If I could live anywhere it would be the beach

This is what I'm loving right now. 

So I thought it was the best way to start this blog.

Jose's cousin, and uncle blessed us by lending us their car

and beach house for a couple days.

It is winter and so there were literally 3 people at the beach with us. 

Locals who were not there to play.

   

 But we played and we froze 

we collected a ton of seashells 

walked up and down the beach 

and watched crabs roll balls of dirt

It was lovely and peaceful. 

kind of like this 

I really love the beach. If Jose and I ever retire I want to live there. If we don't I'm believing my mansion in heaven is built beside the crystal sea. (yes I think there is a beach in heaven. God made a lot of them on earth so he must love them at least as much as I do)  

It was a nice break from the rest of our trip because, well, house hunting is stressful.

Especially when you have a very specific list of needs and most of the houses you see work for half of them.

There is also the fact that Peru has a slower time table. "we need to have something by monday" doesn't mean anything here. We might as well talk like the grown ups on charlie brown. 

My favorite so far was a realtor who wanted to show us a 2 bedroom house that was about $1000 more than we want to pay because it has a big yard. Jose told her no several times and finally spelled out that we need enough room for 5 (well 6 soon) people.

Tomorrow we are looking at a few more houses then making a decision. If we don't find the perfect thing we have at least found a good temporary place. So please keep us in prayer for that.

Another prayer request is for me and the baby. We had a chance to see the dr here in Piura. 

He is an old family friend and I'm really happy to have such a great dr to work with here.

During my exam he did an ultrasound and found that I don't have very much amniotic fluid. 

It's something that can fix it itself and there are a few things we are doing to help. 

I am drinking a ton of water, not lifting heavy things and trying to rest. (hahahahahaha, rest is not easy when you are a mom, wife and missionary who is moving in a month.) Like I said I'm trying.

After I found out I waited a few days to tell other people because Jose and I wanted to just pray. We did and we have peace that this baby is going to live. We are still asking everyone to pray that my body will produce the amniotic fluid, and that we would be able to do everything we need to in the next month while mommy is on light duty. We won't hear anything else about the baby until next month so for now no news is good news.

Lots of prayer requests this week/month.

Thank you so much for lifting us up in prayer!

I will leave you with this

a boat driving down the street. 

I wish I had a boat car...not really

...and then we slept with chickens on a bus

Our great adventure to Ecuador was one of those things where you have a basic idea of the plan and a few ideas of how it will come together. But in the end it's really not much like you thought it would be at all.

We started out our trip by going to Piura. Jose has family there and we have connected with a Missionary there too. Our main purpose was to really just visit and see what it's like there. Piura is a region but there is also a city called Piura. That is where we went. After living in a big city it's easy to forget that Peru is a developing country. In Lima we have many modern conveniences that are similar to America. Fast food, better roads, etc.. There are still dirt roads in many parts of Piura.

(houses outside the city of Piura)
We still aren't sure if the city of Piura is where we will end up or if we will be going to another area. Jose's family was telling us about an area close by that is full of witch doctors. There are several parts of the region that don't have even one church. The word of God is so needed there. It's hard to know where to start.

After we spent a few days in Piura, Jose's dad wanted to go to Mancora. There is a famous beach there and people come from all over the world to surf. We stayed there a couple days and really just got to relax. Which was nice. It's amazing how hard it can be to relax when your not used to it. But once we did it was heaven. The boys loved playing on the beach chasing waves and then running away from them. Collecting rocks and seashells. One day I want to live on the beach.


After our mini-cation we took an 8 hour bus trip to Ecuador. The trip up was fairly uneventful. In Ecuador Jose and Victor attended a conference in the evenings. Saturday we went to the market and walked around. I'm noticing that if you want to experience the real culture of the towns here you go to the market.
 

Sunday night we took a bus back to Piura. The bus left at 8pm and I was feeling under the weather. I knew we were going to cross the border around 2 am and I needed to be able to get off the bus and walk up to the window with Jose so I was trying to rest. After we were on the bus for awhile something woke me up. It sounded like...a chicken? no, several chickens. And it was. A lady with a cage full of chickens got on the bus at the second stop and stayed on all the way to Piura. I'm a light sleeper. When I'm sick I'm a very light sleeper. So every time I would start to drift off one of those chickens would screech and all the rest would start to chatter at each other. Then the lady who brought them would "sh-sh-sh-sh" as if they were a fussing child. It was ridiculous.
Once we go to the border we found out that the system was shut down and we had to wait for 1 hour for them to turn it on. I was feeling so bad at this point that Jose told me to take a Dramamine. If I had ever been wild I don't think I would have gotten too much into drinking and drugs because I'm a very cheap drunk when it comes to meds. One Dramamine and I can barely stand up. Within 30 minutes I can pretty much fall asleep wherever I am. So, I waited awhile and took it at about 2:45. There I am standing leaning against my husband in line to get my passport stamped and slurring my words, trying not to fall asleep until we get in the bus. When I realize, I have to do this again in an hour when we get to the border crossing into Peru. Thankfully Jose was able to do it by himself. I was in a Dramamine induced coma by that time.

From Piura we took another bus which was much nicer and more comfortable to get home. The trip was Monday night-Tuesday morning.

Now we have 90ish days to get our visas or leave the country again. Please pray that God would provide the finances for the visas. The trip we took was an adventure, just not something I want to be doing every 3 months.  Thank you all for keeping us in prayer while we were traveling. We saw the hand of God in many ways.

The Chinese Starfish

Friday morning we woke up early packed up the kids in the car and drove down to Galveston. We met up with my parents and spent a large part of the day at the beach

My dad, Jose and Logan spent most of their time building sand castles,

digging holes and filling them with water

My mom and Timothy spent most of their time in the water

(Thank God my mom was willing to do that because I was getting worn out with all that in and out stuff)

Timothy is terrified of showers but his favorite thing to do in the ocean is sit (in someones lap) and let the waves wash over him and push him back

Funny kid

Logan filled those buckets with water hundreds of times but every time he got back to the hole Poppy filled the water had seeped back into the sand

It didn't matter though he still had fun

I took 200 pictures so I'm only in about 3 of them.

We went for a walk in the ocean to try out Timothy's game.

It was really windy and started raining shortly after we took this picture

about 2 seconds after this was taken a wave knocked us over

We had a lot of fun

Friday night my grandma, sister, brother and brother in law all joined us for a cook out and mosquito buffet.

My dad made amazing chicken and corn on the cob.

We enjoyed it greatly and the mosquitos enjoyed us greatly.

("off" is an urban legend)

Saturday we went on a beachcombing adventure with some "Master Naturalists"

 (I will share more on that at the bottom of this post)

We forgot to wear sunscreen

I'm sunburned but you would never know to look at me.

 When I was born I left all my skin pigment in the womb for my sister and brother to enjoy.

After all the running around we did we thought it would be fun to ride the ferry...

Everyone else in Galveston had the same idea so we waited in line for about 3 hours both ways 

We took naps

After the ferry ride we drove to Kemah and ate at The Brick Oven Pizzeria  

This picture cracks me up

This one too

Then we walked down the Kemah boardwalk to the fairgrounds to ride the train

since my boys love trains

I love these pictures of Timothy

Riding the train!

It was a great weekend and I'm glad my family could all make it.

AND NOW FOR THE STORY OF THE CHINESE STARFISH

I mentioned earlier that we went beach combing on Saturday Morning

Before we left we heard a short lecture about the different types of things we might find on the beach 

and a little history about the beach then we all headed over to find some treasures. 

Logan and I were walking around together. Logan thought the idea was to collect every single seashell on the beach and picked up probably 30 clam shells and at least 2 dead crabs. 

Jose was walking with Timothy and came to find us. As he was walking he noticed something purple slightly buried in the sand. He picked it up and it was a starfish! 

When we all gathered up to show the naturalists what we found they were all so impressed with the starfish, one of them thought we should donate it to them and one of them said we should keep it. My dad grabbed it rinsed it off in the ocean and stuck it in his pocket.

When we got back to camp he was telling my sister the story about the starfish and pulled it out of his pocket to show her. She turned it upside down and said this says china on the bottom.

I was standing a little ways away so all I heard was "No way! Your kidding me!" 

The starfish was rubber and had CHINA stamped on the bottom. 

It was caked in sand so until my dad washed it in the ocean you couldn't see the word on the bottom. 

Every one of those naturalists handled it and not one of them thought it could be fake.

I wish we had donated it

:p

  Next time I go I think I will take a plastic seahorse and see how they react 

:-D 

(My favorite picture of the whole trip)

HAPPY SUMMER! 

Pictures!

I wanted to put up a few pictures for everyone to enjoy :)

our internet connection is very slow so this is only a fraction of the pics we took on the first day.

.

On the way to Peru

We are so excited! (this is toward the end of the trip so mommy was tired)

a roundabout in Miraflores

The Pacific Ocean there are mountains too but it's really foggy so you can't see them

We are up pretty high in a shopping center and this is a walkway to get down to the ocean

So Beautiful

                                               

There are lots of surfers even though it's pretty cold here. Logan really wanted to surf. I told him he's has to wait until he is at least 10. Later that day he said "Mommy! I'm 10 now!" lol

This is a playground close to the shopping center we went to. If you look closely on the left you can see the mountains and the ocean

Logan loves it here (so do I)