And finally, just a few days before we left, we celebrated my nephew’s 4th birthday. It deserved a post in itself.

Per Drew’s request, his dad made him a plane pizza!  About eight more homemade pizzas were made for the rest of us, and they were delicious.

Keri made Drew a pudding & Oreo “dirt cake” in the back of a huge dump truck. Such a great idea that we might have come up with together? Or perhaps I was just next to her and have subconsciously taken some credit for it?

He used a shovel to share with everyone…

…and snag a bonus bite.

While opening presents, his older sister had to explain her lovely present. It was definitely not for opening, but for dancing or super-hero-running, like this:

And that was America in photos, baby!

For our last week in the States, we overlapped with my sister & her family while they were back from Uganda. It had been well over three years since we had seen everyone, so there was plenty of fun to be had!

It was really fun to see my nieces & nephews at grandma & grandpa’s house, in many ways living out my childhood at my grandparents, while they played dress up and bingo!

Gee, some kids are so cooperative for photos 🙂

We went out one very, very cold night for a local world fair. I remember laughing a lot and being very truly cold.

The best five-year-old hula hooper I’ve seen!

For the kids’ Christmas presents from us, we took them to a bookshop to each pick out a book. It was a lot of fun, and really pretty interesting to see what books attracted each personality. My favorite was the dictionary.

We also took a trip around downtown Little Rock on the trolley, which I absolutely loved. It’s a fun experience to have the touristy perspective of discovering your hometown.

We also passed Heifer, where they had Burma’s flag flying high! We were super excited.

We also bowled and celebrated some wins!

We were so thankful to even have a couple days to enjoy together!

I wanted to post a few last photos to capture all the fun we had stateside!

First, a couple more photos I discovered from the oh-so-beautiful Smoky Mountains.

And our last visit to the Spurlocks in Fayetteville, which included celebrating the twins’ 35th!

There is so much to love about this photo!

I got to hold Fin! At least until her mom came around the corner 🙂

While snowed in, we made up & played the ultimate game of Ticket to Ride, complete with both the Europe & Asia boards and seven people.

Let me just start by saying that this post isn’t about Stephen, whom I love. The idea of a “soul mate” was never in my vocabulary as we dated & married.

It was actually a few months after we were married, when I started working at The Spero Project.  I was working with Brad & Kim Bandy, who had just recently started a non-profit in Oklahoma City. They were working with resettled refugees, as well as other amazing social justice ventures, and I interviewed with them for a administrative role. I was told it would be ten hours a week.

We were pretty poor at the time, and this wasn’t ideal. However, it seemed like a great fit & a great opportunity, so I took it. I worked daily with Kim, who just told me what to do as she thought of it.

About two weeks in, she said this was turning out to be bigger than she imagined; could I work twenty hours a week?

…Fastforward two weeks after that, and I was full-time. I was sort of in administration, and I was sort of just Kim’s sidekick to do whatever she needed.

And just a few weeks after that, Brad declared us soul mates.

We got along great. We brainstormed beautifully; we could finish sentences and read each others ideas. I can honestly say it has never been so easy to communicate with anyone else I’ve met.

I can also say that we are oddly similar. We started to discover all the ways we just think the same, and to be honest, it made our work even easier. You can be really efficient with your time if you don’t have to finish sentences.

It was a good year.

And then we moved to the Thai-Burma border, and I discovered what it’s like to work with people who aren’t your soul mates.

We still come back to visit their little family of four when we can, and we’re here this week participating in Marked, one of Spero’s most amazing events. Due to the snow and ice that has repeatedly hit us throughout our time in the States, we were able to participate in the Collective before Marked, but the actual event was postponed.

That left us bundled up in the living room last night with half of the Spero staff playing Loaded Questions over soup.

Stephen’s pulled question was: What is your biggest phobia or fear? 

I wrote down belly buttons first, but marked that off, because of course he would know it was me. He knows me well enough to know this fear, and its not exactly a commonplace phobia. I decided on unfinished books, which also can haunt me for years.

The person next to him was reading the answers out loud, and amidst the dogs, heights, and even unfinished books–he read out belly buttons. 

What?!

Of course Stephen gave me that one, thinking no one else in the world has that fear, let alone this room of seven people.

And this, after working with my soul mate for a year and knowing probably way too much about our similarities, was the first time we learned we have the same phobia. And that neither of us have ever met someone with the same phobia. {But it does exist, mind you: omphalophobia.}

Because I’m telling you, we are weirdly similar.

And I’m just going to leave it at that, while I sit here with my mind blown.

She was the best person to work for, and there are so many days I wish that Spero would go international or we would go local.  For now, we’re still friends, we’ll call ourselves soul mates, and Stephen & I are both really hoping we can work with Brad & Kim in some capacity again someday!

And last, a few snapshots that needn’t be left behind.

A date night out to a delicious local restaurant!

Enjoying a used bookstore & coffee.

We had dinner out with {most} of our home church group in Little Rock! We love all the people and personalities represented here.

We have spent our fair amount of time in Target, which we love. And I discovered America’s newest genius item: Olives to Go!

We took a trip out to Tennessee to visit the mountains with Stephen’s parents and visit friends! We were snowed in a few days, and it made for an all around cozy week of fires, hot drinks and conversation.

And this is one of my favorite pictures of Stephen to date 🙂

Now that {most} of Stephen’s family is in Fayetteville and with kiddos, we traveled up there to spend some time with them!

We all showed up to cheer Gabe on for his Upward basketball game!

There are a lot of great things about this photo, so please note all faces, passionate finger pointing, and nose picking.

Our nephew asked if he could ride with us after church one Sunday, and before we had left the parking lot, he asked, “What if y’all had kids?” He then recommended we have twins: a boy named JoJo Allen and a girl named Reagan Compton. He said they would be fun for us to play with when we get bored.
I feel like this was really thought through; or perhaps he was a send-in?!  🙂

As part of our Christmas gift from Stephen’s siblings, they sent us to Razorback basketball game! It was SO much fun to call the Hogs! And they are having a good season and did amazing.

Keeping up while Stateside is laughable. The sheer pace of this country is a force to be reckoned with, in addition to our lives here as we try to seize every moment with every person we see in every city we visit.

I’ll just go ahead and say that we fail at this: we miss milestones, even while we are here. Some days we are tired, and I know we miss out on actually being present. Other days we are just overwhelmed, and I know I don’t communicate well or I don’t cherish the person in front of me that I haven’t seen in ages.

We’re trying. Every time we’re trying to sort this out more and more: how to live there and live here, to just live well and to be thankful for the opportunity to do so.

This has been my mantra while we are here: this is America, baby! Be thankful.

So without further adieu, here is part 1, where we spent quite a bit of time with my family after my dad’s epic 60th birthday party.

First, we had Green Day. This is exactly what it sounds like: a day for all of us to wear green wherever we went.

This included a trip to my brother-in-law & niece’s school to visit. Ignore the fact that we are blurry since we’re just happy to be holding nieces and nephews!

You can also ignore the fact that two of us have our eyes closed here.

We always play some games, and unfortunately the Spurlocks & Helmicks always ended up at the losers table for Euchre.

We went to All Aboard, which is one of my favorite restaurants in Little Rock. There is something very magical about having your food delivered to your table by train.

We took a climb up Pinnacle with nine adults taking turns carrying five children.

We did a triple date night, with the two littlest babes joining us. 

We sang Roar! and obviously these two are the best roarers!

While a large percentage of us were on the same continent, we attempted some family photos.

This is dad’s favorite pose.

Nearly five years ago, we fell in love with a Karen family in Oklahoma City. We met them through my first job, when I took five of them to the hospital for shots and ended up losing my car in the parking deck. All six of us trekked all the way to the top and then all the way back down, where we had come out of the building just one curve away from my car. I’m super-organized like that. And then we spent more time with them in my next job, where we started a little crafting co-op and spent time sewing and embroidering a few times a week. Stephen & I learned some Karen from them, and we went on adventures together.  We taught them games and new words and little pieces of American culture.Now, we come back to visit them when we can. We still play games and laugh. They have assimilated into American culture incredibly. Their English is absolutely unbelievable; they can drive and balance six jobs between four working adults. Now they teach us new things in American culture. The oldest, Thay, is in her first year of university and Htoo will graduate high school in just a few months.  Aye is amazing at taekwondo and is as tall as his dad; both he & Htoo are amazing at photography and love their local youth group. Moo is an honor-roll third grader with more spunk that I know how to describe.

Just this week we celebrated Thay getting her citizenship just a few weeks ago. Her citizenship!  This is incredible to me, as we live day-in and day-out with so many struggling to officially exist: papers are more valuable than I could describe. And she is now a citizen of the United States!

It’s amazing to see what they have accomplished and how well they are doing here. They are truly thriving, and it’s really, really beautiful. While we are here in Oklahoma, we’ve been visiting them when we can. We have spent a few afternoons over games of Jenga and Life; we laughed at old photos of us together and painted pictures. And Stephen taught them slow-motion video on their iPhone 6, of course.

And now, I can at least brokenly communicate with the mother, War Gay, in Karen–which makes our time there just so much more fun. I’m still working on understanding the father, Law Del Moo–the fast, low voices are really difficult for me. Really, we just thoroughly enjoyed our time with them this trip. We loved laughing with them and hearing them saying that things were “so not cool.” Because they are so cool now, and it’s just so fun to see! As we left one afternoon, War Gay put some money in my hand and insisted it was for the Karen shirts we had brought them.  They had said they wanted to pay us back for them, so I took the money and thanked her, thinking it was a few twenties. I saw in the car that it was more than a few twenties. It was way more than we had purchased for shirts, so the next time we were there I went back to War Gay and insisted we hadn’t purchased the shirts for that much. She insisted we keep the money. She said they had all put their money together: all the kids and their father and the family budget. They wanted to help us: the kids around us, to feed them and play with them. They wanted to help our community. I thanked War Gay, and then turned to Htoo, who was standing next to us. She asked if I understand what her mom had said, and I said yes as I summarized it. And Htoo continued…”We want to give it. That was us.” Even now as I write it, tears come to my eyes, because this is the clearest picture of the Kingdom that I can fathom. I am so proud of this eighteen-year-old, who understands that that was them, and now they are here, and God is good!  These parents have raised their kids to know what they have come out of, and these kids now want to see the Kingdom come where they were and where they are.And they are willing to live in a two bedroom apartment in the not-so-picturesque side of Oklahoma City, working four jobs and learning to live life here, while they give money away to a little community on the Thai-Burma border. Because God is good. He blessed us with this friendship four years ago when we were in the same country, and they bless us every time we visit. They bless us as they learn and teach us; as they discover life here in the States and show us a fresh perspective. They bless us as they love well and love fully, and give us grace as we float in and out of their lives for just a short visit here and there.