New chapter

     Once again it has been a while since I've posted on here, but at least this time I've got a valid excuse:)  The past few weeks have been a whirlwind to say the least!  Most of you know about the changes that have happened to us in the family department but if you don't I'll summarize it quickly, we recently became a family as we took in a foster to adopt placement!!  We have a long way to go before anything will be finalized but in the few short weeks that we have been a family we have been changed in ways we never could have imagined!!  We truly understand now what people mean when they say becoming a parent changes you, we became parents quite literally in a matter of hours and the changes we've encountered are indescribably awesome!  We continue to turn it over to God and pray that we will be able to share more about this little angel very soon and we thank you all for your prayers for our family as we continue to watch God's will come through this child!

     As one chapter is just beggining in our lives, another one came to an end last night.  As you may remember we had to let my dog Duchess go meet God back in January and we chose to have her remains cremated with the intentions of spreading her ashes in her home state of Montana.  I had a training for work in Billings this week so I brought her with to bring her back home.  One of her favorite hunting partners, Ryan, came with me as I took her out to the Yellowstone river.  She loved this river more than any living being I have ever seen, some of the best retrieves I will witness in my lifetime have been made by Duch on that river, so it only seemed fitting that it was where she would want to be.  As we stood on the river bank reflecting on the great times we've shared there, I knew I was in the right spot as Duchess showed herself to me.  Just before sending her ashes into the river a small flock of five geese flew overhead and as they went in to land on the river jsut downstream from us, one of them flared out to the right and made a loop directly over the top of me before completing the  and rejoining the rest of the flock on the water.  Since January 9th 2015 on I will forever believe that my beloved Duchess will show herself to me through geese, simply because this was her favorite bird to chase and every time I've seen geese since she went to heaven I can feel her presence!  So when this lone honker swayed from her routine behavior to fly over me there was no doubt in my mind that it was my baby girl showing me she approved of her final resting place.  I finished letting her go, placed her collar name tag in the rocks, and sat there for a few moments in silence as I listened to the geese voice their joy across the river.  It could only be summed up with one word, perfect.

Remember, as Norman MacLaine once famously said, "eventually all things merge into one, and a river runs through it."