Blueberry smoothie!!
Lets play wedding
Dressed up for ballet...made Mommy and Daddy want to sing "all the single ladies"
"I'm a weeeel mommy"
Oh little Luiza is so tiny and sweet
Baby Luiza likes me!
MUD PIESQ
Nemo and Poinsetta...our surprises for going 20 nights diaper free and dry!
Daddy brought home two kites!
We went to a park with Gramma and Grampa Oregon to fly our new kites and it was FUN! My favorite part of the whole day was when my Daddy had to climb up high in a tree to get the kite out. Mommy took some pictures and here they are….
Faster Daddy
This is the coolest thing ever!
...up to the highest hight...
Gramma, look at my kite!
Uh Oh...my kite got stuck in a tree and Daddy went after it just like a monkey...and he got it!
I'm on top of the jungle gym
Playing in the sand
I love being a Mom to two such different little girls.
Noelle is two years and two months old and a total riot!
She runs everywhere she goes and pumps her little right arm to grandiose proportions. The loud slap, slap of her feet on the tile floors precedes her big entry into whatever room she’s heading. She’s got these big beautiful eyes that look up sweetly as she says “peeeeese” (please) and those same big eyes produce some big tears and lots of snuggle time when she’s sad. Noelle is my wake up slowly, snuggly time on mommy’s lap is high priority little girl. Temper? Yes! Foot stomper? Yes! Usually both feet alternating. Seeing how Samara never stomped her feet and neither do Micah or I, we’re not sure where she picked that one up. Noelle is just starting to talk more and she mixes her English and Portuguese together. “Mais juice por favor” or “Sis brincar with me” lately she’ll come into the kitchen grab my hand, look up and say “mahahn.” This mean come on!! She’s blessed with a kind of deep and super loud voice.
Noelle’s favorite person in the world is Samara or “Sis” as she calls her. They are super great playmates, and it’s fun to listen in to the conversations they have while playing together. Noelle loves to “go out” for walks. She is always picking up sticks and rocks and stuffing them into her pockets. She is forever thrusting handfuls of flowers in various states of mashedness into my hand, and she has reminded me just how cool ants really are. The cupboard in the kitchen where the mixer lives makes a little squeak. When Noelle hears me open that cupboard she comes running, knowing there will be beaters involved. Noelle loves to wrestle and rough house and climb all over her personal jungle gym, aka. Daddy. Noelle gives the BEST hugs ever, and always kisses people on both cheeks. This little bundle of laughter and energy brings endless giggles and noise to our home and joy to our hearts!
Samara is four years and one month old and is a very sweet and very busy little girl.
dancing
She wakes up with her mind already full of the things she want to do. Play dress up, make a pretend cake, dress dollies, organize her closet…so much fun to be had that she has to get going right now! No time to snuggle for this girl, time’s a wasting. (never was a snuggler, more like holding a bag of antlers) Samara skips everywhere she goes and usually has some sort of song on her lips. Many of them are original compositions in either English or Portuguese. Samara is creative and is forever making up games like “tumble bumble” where we take all the cushions and pillows from the couch and cover the floor then “tumble and bumble” in them. She loves to draw and color and practice writing the alphabet and her name. We do lots of crafty things that involve glue and glitter and buttons and markers and stickers. As she says “I’m pretty good at making messes!” Samara is happy to stay home and play, often not wanting to go out, but always ends up having loads of fun finding bugs, and beetles and pretty flowers on our walks. She likes to “help” mommy around the house and is a great little window washer and laundry folder. Being a big sister makes Samara pretty important around here, she totally loves Noelle and is a very sweet, protective if often bossy big “Sis.” Samara loves stories, and we have lots of books that are well worn. She also loves for Micah or I to make up stories or tell her stories about when we were kids. I once told a story about a little horse named Sparkle and I’m certain I’ve now told hundreds of Sparkle stories as he has become her favorite character. Having devotions in the morning is something Samara never forgets, running to place her little Bible on the table at breakfast time where we spend a few minutes reading and praying together. She often likes to “read” Bible stories to us or to her grandparents via Skype. Dressing up in her princess or ballerina clothes always brings out the dancer in Samara and it’s off to crank up the music and twirl around the living room, usually sweeping Noelle up in the excitement of dress up.
Two girls, so different in so many ways and yet so special and dear to one another and to me. I would love to add some more little ones to our quiver… but God knows better than we do and thus we trust Him and are overwhelmingly thankful for these two sweet, busy, happy, silly little girls that we are blessed to be entrusted with. I thank God for every smile, giggle, tear, pout, fit, hug and moment that I get to be their Mom.
Our Friends Sandro and Sueli invited us to go to the little city of São Jorge do Ivai this past Sunday. The city of about 2000 was having it’s annual Festival of States of Nations. Right from church we loaded up and headed into the Brazilian countryside. Beautiful green rolling hills covered with soybeans, sugarcane and cows filled our windows. Seeing how it was well over 100 degrees this day, we very much enjoyed our air conditioner while listening to Christmas Music in the car. Arriving in the small central square of the city we found it ringed with white tents each featuring cuisine from different countries. We went to the Japanese tent. The only Japanese thing I saw on the menu was Yakisoba. We had a huge hunk of roasted pork and some fish fingers along with rice and salad. Great food, but not very Japanese=0) Sandro is from this small town and so as we wandered around looking at booths and eating ice pops we were introduced to many friends and family.
Next we went to Sandro’s parents house where we had acerola and lime juice, changed the kids clothes and visited a bit. From there we loaded back into the cars and headed further into the country. Sandro’s sister and her family live on a small self supporting farm. Her husband João earns his living by milking about 10 cows a day. On their property they had chickens, mango trees, avocado trees, cows, coconut trees, pinapple plants and their own garden. They made their own butter and produced much of their own food. We spent the afternoon hanging out there. Sitting on the wide porch, relaxing in hammocks, picking fruit from the trees, gathering chicken eggs, swimming and sweating!!! It was a fun day, nice to be out of the city and to spend time with friends.
Samara and Sandro swinging. Notice all the mangos strewn on the ground! HORRIBLE sight for us mango lovers. Funny that when I told them that's how the apples are in Oregon they felt the same way.
Avacado anyone?
Sueli, Noelle and Daniel taking a break
Micah loved that he HAD to climb trees to gather litchi fruit...not sure what we're going to do with all of it=0)
Noelle and her buddy Sandro
Look Sueli, these are the eggs I helped gather
riding high
I LOVE animals and want to hold those chickens
These horses are STINKY!
farm girls
snacking on acerolas...very high in vitamin C
Micah and Sandro picking mangos to bring home
best way to end a HOT day
SPLASHING!
I'm not sweating anymore!!!
My Auntie Andressa was pregnant for a long long long time. I was weeely escited to meet her baby. Finally after a long time baby Leticia was borned, I packed up my suitcase wight away to go visit her. Later we went to Londrina and I got to hold the brand new teeny tiny baby. She was soooo cute and tender. My favorite part was changing her diaper and picking out different clothes to put on the baby. I even got to help give her a bath. I love baby Leticia she is very speical.
I was so happy to meet Leticia and my favorite part was getting to hold her
Hi baby Leticia
she was so cute sleeping in her bed, but I kept asking if we could wake her up and change her clothes
I got to help Auntie Andressa give Leticia a bath, she was wiggly and slippery
Every now and then, we all encounter moments where we wished we had a camera. Moments that we wish we could freeze in time. Not having a camera at the time, I now want to paint a couple pictures for you of the last two I’ve experienced.
A couple days ago, I got home from about 5 days of meetings at a camp 45 minutes outside of town. When I got home, the idea of “daddy” was once again a novelty, and I got to play dolls, push little girls on swings and everything else I had been missing for the previous days. Then, at bath time, Noelle came tearing down the hall, naked as could be, yelling “papai, papai” (Daddy, Daddy). After Marla took her back into the bathroom, I followed her. When she saw me again, she jumped from Marla’s arms into mine. Then she put her arms around my neck and squeezed for a long time saying quietly “papai, papai, papai.”
Then on Sunday, after church was over, Marla and I went to pick up the girls from their Sunday school class. As their class is in an old converted house, we could look in the room from one window, and see what was going on. Posted at the other window like a sentinel was Samara waiting to catch the first glimpse of us as we rounded the corner. I could see that clutched in her hands were the two gram crackers that she had been given. She had broken each cracker in two separate pieces, so that she clutched four equal sized crackers in her hand. As we picked her up, she carefully distributed one cracker to daddy, one cracker to mommy, one cracker to Noelle and one cracker for herself. Her teacher later told us that she had been saving those crackers during the whole class… just so that she could share with us.
How I wish a picture could fully capture such moments
There is an orphanage here in town that is sponsored by the church that we work with. Many of the short term mission teams that come to Brazil spend time doing work projects around the property. But mostly they love to come and play with the kids. There are about 30 kids there now and they live divided in 5 houses with house parents/mothers. The kids are from 10 months to late teenage years. Few are true orphans the others have parents who are incapable (drug addicts, in prison…) of taking care of the child. We have spent time at the orphanage when work teams are here and lately I’ve been taking the girls over on Saturday mornings just to play. We usually show up as the kids are finishing up their chores. As we start to play on the playground kids wander over and before I know it Noelle is in the charge of three or four “mothering” 8-12 year olds and Samara is giggling and testing out her growing Portuguese vocabulary. I love to just sit and watch the kids play, to have Elle come and hold my hand and, to have Erik ask me to take pictures of him doing “stunts”, to hear their laughter and to have a pocket full of candies to hand out. Below are just a few pictures of these sweet kids.
getting dizzy
Erik the stunt man
Who says that carting off piles of leaves isn't fun?!
Samara and her new friends playing house
Crutches smutches...I cruise pretty fast with my plastic chair
Finger fencing championship of the world!
A little help
Why they lost? Well, from my point of view… they lost their cool. Could this meltdown have been avoided. Hmmm, I don’t know. You see, what makes Brazilian soccer fun to watch, as I have seen and as it has been explained to me by others, is that you can see that they are having fun when they play. This wearing of emotions on their sleeves opens the game up to creativity and experimentation. Brazilians like not just to win, but play beautifully with finesse. Theirs is not a game of cold and calculated play, it is a game of emotion and creativity. To ask them to play without emotion, would to make them un-Brazilian. Do I wish they had won… yes! Do I wished they’d have calmed down put their emotions in check and played their game…yes. But I guess the show goes on, and our flag at least for a time, is at half mast.
I guess in hindsight, it was a good thing when I called Marla with some bad news from the Sao Paulo Airport. My flight out of Chicago (I had spent the previous week in OMS meetings in Indiana) had already been delayed 24 hours due to severe thunderstorms. When I arrived in Sao Paulo, I was informed that my connecting flight was already full. On the phone I told Marla that I was put on a later flight, and for a moment it was quiet on the other end of the phone. Then she said with obvious disappointment in her voice “if I come to pick you up from the airport when you get in, I’ll miss watching the Brazil World Cup soccer game.”
It wasn’t “I’m sorry Micah,” or “It’s already been a week since we’ve last seen you, I miss you and I’ll jump right in the car for the hour and a half drive to come get you:” it was “I’m going to have to miss the game!!”
I won out in the end and she loaded up the girls and tuned in the radio for the drive. In truth I was/am happy that she’s enjoying this World Cup season and she can now talk intelligent soccer with the ladies at church (yes I’m serious… this is Brazil after all).
Below is a picture of Noelle’s latest feat. We call it “hey, I can look out the window now all by myself!”
Definition of Friend according to Webster’s:
Person one likes
We have recently been thinking a lot about friends. Those people whom we like and think about and spend time with and pray for and miss. Being that we live in Brazil and most of you reading this do not, you fall into the pray for and miss category. So recently when the pastor from the church that we worked at in Londrina called and said that they were bringing a group to Maringa for a holiday we were thrilled! Here in Brazil there seems to be many holidays, city ones, state ones, national ones. Most of the time were not even sure why there is a holiday, but try to enjoy it nonetheless. So just over a week ago Micah met this group downtown and played tour guide for them on a drizzly afternoon that eventually brought them to our home for “café da tarde” the afternoon coffee and snack time that Brazilians have every day. The girls and I had made cookies and ham and cheese sandwiches and of course we had coffee. They stayed and visited and we laughed and talked and thoroughly enjoyed our time together!. What a blessing for us to feel like we were not only among persons that we liked, but friends that we love.
Group from Belo Horizonte Church in Londrina
Samara and Isabella
Then we got another phone call from Andressa and Marlon and Wesley and Rosianne saying they wanted to come visit for the weekend. These are two couples that were in Micah’s discipleship group and became some of our closest friends in Londrina. Marlon and Andressa are married and expecting a little girl in August. Wesley and Rosianne are getting married in October. So again we were blessed by time with special friends who we love and who love us and really love Samara and Noelle.
Tooth brushing buddies
Wesley and Noelle
"decorating" Rosianne's hair
breaking in our Churrasco (bar-b-que)
Telling us the story...The directions said to "mix by hand" when Micah turned around Marlon was doing just that!
SUPER special people we like
The girls and I often take walks around the neighborhood in the afternoons when they wake up from their naps. I thought I’d “take” you along with us today…
The biggest reason that Samara and Noelle like to go on walks is to visit all the neighborhood cats and dogs
This little puppy is their favorite, he's not yet been trained as a guard dog so he loves our visits
overflow seating at the bus stop
It’s very normal to see large fancy homes
next door to not so fancy homes
The sidewalks here are pretty uneven, full of tree roots, broken concrete and holes, so pushing a stroller can be quite a workout.
In the five block radius that we normally walk I believe that we are one of three houses that does not have a dog (some have four or five). Here dogs are much more than the family pet, they are an important part of people’s security systems so you never hear someone tell their dog to “be quiet” or “stop barking.” I understand this but at 3am when the whole neighborhood chorus gets going…well you can imagine how understanding I feel.
We often see people going door to door selling things
Broom vendor
Corn on the corner, unfortunately not like the sweet corn we love in Oregon.
taking a rest on a brick
headed home
barbed wire, razor wire and an electric fence
beautiful poinsettia growing on the gate next door
Thanks for taking a walk with us this afternoon, hope you enjoyed this little taste of the neighboorhood
For those of you who might be confused over the title of this post, at least 1 of 2 things are true.
1. You do not know how hard it is to find peanut butter overseas
2. You do not know how my wife loooooves her peanut butter
Of all the sacrifices it is to live in Brazil, perhaps none has been as great for Marla as living without peanut butter. They do have peanuts here in Brazil, but people here haven’t developed the taste for peanut butter so it is almost impossible to find. And when you do find it the in the import section of some supermarkets, the jars are small and so ridiculously expensive that we’ve never bought it. So until recently, the gift of good peanut butter was something only a visitor could bring.
Oh don’t get me wrong, I did try to make some. I’d first buy the peanuts, then I’d roast them. After roasting them in the oven, I’d take each one of those red papery skin things off of each peanut. Then I’d roast them again. After their second roasting, I’d put them in a mini-food processor and blend them up adding oil and salt. The process took about 2 hours to yield about 2 cups of peanut butter.
But then about a month ago, I saw in a health food store dry, roasted, salted peanuts, without the little red skins. Oh my goodness, how my heart jumped. Not only did this store have salted peanuts, but they had unsalted as well. Sooooo after trial and error, I have discovered that 1.3 kilos of unsalted peanuts (that I have to roast again) + .7 kilos of salted peanuts + a cuisanart + about 40 minutes of work yields almost 5 pounds of delicious peanut butter for about the same price as you can buy it at Cosco! Oh how God is good, and life can go on!
My mother’s day gift bags were many this year…Samara came scampering back and forth from her room her arms laden with gifts. As I opened each bag she explained why she had given me each present. Her dolly and doll blanket because “I love you so much, I want you to have her.” Her jewelry box filled with her jewelry “because you love jewlerrrery Mommy” Her pillow “because I love you so, so, so much Mommy” Item after item that she had picked out from her treasures, and wrapped up specifically to give to me. Then she sang an original Mother’s day song at the top of her lungs that went something like: “Happy Mudder’s day, it’s your Mudders day, Happy Mudders day…” and danced in circles. She presented me with a card that said Happy Mother’s Day. Micah had written the words in yellow marker and she had traced them in blue and was quite proud of herself. Later that evening when we were cleaning up she made sure that all the things she had given me were in my room. Dolly Isabelle was “sleeping” next to my bed and the jewelry box was on my dresser. I did convince her that it was okay if she “borrowed” her pillow back so she could sleep with it. I feel like I got the greatest gift ever. The love of my daughter, love enough to give to me her most prized and treasured possessions. As Micah was tucking her in that night she said “It made me wheeally happy to give all those things to Mommy, because it made her wheeally happy.” Well Samara, It made did make Mommy happy. So happy in fact that I don’t even mind when you “borrow” your jewelry back to dress like a princess.
Special card from a special girl
Start with two days, add 175 kids ages 5-11, mix thoroughly with 15 counselors, sprinkle in over 250 pieces of luggage, toss in a few handfuls of homesick tears, spice it up with a variety of games and activities, combine with Christ centered teaching and top it all off with a torrential, unrelenting downpour and you’ve got the recipe for an unforgettable time…
Getting groovy
one of my new buddies
clowning counselors
Once a week between five and eight little girls would come scampering over to our house
To spend several hours with me. We would play games, do crafts, talk about life, read the Bible, giggle, bake yummy American treats, pray, talk about our families and just hang out. I taught some of them to sew, they were exceedingly patient with my bumbling Portuguese, and we all became, I believe, extra special to one another. So here we are one and half years later and my “girls” are growing up. I picked up four of them yesterday for an afternoon downtown eating ice cream, walking in the park and just hanging out. I saw lipstick and glittery eye shadow, boys are no longer completely icky, sixth grade is starting on Monday and time marches on. On one hand it was a delightful few hours together and on the other it pained my heart to hear of parents splitting up, teenager sisters who are pregnant and fathers who are abusing alcohol and drugs. I hold these young girls dear to my heart and I pray that the truth of God’s word will take root in their hearts, that other ladies in the church will invest in and mentor them and that these girls will choose a life surrendered to Christ. I do not know how many more times I will get to see them as we are moving to a new city on Monday, but I am thankful for them, for what God has taught me through them and I will continue to pray for each of these sweet girls daily by name…Gabriella, Giovanna, Leticia, Carla, Aleini, Nadialie. Deborah, Isabella.
for more recent pictures check out the pictures and videos page
Wake up to sunshine
Two hours to…
Feed girls
Pack lunches
Gather snacks
Scrounge warm layers
Fill thermos with hot chocolate
Find sleds
Hit the road
Two hours to…
Drive up to Mt Hood’
Pile on the layers
Hike to the hill
One glorious hour of…
Sled rides
Throwing snowballs
Watching spectacular crashes
Enjoying the beauty of the day
Before…
Samara was “fwozen”
Noelle was bleeding (and screaming) from a rogue sled accident
Samara had to go potty
Noelle was hungry
So…
We hauled everyone back to the car
Strapped crying kids into seatbelts
Filled sippy cups with diluted hot chocolate
Rubbed cold toes and hands
Handed out blankies and
Sighed as tuckered out little girls fell into sweet sleep
Two hours…
To drive home
One hour…
To clean up and put everything away
Memories…
That will last forever
I love this stuff
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