Since we dropped off Katherine last Thursday we have gotten 7 letters from her, and 5 of them were yesterday.

One was a homesick letter, and the rest were cute, newsy, and happy. Every night, her camp posts a letter detailing the camp activities for the day and anything special that may have happened that day. Then they post pictures from the day. At least 200 pictures, yesterday there were over 400 pictures. I am like a crackhead every night scrolling through looking for pictures of her.
We came up with a secret "thumbs up" symbol for her to tell us she is happy and doing OK and yesterday I scrolled through all of those pictures to get 2 thumbs up/huge smiles from her. I was jumping up and down, crying and screaming! My precious baby was OK. She looks happy and well fed and is in the process of learning how do do her own hair. I am able to write her emails and I send her at least one every day. We have sent her a care package from camp with her new tribe memorabilia, and she forgot a pair of shoes, so she got another picture with shoes and a few goodies. We realized she was running out of stationary FAST so instead of discouraging her to write, we sent a third package with stationary.

Her letters are hilarious! She is taking tennis, golf, swimming, something about nature crafts, dance, and drama. I heard today from one of my kids at Camp Invention who's sister in in Katherine's cabin that the found a dead scorpion in their cabin. I have not heard about it yet from Katherine but I am sure that I will soon.

Please write to her if you can:

Katherine Haver

Bubble Inn

Camp Mystic

2689 Highway 39

Hunt, Texas 78024-3412

I decided that my resume did not have enough job titles, so I agreed to teach Camp Invention - an inventors camp for kids held here in Galveston at my kids school. It is a really cool curriculum and I am having a blast. However, I have one serious observation. Teachers are overworked and underpaid. I wonder how they have time to instruct between drying tears, refereeing fights, dealing with outbursts, etc... We have made boats out of aluminum foil, parachutes, polymers, they have learned about lift and drag, chemistry, vikings, and superheros. It is over on Friday and I am already happily exhausted.

The moving people have come to inventory our house. I have to decide what is going to Venezuela immediately, what is going on the boat, and what we will carry with us. I also have to decide what I will leave in our NEW HOUSE in Galveston. Yes, we bought a house here. A small one (for us). It is 1500 square feet and is in Evia

http://www.eviagalveston.com/bungalowrow.htm

Mine is the super cute red on on the end. I think you can click on it and check it out. It will be our home for the holidays and the summer and we will potentially rent it out as a vacation rental.

Duty is calling - will write more later.

Kisses

Mary Claire