Family Update: Fun trip home!

We have been back in Nicaragua for a few weeks now, but we wanted to share a little family update from our travels back to the U.S.  We went home to Miami for Christmas….it was so much fun to be home at Mema’s house!  It is such a blessing for our kids to get to be with all of their cousins who we really really miss all your round…and for Krista and I to see my siblings and their spouses whom we love dearly and miss year round too…plus my momma is my hero…so much fun!!!

We had so much fun together but I forgot to take pictures.  You would think with a house full of 10 kids there would be lots of fights and craziness, but it wasn’t that way.  Ok well maybe there was lots of craziness, but everyone just has so much fun together, non stop football and nerf guns, swimming in the the pool in winter, candy cane hunts, Mema’s awesome cooking made for soooo many sweet times together.  It was awesome!

We had a awesome “Noche Buena” at Aunt Reina and Uncle Matt’s house, and then Christmas morning at Mema’s, and then more Christmas a couple days later with Tia and Tio when they drove down for the New Year with their gang.  Check it out, the girls got these crazy little birds that hatch out of an egg!  Hatchables, I think?!?  Hatch-a-really-cool-invention is what I call them!  Again I am missing too many pictures.  But, God blessed us with an incredible Christmas time!

Juju lost a tooth on Christmas Eve….so the tooth fairy and Santa combined LOL!

We had a chance to drive through Florida and visit friends along the way.  We are so thankful to friends and family who open their doors to us to crash in guest rooms and on couches, visit with us, bless us, pray for us and give us a great time while home!

On the West Coast you get to go to the beach in Winter and we got to go out on a boat and visit with great friends!  And we found sooo many beautiful shells too, incredible.  We also stopped through Celebration, FL to visit friends who had recently visited Nicaragua from Illuminate Church.  We even saw snow in downtown Celebration that night! (ok it was fake hahaha, but so cool!)  Not only that, we got to go to Disney World!  It was soooo much fun and we are very very very thankful for that blessing!  We also ate lots of Chick-Fil-A along the way thanks to friends there too…such a blessing!  Praise Jesus!

We made it up to Tallahassee and stayed with Aunt Kris (who our kids all call Aunt Grammies).  She took great care of us, as she always does.  Guess who else we got to see?  Andrew and Angel from Casa Robles! (You may remember this story about the Cloud family and the boys).  This was definitely a highlight of our trip!  Seeing them doing so well and having dinner with the Clouds and their family was great, it was wild to speak to them in English!  We also took the boys out for the day to visit Wakeenah where Krista was born.  They got to see where the Buzbees used to live and meet Don Michael’s family.  Another special moment, was when we got there.  We brought fresh treats from Mama Angelica that she packed up special for them, and notes from all the other boys.  Angel snuck away to read his letters, Andrew enjoyed the Nica food!  LOL.  They are doing well…so fun to see them!  Please keep on praying for both of them.

Our home church Christ Journey Church in Miami is such a blessing to us as well, and takes such good care of us!  We had fun at the church sharing some testimonies from Nicaragua, meeting with some of the youth from a team coming down in the Spring, we loved being home for the Christmas Eve service, and even more we loved being welcomed into friends homes, being prayed for, being loved on and having a great time!  Speaking of having a great time, some dear friends got us tickets to the Orange bowl!  It was a tough loss for The U,  but it was really cool to take Mason to a big bowl game!  God is good to us and the support from Christ Journey into our lives and ministry here is so incredible!  We love you all and look forward to seeing some of you soon!

This last picture is what I woke up to on our wall in our bedroom after the first night back home in Nicaragua.  After such a blessed, refreshing and fulfilling time in Miami, Jesus woke me up with this.  We have a purpose, we have a fulfilled life, and it is all wrapped up in this cross.  It is everything for us.  Amen.

Thank you for keeping up with us!

Love, Chris & Krista and our gang.