Friday Flashback

    I was trying to think of ideas on short, quick, easy posts since writing a well thought out blog post can be intimidating and take hours, so I was inspired to do a Friday Flashback each week (hopefully each week).  What I'm going to do is randomly choose a folder of pictures on my computer and pick a photo and tell the story behind it.  Simple and quick :)  So here's my first Friday Flashback...

   

    This was taken almost exactly 3 years ago in June of 2010.  I was in the middle of college and halfway through my Secondary Ed schooling when my dad suggested I look into volunteering at Gateway Woods. I was struggling with imagining myself as an authority figure to high school kids, let alone "bad" high school kids.  I was terrified of having to deal with kids with behavior issues or no motivation for school.  We thought that maybe working alongside Houseparents and Residents I would get some experience with troubled teens.  We didn't realize that being a volunteer did not mean a lot of experience with the kids as their authority but hey, I'm not complaining, I still learned a lot.  Especially that these "bad" kids were really just kids with hearts and souls like mine that needed to be cared for and loved.  I created a lot of friendships too and built confidence in new experiences.  By the time Spring Break rolled around I had agreed to spend the whole summer in Leo volunteering at GW.  

   This is the morning I left Phoenix for the 29+ hour drive to Northeast Indiana.  Tyler and Amy were my traveling buddies :)  We had such a blast driving out there.  I don't think any of us knew that on this fateful morning the direction of my life would be forever changed.  What was just a summer volunteering turned into me moving out there the following summer to be an Assistant Houseparent which turned into me meeting my future husband, setting roots down in Fort Wayne, and becoming the Social Studies teacher at GW.  Even when I moved out to IN to be an assistant, I said that it would be 2 years and then I'd move home to AZ.  Now, things are different, and that's ok, but I do get kind of sad/nostalgic/sappy, whatever you want to call it, when I look at those three 3 college kids and think about how much we've changed.  Two of us are married, all out of college and faced with endless possibilities of where we could end up.  Pretty crazy!  I miss them and the old days but the current days are pretty great too :)