summer celebrations!

The end of July kept us celebrating! 

On July 15, we received a call from BGFM congratulating us on becoming official missionary-appointees. We are going to be missionaries! 
It has been such a joy to see the Lord continue to open the doors for us to move to Brazil full-time. We're looking forward to what He has in store for us as we work toward that goal. 

Our good friend, Heidi, designed our prayer cards. Thanks again, Heidi! We love them. 

As if that news wasn't exciting enough, we celebrated our third anniversary on July 31st! The summertime always makes me pause and smile at God's faithfulness as I look back on the school year and past summers. It has been fun and encouraging to reflect on the ways God has grown Mark and I in our love for Him and our love for one another since we said, "I do," in Oregon three years ago. He is at work! I'm so thankful that we get to see His work close-up in marriage.



To celebrate our anniversary, we visited Santa Barbara for a weekend away. It was so beautiful! Our hotel was only 2 blocks away from the beach. We enjoyed walking the Santa Barbara Harbor and Pier.

Don't worry, it was only overcast in the morning! 

Keeping with tradition, we visited the Santa Barbara Zoo. Last year, we visited Gramado Zoo in South Brazil :)

3 years, thumbs up! 

We had a great time walking around and seeing the animals. I found it funny that nearly every animal was asleep when we visited their exhibits! We saw sleeping alligators, sleeping snow leopards, a sleeping gorilla, sleeping gibbons, sleeping macaws, sleeping meercats, and a sleeping fox. We did see awake and alert lions (ironically placed adjacent to the awake and alert giraffe exhibit). 

Mark with a sleeping cabybara. 

 Even though we visited the zoo at animal nap time, it was a great trip! We also visited the Santa Barbara Courthouse. It is a HUGE building. The old Spanish architecture was so pretty. We spent around 2 hours exploring. We made it up to the top of the bell tower to get a view of the city. It was amazing.

We accidentally found a great Brazilian place too! As we were walking around downtown, we noticed "Brazil Arts Cafe" and decided to check it out. It is a Brazilian restaurant that has a back room for capoeira classes and watching Brazilian soccer. Needless to say, we stayed awhile. We enjoyed our "Brazilian" smoothies and Mark enjoyed watching 2 different soccer games on the big screens. 

For the last part of our trip, we enjoyed the Scenic Drive around the Santa Barbara area. The route took us up into the mountains and along the coast, enjoying God's creation in the beautiful views. 

 We praise God for this time together and look forward to celebrating many more anniversaries!