2020

There are some days, weeks, months, years when you feel like you have nothing to show for your hard work. And then there are months like June of 2019 when you put an entire second story on your house and all of that hard work suddenly becomes visible! This was our house in APRIL... just one story, pouring cement footers and creating a front entryway. And MAY... tearing out the old trusses and setting floor joists so we could put on a second story! During the first week of JUNE we put on the floor for the second story and Randy put in a staircase and started building walls! On June 13, we invited friends and family over to raise the exterior walls. (Thanks Tim, Darlene, Eric, and Dad!) And then we let our nieces put up the interior ones. (Thanks girls!) A week later the new trusses were delivered... (Thanks David!) And in a matter of 3 days we had all of them set in place too! (Thanks Dad!) Randy then framed out the bathroom (I can't be...

May was a really incredible month for us, filled with other peoples' overwhelming generosity. But before I fill you in on that, let me rewind a bit to last December. In December, Randy and I went to San Felipe. Our primary motivation was to spend Christmas with the kids at the orphanage. But we had a very important secondary motivation: to go to DIF (children's services) to inquire about adoption. While living at Sonshine Hacienda, Randy and I obviously grew very attached to the children. Over 40 kids were part of our lives while we lived in San Felipe. Some for just a few days. Others were there at the children's home when we first visited in 2016, and continue to live there today. They all made a lasting impact on us, but we connected with three boys in particular. So it was those three brothers that we asked about when we went to DIF (pronounced Deef). We were met with a familiar face when we arrived at the offices -- a woman we had worked with on numerous occas...

Of all the states we were planning to travel to in our 4 months of wandering, South Dakota was the only one I had never been to. So obviously I was most excited about this one! I had always wanted to see Mt Rushmore, and even though I've heard people say it is disappointing, I didn't care. It was still tops on my bucket list! After visiting Devil's Tower, Wyoming, we once again started heading east, making the short drive to South Dakota. We stopped at the rest stop/visitor's center on the border of the two states and asked for a recommendation of an RV park. The woman suggested we go to Wyatt's Hideaway in her hometown of Belle Fourche (pronounced "bell foosh"). We had already been to Belle Fourche -- it was the geologic center of the United States that we had passed through earlier in the day -- but we were all about taking recommendations from locals, so back to the center we went! And we were so glad we did. The plan had only been to spend o...

Randy and I got up early one morning, leaving Van in bed at Robert and Suzanne's house, and went into the city of Boise. We met up with some former employee's of Randy's and delighted in catching up with them over breakfast. It was exciting to see them making Boise their home -- finding a sense of place where they could become who they were created to be. When they had to head in to work, Randy and I walked downtown Boise, checking out the courthouse, the Basque district, local coffee shops and more. It was fun to be a tourist again and was the momentum we needed for the next leg of our adventure. Since we'd picked him up, Van regularly asked if we were going to see Niagra Falls. And each time we reminded him that Niagra Falls was on the complete other side of the United States, and that while we were going pretty far east, we weren't going that far. We'd been together for 3 weeks by now, and Van wasn't giving up. Randy and I were starting to wish we...

If you’ve never taken a road trip with a 10-year-old boy, here is my depiction: Rand : “Hey Van, look, a volcano!” Van : “Cool.” Rand : “Hey Van, look, a buffalo!” Van : “Cool.” Rand : “Hey Van, look…” Van : “What’s for dinner?” It has taken me a few states to get used to this. Rand and I imagined Van being mesmorized by literally everything that passed our windows. Lassen volcano, a Bengal tiger, the ocean... but we can’t even get him to look out the window! The couple of times we’ve tried to force him to he’s simply fallen asleep (this kid can nap for hours!). To be honest, I was pretty disappointed at first. I had the expectation that experiencing this trip through his eyes would be a new way of seeing the world, with child-like wonder. But he’d rather read a zombie book for the third time than marvel at the random waterfalls along the highway. Disappointment was my attitude going into our trip north to Mt. Rainier in Washington state. It was recommended to us ...