Happy New Year's

Since we have yet to ever write a Christmas letter (I think next year will be the year!) I thought I would summarize what we might have said in today's posting. It's amazing to think back to a year ago and reflect on all the great experiences and changes we have had...

We spent our first year in our own home and already have some very memorable experiences here (Dan's 30th Birthday Party and awesome visits with family and friends).

Dan stopped his tree business and sold his dump truck (much to my relief!).

Dan started a second Masters program and began teaching 11th and 12th grade English.

We were able to spend a week in Haiti...

and were able to spend time with family in California (our family walk in the Bay area)...

Idaho (part of the Reeve clan)...

and Washington (Dan's Mom Paula and our niece Grace and nephew Caleb at the Pike's Place fish market)...

We took our first trip to the South and had an awesome Labor Day weekend with some of our best friends from Seminary...

The year went by so quickly... it's hard to believe it's already 2006! We also have much to look forward to this year. We will celebrate our 4th year of marriage in a couple days! As I look back I can see how the Lord has continued to grow us through each year. It has been amazing! The end of this month will also mark the end of our 3rd year in St. Louis (wow how time flies!) and our 3rd year with our Church family. I really do mean family. We have been richly blessed by this wonderful group of people. July will mark the most major change of our year. We are expecting our first child on July 8th. We are so excited and can't wait to meet the newest addition to our family.

We hope the start of the new year has been wonderful for all of you as well!!

Writers Block

I have had writers block for about 4 months. After extensive psychological testing, blood work and cat scans the doctors and I realized that the cause has been a common but often rare form of firstyeayofteachingoloisis. Its wednesday Im at school finals were given monday and tuesday (half days for the students but not teachers)so now Im writing because we have to be at school all day with pretty much nothing to do as grasdes are in the data base. SO I though I would give everyone a sampling of teaching in the city. DISCLAIMER:Take this all with a grain of salt as I love all my students and many are on thier way to good things.
Things you never thought you would hear in high school:
Quotes from the PA system:
Administrator "If we catch anyone in the hallways fighting (long pause)YOU WILL GO TO JAIL!"
Quotes from students
"Your last name is Reefer?"
"Hey J.T. I need some help"
"Easy J.T."
"Hey Mr. Reeve you look like Harry Potter."
"Mr. Reeve you look like that Hobbit we just saw in that clip."
"Hey Mr. Reeve your wife is fire." (pronounced fieuuur)
..................more to come

Some Mid December Thoughts...

Well... Dan's first semester of teaching is finally winding down. I don't think we've ever felt we needed a break more! His long nights and early mornings have been pretty tiring. He'll be done with students next Tuesday and his last day will be Wednesday. We fly out that Friday for Seattle!! It's great to live in a city with a major airport. I think I've mentioned this before... but it's so nice to leave your house only about 2 hours before your flight! I'll never forget those long travel nights after work in Chico when I would fly up to see Dan when he was living in Seattle. At least the flight was short!!

One of the big highlights of this month was last night! U2 was playing here in St. Louis. We bought our tickets back in March. Dan and I didn't really agree on how much we paid for the tickets... but I have to admit our front row seats last night were awesome! It's worth it to be able to see the faces of the performers.

Another highlight of this month was our first big snowfall last week. I'll post some pictures when I finally get my film to the store... one of the not so joys of being a one car family. We got about 2 1/2 inches last Thursday. It was great because Thursday is my day off. I loved listening to Christmas music and watching the snow fall outside. It wasn't so fun walking to work in it the next day... but it was still pretty.

Well... I think that's it for now. Hopefully Dan will have some time to write on his two weeks off from school.

Thanksgiving

I can't believe it is already December! The last couple months have flown by. I woke up this morning to snow flurries outside. It's fun to live in a city where it actually snows every year. Dan hopes desperately every day for school to be cancelled for a snow day. He must have walked to the door at least five times during his lesson planning last night to see if it was actually snowing. Hopefully one of these days he will get his wish.

This year we are so fortunate to get to spend Holidays with both sides of the family. The Tuesday before Thanksgiving last week, my Dad called and asked if we would like to come home for a couple days. I almost burst out crying on the phone. Every year my family spends Thanksgiving with my Grandfather and Aunt in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was devastated that my entire family would be there this year... everyone except us. So, we flew into Oakland (and surprised my Mom) last Thursday and had two amazing days with my family. Thank you Dad!!!!! Our super cool brother in law Scott took this picture of us (on a family walk). You can see San Francisco and the Golden Gate bridge in the back. For some reason it was extremely hard to come home after this trip. Dan and I were giving each other pep talks as we walked to our gate in the airport. We kept telling each other that it was okay... we won't be out here forever. Not that we don't love it here, we're just really starting to miss living near family on the West Coast. I can't wait for the day that we can drive home instead of fly.

Christmas this year will be with the Reeve clan in Seattle. I love it that our families live in areas that most people go to for vacation. This will be my first Christmas with Dan's family. It's hard when everyone is so spread out. He has a brother in Idaho, a brother in Montana, and his parents live in Seattle. We're really excited to get to spend Christmas with them this year!

Well... it's time to go eat some breakfast.

My Most Recent Attempt at Creativity

I love trying new ideas out of magazines. First it was the wheat grass and now it is the pumpkin address. I thought it turned out pretty good. The idea is to put Christmas lights inside the carved out pumpkin. We tried that... but our pumpkins are too thick to be able to see the light. I love Fall!!

Tomorrow Night

Dan asked me to his High School dance tomorrow night. I am so excited!

We're actually just going to be chaperones... but I still think it's pretty fun that we get to go to a High School dance together.

Our Neighborhood

I know I promised Dan would be the next to write... but he's taking his usual afternoon nap... so I thought I would sit down a write. I have about five minutes before my cornbread comes out of the oven (there's just nothing like smelling your mom's cornbread in the kitchen several thousand miles from home).
We are heading out to Bible Study in about an hour. Our church has small groups that you are assigned to geographically. That way you can really focus on meeting the same people in your community. We love it because we can walk since the leaders live just two blocks from us! Being so close to everything reminds me so much of Chico! We share a car... which can be a pain sometimes... but it forces me to walk to the 1/2 mile work every day (with our cats George and Eddie who have started following me about half the way there).
There is also a small park two blocks away that has bands playing once a month. You can actually see the Arch from this park... since we live on one of the higher parts of the very flat city of St. Louis. We're going to walk down for a couple minutes tonight to hear the last group of the summer play... unfortunatley it really does still feel like summer here.
Anyways... I was in the kitchen cooking and I could hear the band playing just now... so I thought I would just mention how great it is to be living in such a great part of St. Louis!

Dan really will be the next to write!

September

We have been unbelievably busy lately. I keep telling Dan that we need to try and keep our blog updated... even if it's only a sentence. We have actually had family in town on and off for the last month... either that or we have been out of town. My sister Cari and her husband Scott spent two weeks with us at the beginning of the month. It was great! It was their first time out to St. Louis and we made sure they saw as much of it as possible. St. Louis can't really compare to San Francisco or Seattle... but there are still some neat areas here. This our famous arch picture that we take of anyone who comes to visit. You have to lay down on the ground so you can get the entire arch in the picture. Scott and Cari are now in New Orleans helping organize teams to help with the hurricane clean up. They process hundreds of work orders and then send out surveyors and teams to different locations. They'll be heading back to St. Louis in a couple weeks to pick up their dog Ranger here at our house before they start the long trek back West.

My Dad and Mom were with us for about a week after that. My Dad always finds out about great little day trips whenever they come out. A week ago Saturday we went to an apple farm in Illinois.

We road a "tractor train" out into an apple orchard and picked a couple bags of apples. It was great! After that we visited the arch...

and then took a river boat ride on the great... dirty... Mississippi...

It was definitely not the prettiest boat ride I have ever taken... but it did have some interesting views... a sunken barge for example.

Dan has been super busy with school. He loves teaching... but it does have its challenges. He has had two lockdowns in the month that he has been teaching (one of which I found out about on the morning news!!). We would have never thought at this time last year that he would be teaching at an inner city school here in St. Louis... but it's great to see how the Lord moves you in new directions! We miss California tons... but love St. Louis at the same time.

Well... that's it for the month of September. I promise to make Dan write next time!!

What Not to Buy

I have to start out by saying that I love guacamole. Everytime our Bible Study has dinner together we bring it. Today we stopped by Trader Joe's on our way home to pick up some avocados (we have Bible Study tonight). I had just bought some there two days ago so I didn't think they would be hard to find. I circled the produce section two times and didn't see them. I was a little frustrated until one of the Trader Joe's employee's pointed out some huge green guava looking fruit. They were Slim-Ados. Don't ever buy them! It made my guacamole making go by a lot faster... since they were HUGE... but they taste horrible! On the sticker is says they have 50% less fat. How do you grow produce with less fat? I'm sure there is some scientific answer... but I don't care. The Trader Joe's guy said we could take them back if we didn't like them... but that's a little hard now since there is a huge bowl of Slim-Mole sitting in our refrigerator!!

Dan the Man

We created this site so we would be better about communicating... it hasn't work so well!! We are really going to try and be better about writing. This summer has been busy! Haiti was amazing. It was so eye opening to be in a different country... one that compares in no way to the US. It was hard to come back to paved roads and air conditioning... what an adjustment after only a week away. To somewhat explain how poor of a country Haiti is I have to tell you that the President of their country was on our flight in from Miami. I have never seen so many guns (once we landed) in one place in my life. I had serious thoughts about not getting off the plane! Seriously though... it was amazing to see how the Lord works in different places. We had a chance to do VBS with about 100 kids. It was so great to listen to them recite memory verses that they had learned throughout the year. They were so happy! I was so blessed to be able to go with Dan and experience just a tiny piece of what it might have been like for him to spend three years on the mission field in the Philippines.

Our big news of the summer is (no we are not pregnant... which we get asked at least 3 times a week!) that Dan got a teaching job!! What a huge answer to prayer. He will be teaching High School English in a school in the city... only 7 miles from our house. We were talking tonight about how amazing it is to live in somewhat of a big city and to be so close to everything. We live .4 miles from my work and church! I love to be able to walk to work in the morning!! Anyways, Dan will be teaching one period of World Lit. and four period of African American Lit. School started the day before he was hired, so he won't actually be in the classroom until school has been in session for about two weeks.

We are heading down to Atlanta this weekend (my first time to the south) to visit some good friends from Seminary. Should be lots of fun. We'll write again soon!!

Q-Tips

Has anyone ever noticed that on a box of q-tips there is a warning stating, do not insert in ear? Only in America can an iconic brand of cotton swabs on a stick state on the box that they should not be used in the very way that thay have been marketed upon for decades. So i cannot wait to see "do not insert into mouth" on hot pockets.

Nick

hello family and friends. We've returned from Haiti and actually didnt want to come back. It was great for us to walk in a different pair of shoes for awhile. Our internet has been down, it seems that there is a trade embargo against the import of DSL modems in the St Louis area, something about Fidel and DSL tobacco seeds.
We also came back to some tragic news, one of the young men from my youth group in Seattle, Nick Bloem, was killed in Iraq last Wednesday when Alyssa and I were in Haiti. He was a marine and a day past twenty. Please pray for the Bloem family and friends in this time. Alyssa and I are heading out to Seattle on Friday for the funeral. It is at times difficult to understand the affects of sin in this world, but Nick knew Christ who overcame sin and death. So we trust the Father even though our hearts break at the same time for Nick and the Bloem family.