Friday!

Today was the last day working on our homeowners house!  It was a little bittersweet but so awesome to be able to see all of the improvements we were able to make to her house over the week.  Overall I personally was up on the roof when there was literally just the beams left which was kind of fun and scary, and we did sooooo much scraping of paint this week that I'm pretty sure all of our knuckles are raw.  But today was nice because we finally got to paint her porch and got it almost completely finished!  There were a couple of things that we weren't able to get to that another group will have to finish for us, but overall we got so much done.  Looking back on the past week my favorite day had to be Wednesday when we had homeowners night at The Pittsburgh Project.  The homeowners were able to come and have dinner with us and so we got to know our homeowner a little better.  We found out all about our homeowner's family and her past and it was so nice to talk to her and get to know more about why we were sent to help her.  After dinner we had a church service with our homeowners and during the service a couple of kids were asked to go up and talk about the work being done at their homeowner's house, and thank them for inviting us into their home.  Pastor Brett asked me to be the one to talk about our homeowner.  At first I really didn't want to because I typically don't enjoy public speaking but afterwards I'm so glad I got to because our homeowner has been so patient with our amateur attempts at fixing her house and it made her was so happy as well!! She loved the flower I got to give her and when the homeowners were given the chance to speak about what was going on at their

house she did!  It was so exciting because honestly none of us thought she would because she's so quiet and shy but when she did it was a huge encouragement to us.  It really showed us why God put us where He did.  Thursday we got to meet our homeowner's six year old grandson who was adorable!  He loves playing basketball and wore us all out asking for piggy back rides and is convinced that Megan is his girlfriend;).  He got to eat lunch with us both today and yesterday which was also a lot of fun for us all.  Unfortunately today he lost his basketball down the street so we went to K-Mart to get him a new one!  Megan, Liann, and I ran around the store with him on my back and he got to choose out a basketball with his two favorite colors, red and blue.  The best part was when we told him to thank Pastor Brett and he said, "Thanks for the new ball Mr. Wrinkle."  So of course that's Pastor Brett's new nickname:).  Overall this week has been such an enlightening experience and I'm so glad that I've been able to go on it with such an awesome group of people.  I have really enjoyed getting to know all of them better as well on this trip and almost wish that we could stay another week, however I'm also really excited to go home and hopefully apply all that I've learned here to the lifestyle at home as well!

-Maddie B.