Kelly stayed over night at her friend Skyler’s house last night. It is really the first time we have ever let her do that. Lorena is supposed to go and pick her up at 11:30 this morning. We really do not like to leave her for those kind of things, but she really wanted to go and Lorena knows the family pretty well from having helped out at Kelly’s government school. They went swimming at a neighbor’s swimming pool and that scared us, too. We are going to have to let loose more and more now, but it surely is not going to be much fun.

I am down to about 190 lbs. now. Wow! It took quite awhile to hit that 10 lbs. lost mark. I have really been pretty faithful in doing my exercise, but I think I can do more in terms of eating better. I hold the line pretty well when I am at work, but just eat way too much after I get home. It seems like when I take the time to work in the yard after I get home and then do my exercises after that, I lose more weight. As usual, I did my exercise during Focus on the Family’s Adventures in Odyssey radio program. It does not seem the same, though, if both Kelly and Christian are not there. I let Christian play Zoo Tycoon while we listened.

Last night I mowed the lawn. It had gotten pretty long and ratty. It is starting to fill in a little more, but there are still lots of brown spots, weeds, and clover that are going to take me a long time to clean out. I have really been enjoying this a lot. Tonight, Lorena is going to bring me a load of dirt to do the final pass on filling in the deep area between the sidewalk and the street curb. After that I need to dig out a bunch of grass and weeds and level an area around the services at the edge of the yard so we will finally be ready to put in the barkdust. After that, will come a drainage pipe we need to bury under the sidewalk and get a hole bored into the curb so the water will run into the street. We have an area by the driveway that we want to fill in with sod and after that, the main big items we have left are the patio and a fence along two sides of the house. I will take some pictures as we move forward.

Last night, because Kelly was not home, Christian and I did not want to read any of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days because we did not want Kelly to miss anything. Instead, we started in on C.S. Lewis’ A Horse and His Boy. First we started with Christian reading. He thought it was pretty hard, but after I read about half a chapter, Christian asked what I thought about the idea of each of us reading every other chapter. I thought that was great. Kelly and Christian both started in on fifteen minutes per night of Mavis Beacon Typing. Both of them are doing great on it and they enjoy it, too. After we finished reading, Christian and I talked a little more about him making another step in serving God. All in all, it was a super night.