New Year's Eve

We really enjoy our New Years Eve's here in Brasil. Mainly because we've never heard or seen celebrations like this when we were growing up. It seems like every street has someone shooting off huge fireworks. To us, as Americans, it was almost scary when we first moved here to see the types of powerful fireworks anyone can buy here after growing up not being allowed (by parents, city restrictions, etc) to shoot anything bigger than bottle rockets, sparklers and M-80's.

This year we had some people over from different house churches and enjoyed some good times together before we hit the street and shot our fireworks. Here are some pictures from our night.

Some of the group taking a break during a game of "Villian and Detective."

Santa Claus gave the Blume kids a Nintendo Wii (or as Anderson calls it a "Atendo Wii") and these two guys, Tiago and Jorge stayed close to it most of the night. It was funny stuff to watch these guys learn how to play it.

They were both sweaty after a few hours of playing but they had a great time playing sports they'd never played before (baseball, tennis, golf, boxing).

Starting off with the sparklers.

With the help of my two assistants we moved on to bigger fireworks.
Some of the group enjoying the fireworks.
Carys and Joca watching the big one we just sent up.

This is me lighting one of our last big boys that we shot off. If it looks like I have kind of a "sissy, get ready to run" body posture, you would be correct. This one is called the "Earth Shaker" and it claims to go about 500 feet in the air. So, yes, I was a little skittish when lighting these.
Here's one of the Earth Shakers in action: