zooooooooooooooooom

and there july went.
wow.
what a month.

as it began, we played mini-golf with great grandma and a berry-bringing, story-telling uncle...




SUCH a gift it is to have time, especially between those fresh-new to the world and those whose souls are worn from the work of a life's walk...

then it was on to fireworks & black swans, and a jaunt to the airport to retrieve our precious texan aunt. on our way home, we dropped off dough and prayer posters at the global orphan project, an adventure that quickly became one of the highlights of said aunt's trip (more on that later). then she and i headed eastward for a great girls gathering. while we were gone, our always-friendly-helpful father-of-five neighbor man went missing. we are so very very thankful that he has returned home, after almost 3 weeks gone, and is doing well. in the meantime, amid waiting, wondering, hoping, praying, bringing muffins... our family's summer kept right on bull-dozing through the month with 3 full weekends in iowa, celebrating our matriarch's 90th, driving a few hours to one wedding, hosting a jungle of a baby shower, one full week of vbs back at home catapulting into a week at family camp back in iowa, a weekend on the lake with more fun relations, and a partridge in a pear tree. whoosh........ oh, and i became licensed to teach simply music, doing the vast majority of my online training also in july somewhere between the laundry that i surely didn't keep up on, and the creative cooking that we all know was only in my dreams.

so there has NOT been a lot of open space in my mind lately, clearly.
though i was CERTAIN that i had blogged about our glorious global orphan office visit, but i must've dreamed it.

it was so. incredibly. cool. we got to meet several more of the global orphan folks who do tons of leg work and hug work with and for the kids. my kids got their picture taken (which went on the GO blog here!) with Trace and Adrien holding the prayer-love-hope banners that we made at our event on June 19th. Adrien took the banners to Haiti the VERY next day, and delivered them to the children that weekend! then a gal who was on that trip contacted us and sent this picture of the kids with the banners we made. she said they used them to help the kids learn more English words... just look at all those cute little croc feet! (you can click on the pic to zoom)

hopeful. hearts. HUGE joy to be a little bitty part of it!