The softball tournament wrapped on Tuesday, and again we had a good showing! We played the Rahn’s church first, and played a really close game all the way through until the end, when with the score tied Chris H scored from first on a single with two throwing errors to give us a 5-4 win. Bob and I also turned a sweeeeet double play on a liner to second with a pickoff of a runner at first. I love doing that. That put us into the championship game against the regular season champs, a team that we smoked about 6 weeks ago but had destroyed the other of the final four teams in the early game. We played well, played from behind most of the game and even took a 1-run lead into the last inning but they won 10-9. We got a runner-up certificate and a $100 prize for the church instead of trophies, nice. Wednesday was the first day of school, specifically the first day of high school for Alex. It’s hard to wrap my head around that still. He had a good day though, but Nat told us that nobody even spoke to her all day and she wishes Beth could home school her so she doesn’t have to go back to that place. The second day went better though, and we realized later that she forgot to take her meds the day before the first day, so that may have been why it was so rough. FCC Kids / Revolution started back up again also. Unfortunately for me, Nat’s counselor can only see her on Wednesday evenings, so Beth is going to be taking her there and I will do the kids class myself. And we have an unusually...rowdy…difficult….group of kids. I was not able to do the lesson at all because I was too busy doing riot control. I asked for some assistance for going forward. We went to the middle school to meet & greet with the teachers Thursday evening and to walk around the school with the girls. Missy is taking a Chinese class, amazing. From that, I surmise that middle school is about the same as it has been. We deliberately set aside the weekend for nothing on the schedule, so it was pretty quiet. I ran a bit but my ankle started to hurt and the my knee started to hurt after about 5 miles so I quit there instead of running through it, so I guess I’m learning there. In the evening on Saturday, Natalie heard from a best friend of hers and literally got on her knees and begged for us to let her go meet him at the park in Winona Lake. We did, with the condition that we meet him first and they stay at the beach. All of us went to Winona, and we left them at the park for a while as the rest of us went to Rocket Fizz. From what we’ve been told, he’s talked her out of suicide attempts in the past and is *not* a boyfriend, so we wanted to let her see him and that seemed to make her really happy. And on Sunday, Gary made her a cake. I’m not sure why exactly, I think it’s due to something between them when he came to visit her in the hospital. She made one for him too last week.

The week ended better than it began. Monday I took the chance to drive the van in to work so I could drop it off at Ab & Tom’s. It made it there, but the overheating alarm went off just as I was approaching the shop. They said they would be able to check it out the same day but they hadn’t called by the time Beth and I had to go to Fort Wayne for family counseling with Nat. And it went poorly. Nat was ok for a while but got really upset with Beth when Beth challenged her about having already dealt with her past, and about not having reasonable expectations for her meds. And she stormed out of the room and didn’t want to say goodbye to us. Nor did she want us to come tomorrow. Beth was fearing the worst and we were both pretty upset overnight. Tuesday was better; the van problem turned out to be split hoses and there was no permanent engine damage ($450 was better than I was afraid it was going to be), then Nat’s mood was much better and Beth had a good visit with her in the afternoon. The softball tournament began at 7:00, which meant that I missed…get this…Alex’s high school orientation…but Beth took him and he said it was boring. But he did get a new iPad, a full size one. And Beth caught the second game. Yes, second…we won the first game of the tournament, essentially a play-in game, by mercying them in the 4th inning, something like 18-6 (Chris Hohm hit TWO grand slams in that game). That was the same team we should have beaten last week but didn’t. Did this time. Then in the second game we played the UMC, the team that beat us badly twice in the season and has the worst attitudes. Complainers, they are. They have more heavy hitters but we stayed with them and finally put them away late. I also had a very gratifying walk late in the game. I hadn’t been hitting well, and the guy in front of me was intentionally walked to load the bases. So I took 3 in a row a forced in a run. Hee, hee. So, we play again next week, against even stiffer competition but on a win streak. Wednesday we had another family counseling with Nat, which went better but we’re still pretty concerned and scared about things. We got safes to keep all the meds in the house locked up. Nat was pretty tired but glad to be home for the next couple days, which we spent getting ready for another camping trip. We had a coupon in a big book we bought a while back for a free night at Indian Springs Campground near Garrett. Friday after I left work we headed there for the weekend. We also brought Sam with us again. We had the boys in the tent and the girls in the camper this time around. The campground is very nice; we liked it a lot. The whole camp is clean and well taken care of, the lake is clean and not too muddy, and the sites weren’t too small like some private campgrounds. However the crowd was largely semi-permanent residents (big RVs hooked to sewer lines) and there was some drinking and loud revelry going on pretty late, and the campground is pretty short on bathrooms. It wasn’t a problem for us this time because we got a site that was close to them, but it would have been a big problem if we were on the other side. Anyway, we had a nice weekend there. I did burn the tin foil dinners pretty badly this time around, not sure why that happened. Maybe we didn’t use the heavy duty foil. Dunno. Also we visited the Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg auto museum while we were up there, since we had another coupon. Really liked it, too, all of us. Alex even said he liked it more than he thought he would. We packed up and headed home around lunchtime on Sunday. Nice weekend overall.

Big week. We started out on Monday by heading to Holland for a short camping trip. We were there by lunchtime, a bit early for check in, so we went to Dutch Village (shopping only, not the farm). Turns out it’s a good thing Beth and I got a new wedding candle last time we were here because the candle place is gone, the owners retired. We got some trinkets and looked around, then got set up at the campground (Natalie wanted to sleep in the tent by herself, so she did, and Alex and Missy were in the camper. First time with Alex sleeping on the dinette bed with the storage/supports I built for it between spring break and now) and we headed to the beach. Overall, this has been a weird summer I would say, cool and wet, so we were afraid the lake would be too cold. Well, it was pretty cold. It was beautiful weather while we were there, but Lake Michigan was on the chilly side. Not so cold that you couldn’t be in it, though. Even I was in for quite a while. Seemed a bit muckier than usual, though. The sunset on the lake Monday evening was also beautiful. However, it became apparent that we weren’t going to want to spend all day at the beach Tuesday, so we started working on plan B. Which turned out to be Windmill Island, which none of us had ever been to before. You should see that street organ. The gardens were amazing; like I said it’s been a fairly wet summer so I’m sure the flowers all loved that. We took the tour all the way to the top of the windmill (De Zwaan) which I loved (but I’m into that kind of thing). Alex and Missy liked it too but the height made Nat dizzy. That was the morning; we did spend the majority of the rest of the day at the beach. Still chilly, but nice. And I’ll take a chilly and kinda mucky Lake Michigan over any of the lakes around here, I’ll tell ya. Wednesday we had to head back fairly early because we wanted to get back in time for the youth group’s water wars (at least Alex and Missy did, Natalie didn’t want to go but we made her). We then finished getting everything ready for the garage sale and started it on Friday. So nice we got most everything ready for the garage sale before we left, so we didn't have to do a mad rush to get things ready after we got back. The Purvis and Harrison families also had stuff in the sale so the ladies were at our house helping out, and when I came to the house for lunch Beth was not there, because she had just left to rush Natalie to the emergency room. She took pills and then told Beth what she had done. So she was in the ICU for a while, then had an ambulance ride to Parkview in FW. I stayed home from work to man the garage sale while Beth was gone, incidentally we made about $120, then the kids and I were going to FW to visit but the van started overheating by the time we got to Big R. I parked to wait for it to cool off and tried to make it back to get the truck, for a while the van wouldn't even start but eventually it did and we made it *almost* home before the alarm was just dinging constantly and it was overheating big time. The truck was still at the hospital so I caught a lift there to pick it up and we went to FW in the truck instead. We went back home after a while. Saturday I manned the garage sale again while Beth went back to FW. We did some good sales (Missy sold a lot of toys and her Bitty Babies, so she made a lot) and had a 2-day total of $280.75 for us, $156 for Missy, $42.50 for Alex, and $1.00 for Natalie. Beth is back now, Nat is not.