Our Time in the States

We arrived back in Budapest on December 2nd. I had hoped to update this blog again while we were in the US, and definitely before now. I even made a folder of some more pics to post on here from our time in the US. It's 17 pictures, so I guess I will just post some of them.

My mom was thrilled to meet her only grandchild. She has waited many years for this.
We stayed at my church's missionary house. It was 30 minutes out in the middle of nowhere, but it was beautiful and very peaceful. Here are some pictures of 5 deer and 6 wild turkeys that were right out front. The turkeys only came 2 or 3 times, but the deer were around every morning. We were really thankful for my church and them having a place for us to stay. Even though we do stay with some people during our furlough, it's really hard on us to continually do so.

It's interesting when we go on furlough because so many people ask us if we are enjoying our vacation. We usually look at each other and laugh on the inside. Furlough is one of the most stressful parts of our ministry. It's great to see family and friends, and of course, go to Wal-Mart and get clothes and other things for much cheaper prices, but we have to cram a ton of stuff into a little bit of time and often run on fumes. We were real thankful for how well Ethan did considering that he was always having to adjust his schedule around, especially with us doing a lot of speaking in the evenings. I will do another blog entry and talk some about his time and post pics of him. I was also thankful that we didn't gain weight. During the last furlough many people wanted to meet at a restaurant, so we were usually eating out for lunches and dinners. We gained around 15-20 pounds from that (and not having time to exercise). We do enjoy going out to eat when we're in the States, but not everyday, and especially not multiple times a day. This time, there were quite a few people who invited us to their homes for a meal. One family even cooked a meal and brought it out to the mission house for us to all eat. I still can't believe that they went through so much trouble.