Fundraising!!!

We've been home now for officially 2 months and have been working hard on fundraisers for Africa. We finished up a giant garage sale this weekend and are so excited about how it turned out. We had lots of awesome stuff donated for our sale and made lots of money for the children in Uganda! We are planning on having another sale in the next couple weeks also, and are excited about that too- not for the actual sale part, that's horrible, but about the funds we can get to help the kids.
We had an amazing opportunity for a fundraiser the weekend before this one. The mom of the children I nanny for hosted a dessert night for her friends so that they could come and hear our stories from last year and listen to our ideas for more ways we would like to serve in this next year. She is the most amazing woman and made the night so special and fun! We are so grateful for her and for everyone who attended the event! It was a big success and it was so fun to just be able to talk about our year in Uganda, Haiti and Peru.
We are busy now planning a kids summer day camp, another big garage sale, and a couple other things so that we can help out as much as we can!!! More about our plans shortly...they are exciting!

Hi everyone!
Summer seems to be quickly flying by- I can't believe it's already after the 4th of July! Rachel and I spent part of the day biking to Stillwater! It was about 30 miles, giving us lots of time to talk about our plans for next year. There are so many different ways in which we would love to serve during out year in Africa and we need to figure out more specifically what we are feeling called back for.
A few weeks ago, we participated in both of our first 5K race! We had registered for it one night on the internet in Peru, thinking that it would be a good incentive for us to get in shape, especially since it was called the "Back In Shape 5K". Well, we didn't train for it as much as we originally planned on, but we finished in what we thought was a very decent time and we had a lot of fun doing it! Later in the summer we will be running in a 10K and will end the summer with a 15K!
Besides our biking and running, we have been keeping busy working, planning another garage sale fundraiser, and trying to keep up on our children all over the world! Our friend Amy is now back at Amani Baby Cottage in Uganda, so it has been fun emailing and talking with her to see how everyone is doing there. We hear that Baby Katie (our little girl in Uganda who was HIV positive and very, very sick when we first got there back in September but then started ARVs and started doing much better) has moved up to Baby Room 1, is crawling all over, is nice and chubby, and loves to steal other kids' food!!! It's so great to hear how well she is doing, and makes me so excited to be back there to see her and all our other Amani kiddos!
We hope you are all having good summers! We will keep you all posted as we begin to make some more definite plans for our year in East Africa!