Summer Ends

Well, my last post was entitled "Summer Begins," so as you can see I haven't kept up with blogging much lately.  I should have had more time over the summer, but I guess I was in "summer mode," meaning "lazy mode."  So I'll try to summarize the highlights of our summer.

For the last week and a half of June we hosted another chaperon from Latvia.  Her name is Lana, and we had a fun time with her.  A couple other families in our church hosted her after us, and two families in our church hosted Latvian orphans for 5 weeks.  (One family is even hoping to adopt the kids they hosted!)  It's been really neat to see God moving in people's hearts in many different ways regarding orphan care.  Everyone has a different niche, but God can use all of us somewhere!  Here are pictures of the host families and kids and of Lana with our family.

After Lana left we went to Gettysburg for a 150th Anniversary Civil War re-enactment.  It was a miserable day!  I guess if you're really into this stuff and you want to camp out and pretend you're really in the war it might be cool.  But for a family with young kids, walking around in miserable sweltering heat while trying to find a place you could actually see the battle was NOT FUN!  For hard-core civil war buffs maybe, but it was definitely not user friendly.    

July brought about a trip to Cincinnati.  Just Tabitha and I went.  She had testing done on her kidneys and bladder, showing good results from her last surgery.  We were thankful for that, and we also had a really good time visiting with our friends, the Fronduti's.  The only trouble on that trip was when the van tire blew out on the highway in West Virginia.  I was able to pull over without any major trouble, and a kindly West Virginian neighbor stopped and changed it for me.  

After we got home the older 3 had swimming lessons, which is always a fun time.  Next year Rayanna will be able to do it too, which should be good since she's tired of being just a spectator!

My sister Carrie came to visit for a few days since she had a conference out our way.  Well, kind of "out our way."  7 hours and $50 in tolls made me vow to never go to New Jersey to pick anyone up again!  It was great to see her though (and she did pay for the tolls).  Don't worry...you're worth every bit of hassle, L'il Sis.  =)  

August was a month of sadness and joy.  Sadly, one of our pastors and his family had to leave the church for personal reasons.  We will miss them and their ministry very much, and our church family is definitely grieving the loss.   In happier news, some other friends from church welcomed home their daughter Mihret from Ethiopia!  The kids and I got to go to the airport with some other friends to welcome them.  What a special time!  

I held a music camp for the first time this summer.  It was called Music Olympics.  I had 11 kids (including mine) for 2 hours a day for 4 days.  It was fun, but definitely exhausting!  Maybe a year from now I'll have recuperated enough to do it again.  :)

We started school on August 19th:  fourth grade, second grade, kindergarten, and preschool.  Rayanna is thrilled to be doing school with the big kids and gets quite upset if I don't have enough work planned for her.  Tabitha is learning to read and doing really well with it!  Jesse is excited about our study of space this year.  And Ethan is showing a lot of maturity in planning his work and being responsible to get it done.  Four days out of the first week were good; one was not so good, and I was ready to quit!  But overall, the first two weeks have gone well, and I'm hopeful that we'll have a good year.  The kids even spent time playing make-believe together one day (WITHOUT fighting!), which is something I haven't seen them do in ages!

Now it's Labor Day weekend, the unofficial end of summer.  I'd like to say that we're ending summer with an exciting anniversary trip to the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, NC.  That was the plan, but, as you'll see in the next post, our plans don't always work out.  All in all though, it's been a good summer.  We even had several weeks of gorgeous weather, for which I was very thankful!  Today it's back to 90-some-horrible degrees and nasty humidity, but oh well.  I'm ready to start another school year and count down the days until fall weather!  

Ethan's Debut

I had my studio piano recital tonight.  I usually have 2 each year.  This one was special for a couple of reasons.  One of my students is graduating this year.  I've taught him since he was 9 years old!  And now he's going off to college and will even be majoring in music.  It's exciting to see all he's accomplished and sad to be letting him go!  The other thing that made this recital special is my newest student . . . Ethan!  This was his very first recital, and he surprised me by actually wanting to participate!  He got a little nervous ahead of time, but stayed calm enough to play well.  I'm very proud of him!

Runkles Piano Studio Recital

Today we had our end-of-year piano recital, featuring music from the Romantic era.  The kids did a fabulous job!  I was really proud of them, and pleasantly surprised at how well everyone played.  I gave out their certificates for another year of piano study.  It's hard to believe I've been teaching some of them for 7 years!

I usually perform too, to keep myself practicing and set an example for the kids.  This time I took a risk and played a tough piece I hadn't performed since college.  I didn't play as well as I could have "in my prime", but it turned out OK, and it was fun to have a challenge again.

This is a really great group of kids.  I've gotten to know them and their families pretty well over the years.  They aren't just students or clients any more, but they're also friends.  Great job today, kids!!

Us

Well, I've been slacking a bit on keeping this updated. And I can't remember which family members and friends I've told what to . . . so here is a brief update on everybody:

Tabitha
Tabitha continues to adjust and settle in. She's picking up more and more English, and our communication is getting better and better. She had an MRI on the 8th. We're still waiting for her Chinese hospital records to be translated. As soon as that's done, the doctors can give us a plan of action as far as what surgeries she'll need and whether or not the neurogenic bladder will be correctable. Her temper tantrums have greatly diminished, and we're working on the whining. She's making great progress on all fronts.

Jesse
Jesse's a happy 4-year-old who's excited about life and learning and having fun. He's constantly making us laugh with his off-the-wall comments. He's learning his letters and loves doing his school work. He's in AWANA Cubbies and really enjoys that too.

Ethan
We just joined a homeschool co-op this month, and Ethan is loving it! He's taking Ancient Civilizations, Physics, and Art. They're really fun, hands-on classes, and he's so excited every Monday when we come home. It's great to see him loving it! He is really into art lately and loves any kind of craft/art project. He also just started a Kindermusik class, which I'm very excited about. And he's in AWANA Sparks and doing a great job learning his verses there. It's been fun seeing him come out of his shell a bit and make friends.

Heath & Erin
We've been busy trying to figure out how to parent 3 kids. You'd think we'd have it down after the first two, but it's been a big adjustment. I do feel like we're finally getting the hang of it, and are almost functional. =) We try to have a date night at least once a month, and we're hoping to be able to go on a cruise later this year to celebrate our 10th anniversary. Heath's been doing a lot of side work while his main job has been very slow. He's also been around to help me with the kids a lot, which has been great! I just resumed teaching piano lessons last week (one day per week). It's nice to be back to teaching, though sometimes I wish I were less busy. But it's a nice change of pace from the rest of the week.

Our Vehicles
This past August (after I killed our camry) we bought a used minivan. I was thrilled! Fortunately Heath was wise enough to buy the after-market warranty, because the week before Christmas the transmission decided it wasn't going to function correctly anymore. So, we took the van to the place the warranty people would work with. And . . . it's still there. One week of no cell-phone service at the beach where they couldn't reach us, and the rest of the time is waiting for the auto shop and the warranty company to work things out. Supposedly we'll be getting it back early next week.

So...in the meantime we've been a one-vehicle family, that one vehicle being Heath's beast of a truck. Let me share my feelings about this machine. It's loud. It smells. It jostles one's insides. If the back isn't filled with thousands of pounds, it might jostle one right into oblivion. It's too tall to get in without a ladder. It can't fit in a normal parking space, and it's so high up in the air that the ground around it is not visible while driving or trying to park. And did I mention it's loud and it stinks? Oh yeah, and the inside driver's side door handle broke, so after I put on a hillarious show of trying to park the monstrocity, I can't even get out without another circus display of maneuvers.

But...nonetheless I'm very thankful that we have a way of getting around, and that Heath's work schedule was quite flexible to allow the kids and me to make it to all our planned destinations.

Our Home

Well, here's where it gets interesting. Two years ago we bought land, planned on quickly and easily selling our house for a great price and then building our new house. Turns out God had other plans. With the drop in the housing market, we were unable to sell our house, and so here we are two years later paying interest on both loans, running out of money, and not getting any closer to building. We considered the options of refinancing, renting out our house, selling the house, selling the land, etc. After much deliberation and number crunching, we have decided to put both our house and our land on the market. I'm a bit sad about giving up the land we've been planning to live on these past couple years. But it's for the best. The hope is that we can sell both, walk away with a lot of cash, rent for awhile, get a great deal on a new piece of property (or a house we can rebuild), and then build the house we've been dreaming of. Not the way we wanted to do things, but necessary. And I'm hoping that God has something even better than we'd ever imagined in store for us. If not, we'll just wait for our mansion in heaven. :)

Well, those are the latest happenings in the Runkles home. Thanks for reading!

If it ain't Baroque, don't fix it! ;-)

On May 15th, my students had their end-of-year piano recital. This recital had a Baroque theme, so the first half of the recital was all Baroque music. We'd been studying this time period all year, so it was fun to see them perform. Some of them even used the harpsichord! OK, not a real one, but the harpsichord setting sounded pretty close! The non-Baroque pieces were played on a 9' Yamaha grand. We held the recital at a piano store in Frederick, so this was THE BEST instrument we've ever had for a recital! I thought it went pretty well, and I was very proud of all their hard work. It'll be the last recital for awhile. I'll be teaching a few students over the summer, but I'm taking next fall off when Tabitha comes. And since we're still hoping to move one of these days, it'll probably be my last recital with some of these kids. So it was bittersweet, but they did a great job!

On December 12th, my students had a piano recital with an Animal theme. I think it's the most fun we've ever had at a recital! Each student played pieces with an animal in the title. They chose pictures of their animals, and I made them into a slideshow, which was shown while the students played. A few of them even dressed up like their animal. It was really fun! My plan is to have a different theme each year for the fall recital, so if anyone has any ideas for themes, send them my way!