Travel Day-Brasil

We arrived in São Paulo with no problems.  Like we shared yesterday, we had a great overnight flight.  Giovanni slept almost the whole way which was a blessing.  We then had to claim all of our bags and go through customs.  No big delays but not much fun to have to drag the bags around again.  

We finally made it home.... 

......and were met by a few different people. 

Bronwyn's friends from school were there....

(another classic from Bronwyn and her best friend Julia.....just look for the ones with their eyes closed)

.....and some of our brothers and sisters in Christ met us to take us home. 

 

Thankfully we have a brother here who has a huge school bus that could hold all of our stuff. He was an incredible blessing as he just muscled all of our heavy bags as he loaded and unloaded them.  His name is Renato. Here he is holding Giovanni.  

Giovanni looks a little worn out from the trip doesn't he?

We got home and were met by other family members from the house church that meets in our house.  

Even our street guard helped us with our bags.  In Brasil you pay a monthly fee to have a guard keep an eye on things.  They actually are responsible for quite a few houses on a certain street.  This is our third house to live in since we moved to Brasil and with every move God has blessed us with great street guards.  This is Gilberto. 

His guard spot is actually right in front of our house.  Jade is the dog next to him.  She definitely makes herself at home in our house. She's kind of like the street mascot.  Very cool dog. 

As we walked through the house we quickly found out the things that our Christian family had done while we were gone.  Actually it was brothers and sisters from 4 different house churches that had taken care of things for our family while we were gone.  

Things like cleaning the entire house, cutting our grass, making some electrical repairs, planting some flowers and spices and having food for us (including one of my favorite foods of sweet rice.....thanks Leni!).  We can't tell you how much all of that blessed us.  

As we walked around we noticed that they also left cool little, encouraging notes to us all throughout the house.  Each person had an encouraging note or notes written to them in their rooms.  Notes were everywhere.  It was really cool. 

Okay, I guess I need to explain Grace's note, above, to Anderson about the smelling.  Anderson has an incredible gift of being able to smell.  As you know from our Andersonism's on the blog, he just tells it like it is in his world.  One Sunday he smelled Grace and told her she smelled like ketchup.  We were thinking, "Oh Great" but Grace loved it.  She asks him now what she smells like.  I guess there could be worse things than smelling like ketchup. 

They even bought and signed a table cloth.  

Anderson came into his room and was met with this.  

That's right.  Little pieces of CANDY......ON HIS BED! (emphasis Anderson) He came out and told me and Benay that this was the best day of his LIFE!!  He's not dramatic AT ALL (emphasis mine). 

As you can tell, our Brasilian family really takes care of us.  They loved on us and were Christ to us.  We are a very blessed family and we thank God for our family here. 

It felt good for us to be back in our own home after 2+ months away.  

We tried to get rested up from our jet lag......

.......we got to play outside........

.......and, in general, we got to let our hair down a little bit.