Terror on the Mountain

Camping by this Creek!

Beautiful Saphira



                              

                                  Saphira got her wish to be pregnant with her mama!

Denver and His Nephew

Our Family!

Miss Moonbeam and Cousins

Moonbeam Decides to Jump!

All the kids helping get wood!

Thankful for my Ali Cat!!   Best Daughter in Law EVER!!!

How I found myself hiking up a mountain with 3 girls from our local behavioral school, I'll never know, but sure enough that's what I was doing. I also found myself to be 23 weeks pregnant. No, it wasn't a strange dream. No, I wasn't delusional, nor was I intoxicated. I was just plain hiking up a mountain, unarmed, with 3 that I was in charge of and pregnant as all get out........................

As you may notice, its been a long time since I've written. So long in fact, that I forgot how much I love writing. Busyness, perpetual grief and maybe a little temporary insanity kept me away for a very long time, but I am hoping to be back now.

Some how, the local behavioral school never got the memo that I'm seriously immature and very imaginative. They hired me under the guise of being a seasoned emergency RN. My boss over there still puts up with me too, even though she knows better. They've all kind of accepted that I have a different way of seeing things. How I've kept that job for so long, I don't know. I think its more of a God ordained position. I do miss my "working mom blues stories" mostly written there during long nights and in between patients. With this new job, they don't really know me yet. I think they were thinking of hiring a frowny faced, stuffy school nurse when they recruited me. Unknowns to them, my husband calls me "a troubled adult" and claims that I should have attended the behavioral boarding school as a child. I couldn't bear the thought of being a stuffy school nurse alone, so I negotiated to have them let me do a few hours a week doing "girls athletics" at a lower rate of pay. Somehow they agreed.

Since then, every time we go out, I dawn the giggles and laugh hysterically that they trust me to take girls out of the facility. I attempted to train a reluctant bunch of girls to run "The Sasquatch
Race". That involved a lot of ups and downs and learning curves for me. A lot of these girls have come from big cities and even across the world. They've never lived the kind of life that I so often take for granted. Some of them had truly never run. Some never have hiked in the woods. Some had a lot of emotional challenges preventing them from believing that they could. In the end, my bedraggled crew ran the race and were proud of their accomplishment.

After that, I did "open water swim training" with them. Again, it was a new learning curve. I pushed them hard in the water and made them swim distances they never dreamt they could. Most of them improved their form, but I would have liked them to improve it even more. At the end of that season, as usual, I found myself in a bizarre position. I had arranged for a big ice cream sundae party. As we gorged on multiple bowls of varied ice creams and toppings in a near by bunk house, the rest of the kids were in a discipline mode for some trouble. There was a strange and eerie silence about the campus, which we didn't discover until we were all finished. Here we were being silly and chocolaty while every body else was in trouble.

As I get more and more pregnant, I can do less and less. Instead of running in the fall, I shifted over to trying some hikes. On this particular day, I found myself hiking up to a local mountain summit with 3 charges. Two of the girls ran and swam with me but one of them was new. She'd never done anything like this before and she was struggling. Up higher and higher we hiked. The trail got narrower and steeper. We took more and more breaks.  At one point, the new girl went into meltdown mode, and we'd gotten her back up hiking.  Suddenly we were surprised by crashing in the bushes!! I told her it was probably just a deer. It was directly below us. Then we heard deep guttural roaring growls. The terror echoed over the mountain side. The new girl started a high pitched crying sound. I shushed her quickly and pushed her up the mountain and away from the terrifying sounds. After a while, she was so overcome with exhaustion that she laid down on the trail and told me to let it eat her. With the urgency of wanting to distance us from the beast, I got very firm and pushed her harder to head upward. Finally in the last leg of our journey, I was ready to give up ever getting to the very top. We were both exhausted and ready to rest. There was a distance between us and the tree line now. I could see nothing on the hill side pursuing us. I was ready to sit down and pray. The other two girls had made it to the top and insisted we were very close. One of my favorites went back and helped the new girl to the top. Here we were, on top of a beautiful mountain. We stopped and fervently prayed for Gods protection. The girls could feel the power in our prayers. I slowly started feeling the assurance that everything would be okay. I was unarmed and had no way of protecting them except for trusting God to do it. The peace came that He would. We ate our lunch as the girls marveled over the rich scenery of mountains upon mountains spread out as far as we could see. They'd never seen anything like this, and the terror of getting up there was starting to lose its grip to the vastness of Gods creation. We took a lot of fun pictures and hoped the beast had moved on. I was fairly sure that our new girl wouldn't hold her footing trying to go down a different direction. We would have to trust that God could get us down and He did. The hike seemed dreamy and euphoric. It was such a beautiful day. I felt thankful