Natalie

We so appreciate all your prayers for Natalie and her journey! Yesterday she signed up for classes at the Tec High School. The campus is very impressive. Natalie will do nearly all her homework via a laptop. She will have wireless access on the whole campus. This is really cool. So when we are in the gym watching her games I can give you a ticker-tape/play by play of her games!!! Maybe I should investigate this Twitter thing. All but one of Natalie's classes will be taught in English. This is what really sold us on the school. Think about this. What if your child attended a high school and all but one class was taught in Spanish! It is still pretty unbelieveable that kids here are able do school in English. The US is far behind in studying and teaching foreign languages. I've mentioned this before, but here and around the world, children are taught English from Kindergarten and up. Natalie's section of kids is very small. The bicultural class only has around 30 kids and around 150 for all three grades. The rest of the school is in bilingual. They have half of their classes in English. Natalie will be taking French as her foreign language. This is a little scary for her as she's never had a foreign language. To her Spanish isn't foreign. She's been speaking it as long as she can remember. All the other kids in her class will have an edge on her but in the rest of her classes she will have it so much easier than her classmates. Natalie will have a Spanish grammar class that is taught in Spanish.

Natalie has been in basketball training this summer. Her schedule consists of conditioning on the running track/football field from 9-11 in the mornings. Then she returns in the afternoons in the gym from 2-4. On Tuesdays and Thursdays she also lifts weights after her conditioning practice. This is serious stuff for a 15 year old. She is practicing with girls that are all older than her. The coach is trying to have Natalie play in a category above her age. She is being trained very hard to catch up with the older girls. Natalie's body has never been pushed so hard. She has thinned down and has gotten stronger. The beginning was pretty rough. We are extremely proud of her. She has had opportunities to be "light" already. Please continue to pray for Natalie. We know that there are going to be issues we will face that we wouldn't normally when we homeschool. We know that with God's help, we all will grow together to be more like Christ. We want our children to be prepared to live in a lost world with lost people. Being a missionary and homeschooling often shelters children way more than they should be. Pray for me. I'm dealing with some issues as I let my sweet Natalie away from the "nest" a bit. We live in a big and dangerous city. We've been reminded of this lately with Alan and what his family went through. This is a chance for our family to trust God more than ever before.

Fortunately, the school is a mile and a half from our house. It is very close. Many of Natalie's classmates come from long distances. We can get to the school in five minutes if the traffic is light. Natalie could be traveling as far away as Monterrey, Mexico with her team. This is a 12 hour trip by car one way. This is a very unique opportunity for Natalie. We never dreamed when we got the first recruitment call that she ever would go to the school. We kept thinking that she wouldn't pass the Spanish College Entrance Exam. Then we thought, the coach would never offer a scholarship. Then there was, they'd never give us 50% scholarship. God allowed all the road blocks to be knocked down. There are some kids and some families that God wants us to impact for His Glory. Pray that we wouldn't get caught up in all the "newness" to miss these opportunities.