Pardon my unacceptable excuses

I realize that I have majorly dropped the ball with the blogging thing. I have appreciated the people who have told me that they are waiting for more pictures and stories from Kayla's and my trip, because it makes me excited that people have read and care. In my free time in the last half of our time in Belgium I slept or just didn't have the umph to blog about everything, and the two weeks of travel were a whirlwind. So...

As of five days ago we have been back for a month, which is just crazy. I never thought re-acclimating would be very difficult, but really, everything else in my life has not gone as expected, so I don't know why I wasn't expecting the diving back into reality process to be more difficult. Silly me. 

In the midst of sleeping, TV bingeing, family time, friend time, decompressing, and just getting used to the reality that is the U.S.A., I have been slowly working through the 1,000+ photos that I have taken over the past four-ish months. I am so close, but other things have come to the forefront, like moving, and birthdays, and weddings, and, and, and... 

This week we have been trying to move everything out of the house Kayla and I had been living in to my parent's house, which has made my parent's house a mess. Today we have to finish the last of it, clean up my parents house, and get ready to leave to visit family in Oklahoma on Wednesday, and celebrate my brother's birthday between there somewhere. 

Guess what? Life keeps happening while you are gone for three and a half months, and when you come back it does not slow down for you to adjust to it. Or to blog about it. Though really, if I sat down to catalog my time over the past month, I have definitely had time to finish my pictures and blog, but I just haven't been ready to process everything all at once. I have been processing my time there in little snippets of shared stories with friends, family, and a church staff meeting. But other than those moments I haven't really sat down by myself to work on writing stories and lessons. It is just so vast and overwhelming at times. If I think about all of that time, sometimes I feel overwhelmingly blessed by everything that I went through and everything I learned, and sometimes I am bowled over by the hardships and things that I just had to brush off and not deal with at the moment. 

Now that I am past most of the HOLY CRAP moments of adjusting to life here and dealing with life there, I feel like I am ready to dive into processing and regurgitating mode. So I am being optimistic that you will begin seeing more posts about Belgium and beyond once we get back from the Oklahoma family extravaganza. Stay tuned.

New Mexico!!!

Happy to be back in this loveliness.

Valentines Humor

Oh Olan, so true. (And to the fam, this is proof that someone else says "crayon" like I do.)  :)

Dave Barnes classic.

More Dave Barnes goofiness.