june due to the generousity of my parents and their friends the whaleys. it was truly a dream come true. it was everything we thought it would be and more. blue water, waterfalls, flowers, mountains...everything!! while relaxing on the beach and hiking inland to search for waterfalls and pools on the road to hana was fantastic, our favorite part of the trip was taking a sunset horseback ride. we arrived at the ranch about 2 hours before sunset to prepare for the trip. it was perfect for shane and i because all the horses were named after movie stars. if you know shane and i well you know one of our favorite past times is quoting movies. shane rode russell crowe and i had mike myers (could that have been more perfect??) we rode through the pinapple fields and then down through the rain forests. at one point it started raining on us...pretty hard actually. honestly this just made it more fun for both of us. we loved it!! about the time the sun was begining to set they took us to the top of the mountain and we watched the sun set into the ocean behind a island that was across the water from maui. i wish i had the words to describe it to you, but as you can tell i'm not very good with vivid descriptions. all can say is God is one amazing artist.

the second blessing is the new addition to our family, milly. milly is a 10 month old carolina dog that shane and i adopted july 5th. we were totally not expecting to add a new animal to family so soon after tristan's passing. however, due to the way we found her, we both believed that the Lord led us to her. We were supposed to take our boat out that day but it started raining. we needed to go up to shane's school hoover for something and starting playing around on the internet and began looking at dogs. shane and i thought we might get one around christmas time and wanted to really research breeds so that we could find one to match our lifestyle (thank you caesar milan). we came across this carolina dog which is a rare breed. shane's sister courteney has one so of course we were intrigued. since we couldn't go out on the boat we thought well...we'll just go take a look at her, we're not going to do anything today. yeah right, like that was going to happen. anyway the rest is history. she is definitely a daddy's girl and she is as sweet as can be. she is trying really hard to be disciplined but after all she is still a puppy.

all of this to say we have had a busy but great summer. i hope all of you have had one too.

peace and love.