Re-start

I met my girlfriend over 25 years ago. In all the years since she's never been one to be athletic or stick with any kind of hard exercise regime. She talked about it a lot through the years and tried different things but nothing seemed to stick with her for very long.

That changed last year. My sister knew we would be in the states in December and asked if we wanted to run in the St. Jude half marathon in Memphis. She asked in August of last year. I told my girlfriend that we should do it together. She had never run more than 5km before so she had some serious doubts about her ability to do it but she found a training program on the internet and was willing to give it a shot. The program was for 14 weeks.

Once she started the program my girlfriend turned into someone I had never met before. The training schedule called for running 5 days a week. She only missed one day in 14 weeks. She never looked for an excuse to not run. She ran in cold (25 degrees F). She ran in heat. She ran in rain. She ran in cold and rain. She never quit.

There were many days when the training run was over that all I could do was laugh, give her a high five and ask who she was. I had NEVER seen that side of her before and let me just say, I loved it.

The half marathon was on December 3rd and she nailed it. She didn't stop one time and when she ended she wasn't winded and said she felt like she could have gone faster but she wanted to make sure she had enough gas at the end. I was so proud of her!

I told her, as she trained, that the hard part would be to continue running after the big race day was over. Being in the states with family during the holidays didn't help either. She had a big drop off in running days after race day. Today she began a new running/strengthening schedule.

We went to a nearby track where me, Anderson and Giovanni played with Giovanni's cars from Cars 2 while my girlfriend made her laps. As she passed by on every lap they would go to the track to clap and give her high fives. She cracked off an easy 30 minutes.

Anyway, her re-start today reminded me of a video that Ansley made. I had talked to Ansley before the half marathon about doing a "documentary" of my girlfriend's big day.

She, as always, made a great video. It's full of bloopers and running and other stuff. Two of my favorite parts are the special music she puts on when my dad shows up in his "special" hat. I also like the beginning of the video when my girlfriend, who has some pre-race jitters and doesn't want someone in her face, gets mad at Ansley for always being in her face with the camera.

If you want to catch a brief snippet of my girlfriend's awesome weekend then just watch the video. Great job Ans!

Different Schedules

If you know our family you know we like to go to bed early and wake up early. That's just who we are and we like it that way.

Ever since we've been home we've been dealing with some crazy jet lag. If you keep up with my girlfriend's blog then you already know about it. If not then you can click here to read her take on it.

With the jet lag we've been sleeping at weird times......

.......and even in weird positions.

That's right. My girlfriend walked in to check on Giovanni while he was taking his nap and found him in this position. It was like he woke up and started to get up and then fell asleep again as he was getting out of bed. And his feet just dangled off the floor.

Some people handle jet lag differently than others.

Little Guys, Big Sisters Update

Hey B and Ans,

I thought you might be missing your little brothers' summertime activities.

Giovanni has picked up the Blume little kid tradition of enjoying walking around in just his underwear. It's been pretty hot here and it didn't take "clothing boy" long to change his ways. He still prefers clothing but is getting used to the coolness that underwear only provides.

Here is a video of some recent dancing by your brothers that we thought you'd enjoy.

We also thought you would enjoy some reading pics we took of them the other day.

You also have another younger (although now bigger than both of you) brother who has been pretty busy since we got home. Guess what he and I did last night?

Lucky! (Hear it in your brains as Garrett would say it in his best Napoleon Dynamite voice.)

More Mooching

We have some really great friends (more on them later) that are missionaries in the U.S. and they have a blog.

If you want to be stretched and challenged in your daily walk then you need to click here and read a recent blog post they did. You will be blessed....and stretched.....and challenged.

If you don't want to be blessed or stretched or challenged in your Christian faith then I guess my question to you is why not?

P.S. After you read this specific post spend some time on their blog and check out what God is doing through this family. It's pretty cool. God is really growing them in His image and through them His kingdom is growing here on earth. Then feel free to leave them an encouraging comment. Everybody likes those.

Mooching

We are trying to get readjusted to our time zone. It's been hard.

It's also hot. Sweat in our house hot. We are trying to get readjusted to our Brasilian summer which is even tougher after coming from the cooler U.S.

Honestly it's been hard for me to want to sit down and blog for all my faithful followers. Okay, so it's only about 3-5 but they are still faithful.

Because of my lack of brain power right now (some might say, "What do you mean right now?" as if my lack of brain power was a common thing......I'll choose to ignore them) I'm going to do some mooching off of other people.  I've done it before and I''m not ashamed of doing it again. I'm doing it now.

First mooch is off my girlfriend's blog. She shared a little about our jet lag and our first days back.

Click here to read it. 

POA

We made it home today. It was a relatively easy trip as God blessed us with good flights that were as close to being on time as we've ever had. We also got home in probably the fastest time ever for taking 3 flights from Memphis. Our layovers in the Miami and Rio airports were short.

I'm sure we'll share more about the trip and some of favorite people coming to meet us in Miami for a quick visit, as well as the welcome home gang that met us at the airport here in POA, but for now we wanted to thank you for your prayers for our safety.

We also wanted to leave you with a new (to us......old to the world) song we heard for the first time on our furlough. Our parents both have satellite radio in their cars and they graciously (thanks moms and dads) alllowed us to use their cars for the entire 3 months, except for the first week in Dallas when we had the "Man Van." Anyway, one of our favorite stations was music from the 40's.

It was there where we heard our new favorite song about Brasil.

Give it a listen. You can even read the words and sing along if you want to. Enjoy:

You've got to love Sinatra!!

Going Home?

Tomorrow we leave the U.S. and head home to Brasil. In June we will celebrate 10 years of living in Brasil. It's gone by super fast. 


We love Brasil. Anderson cried when we left in October because he didn't want to leave his friends. It's hard for all of us to leave to come back to the states. Imagine picking up your entire family and living out of suitcases for the next 2-3 months, visiting different people and cities and states, asking people to share their money to support your ministry, taking your kids places where they may or may not know people, etc. and you get an idea of what our furloughs are like. 


Don't get me wrong. We love furloughs. We get to hang out with grandparents and aunts, uncles and cousins. We get to see friends we've known for years but haven't seen for the last 2. We get to eat food and go places we don't have back home. We get to make new friends. It's always good and always tiring. We call it a "good tired."


We've spent the last 3 months here. It's been our longest furlough ever. We normally stay 2 months but this time we stayed 3 because we need more financial support to be able to stay in Brasil and we needed to find a new sponsoring church. God has blessed us with a great new sponsoring church and He's still working on our financial situation. We have faith He will do something cool to help us stay in Porto Alegre. We still have peace that He is calling us to be there. 


The extra month allowed us to hang out with our best buds more than we've been able to do in the past. It's allowed us to spend more time with people instead of feeling like we were rushing through visits. It's been good. 


And so tomorrow we leave for Brasil. We leave for home. 


Home. 


It's a strange world we live in. Our home is in Brasil and our home is here in the states. It's tough to leave our life in Brasil to come here. It's always tough to leave here after 2 months and go back to Brasil. Even more so after being here for 3 months this time. 


Garrett and I just came home and as we walked into the house he was sharing how he wanted to go home tomorrow (he greatly misses his buds, playing soccer, etc.). He's been talking about it for a few days. But he also shared how he's going to miss being with grandparents and having big yards to play in and seeing lots of trees and not just buildings. 


He's got a foot in two worlds. We all do and sometimes it's not easy but I don't think any of us would trade it for anything. We, literally, have families on two continents. Not many people can say that. We are blessed to have people hugging us here when we leave and those waiting to hug us when we get home. It's hard and really special at the same time. 


Our conversation and our feelings reminded me of one of our most favorite people. Her name is Dottie. You may remember her from a post we did in October. Click here if you missed that one. She was a missionary to the Netherlands for 15 years and now her job title is "Director for Missionary Care" at MRN. I couldn't think of a better person to take care of missionaries. Anyway, ever since we've known her she has posted a quote to her facebook, her blog and even her emails. 


The quote hit me today as I talked to my son. Here it is:


"If you came back, you wanted to leave again. If you went away, you longed to come back. Wherever you were, you could hear the call of the homeland, like the note of a herdsman's horn far away in the hills. You had one home out there and one over here, and yet you were an alien in both places. Your true abiding place was the vision of something very far off, and your soul like the waves, always restless and forever in motion." -Johan Bojer, "The Immigrants"-


This blog post was typed from the United States. Our home. 


The next blog post will be written (Lord willing after safe travels) from Brasil. Our other home. 


Very cool!