Branson SP Week #1

So many of you who read my blog are probably very aware of the complete miracle it is that this blog title is referring to Branson. I will be writing an entire blog dedicated to our crazy journey and especially for those last six days leading up to Branson. But for now I figured I would share our first week here with lovely instagram pics. :)

Couple things:
-Our staff team is 25 adults & 9 children (ranging from 4 mths-14 yrs old)
-Majority of the team are ppl we joined staff with LAST summer...it's fun!
-5 of the staff are considered "student staff". This just means they are still in college, but will be in the role of full-time staff for the summer.
-I am leading the Women's time with an intern from OSU named Courtni
- Teddy is leading Adventure Days with an intern from UT named Grayson
-I am leading my own small group. My students consist of a girl from SFA, LSU, and UofH (grad)
-Teddy is leading a small group with Brett Marcos and will have 3 guys in their group.
-We live in a hotel for these 7 weeks...it's called The Honeysuckle Inn. It's wonderful!
-It has already been wayyyy hotter than usual here. I think we are in for a pretty hot summer.
-It's sad driving up the main strip and seeing all the tornado damage. There are many things that haven't been cleaned up or rebuilt.

Now for pictures. As much as I would love to get this dumb blog to align the pics in order, I can't make it work right some times. So...just enjoy these out of order pics that are all over the blog! 

Starting our 7 1/2 hr drive from Fort Worth

So thrilled to spend the summer with Kimbo! :)

Wednesday we had a staff womens morning at the beach hanging out!

After the beach the 3 of us went to get pedi's!

Tunnel's on the way to Branson!

Staff lunch on the Branson Belle Showboat. Lunch & a show! (Sunday)

Laney Bollens. People often think she is my own child. I'm ok with that. :)

Teddy and I during our first "creative rendezvous" planned by the staff guys for the staff women!

The setup for our creative rendezvous. They made dinner for us & served us well! 

 I have tons of pictures of all the fun we are having. We do have staff meetings in the mix of all this fun stuff, but I don't take pictures of that. :) Tomorrow we have a day to set up the rest of the hotel rooms for our students. Putting together bunk beds and cleaning things up. Students arrive on Tuesday! We will have a CRAZY busy week with orientation/job training (for students)/get to know you activities.

I have said it 159,053 times that I love summer projects...but holy moly do I LOVE summer projects. What a blessing to get to experience this with my sweet husband. This will be our first experience with ministry TOGETHER. I'm pumped to see how the Lord uses this summer in our personal walk with God, with our students, and our marriage. Check back often to get more updates!

-Kelli

Our HOME tour!

Our house is coming together slowly but surely. Slowly is emphasized. :)

Here's a walk through just so you can see the space!

Here is an older picture of the house. That large tree on the right producing tons of shade is no longer there. And the grass doesn't quite look like that. But we did put down seed last week & waiting for the new grass to grow. Praise the Lord for all the rain!

Living in this house has had it's ups and downs. But, we have seen the Lord providing too. As you know, when you move into a new place you often have to pay rent x's 2 for your first month. One payment for rent and one payment for security deposit. It's a lot of $$ to start off in a place. Plus, we've been living in an apartment no bigger than 811 sq ft...so obviously our bills will increase too. But these first 2 weeks living here we have had the a/c majority of the time due to the cooler (abnormal) temps for May. And the rain has helped us to be able to put down the seed for our grass and not use our own water (aka higher water bill) this entire time. So the lower bills will most likely even out for our first month with the extra $$ for the deposit. Pretty neat!

We are excited to make this our little home. We know we will always remember it!
-Kelli 

TINY TINY towns

We spent an afternoon here enjoying the view & praying together!

I've always grown up in a good size city. Wichita Falls had at least 100,000 ppl when I lived there until 6th grade and then Lubbock next (and still) which is getting close to 220,000 ppl. You can get anything you need here in Lubbock. I enjoy it.

BUT, this weekend Teddy and I went on a support trip to Munday, Tx. This my friends is a TINY TINY town. You know a town is small when there isn't even a Dairy Queen. We had to stay in Haskell, Tx because they had a hotel that was in business. :)

Cute Wagon @ the park!

I will say there was something I liked about it. No, there weren't many food options and we ate dairy queen two times in the span of 3 days (sick-out)--side note, I never would've thought that was gross before our Whole30 challenge. Now...BARF. There were multiple times when we both said we just didn't want to eat anything because there weren't many options for healthy stuff. So back to what I was saying, it's a slower pace of life. We went to church in Munday that was right off the main road, but essentially in the middle of a field. You opened your windows and it was SILENT. It was sooo strange. I was trying to explain to Teddy how silence at times can be deafening because that was one of those moments. But it seemed so simple. Still. Peaceful. And I kind of liked it.

Do I like it enough to say lets move outside of Lubbock to the country and work within the city limits...no. I'm not there. But it was nice for a weekend.

This is from the church parking lot. PRETTY.

Also, we went to church at Believers Chapel this morning. We were invited by some of our new friends from that community and it was great. It's a small country type church but you can tell they were all a huge family. Church started at 10:30 and the sermon was started until 12:00pm. I knew I should've packed a snack (well...stop at a convenient store I suppose) He spoke for 30 mins, so we attended a 2 hour church service. We literally sang 7 worship songs in a row and I had to sit down around song 5. :) But it was a good experience! We feel like we have a new little city to love on us. We know we will have more trips back to this small community. We felt so cared for & found so many people who get the gospel and celebrate the career choice we have made! I'm looking forward to getting to know these sweet people over the years!


I have said this time and time again but it's truly amazing the journey God has taken us while raising support. Never would've imagined spending a weekend in Haskell/Munday with 10 new potential partners in ministry!

I still have a story about a Craigslist support I need to document too! One of the coolest stories through our support raising journey. I need to write it down so I will always remember God's ridiculous ways! :)

-Kelli

Our first home!

In college I had decided that I wanted to wait to live in a home with my husband. And luckily that plan panned out for me. I lived in the dorms when I was a freshman then proceeded to live in apartments from 2005 til June 2011. I couldn't WAIT to move into a HOUSE!

Our plan was to move into a place in July. But, I had been looking for houses since we started raising support back in August. :) We knew we were going to move into a home once we finished raising our support, so why not start looking 9 months in advance? ha.

Anyways, we had gotten to a place where we could actually consider moving into our own place and that's when it got more serious as I looked at places. Finally started making some phone calls to go look at rental properties etc. We looked at a total of 3 houses. The 1st one was a for sure NO GO. The 2nd was the one we thought we would probably move into, but they really preferred to sale and had some buyers interested. The 3rd is literally down the street from the 2nd that we loved, and ended up having a better floor plan & $25/m cheaper rent. So within a week of starting to make phone calls we were done with our house search.

It's a 3 bedroom/1 bath, 1300 sq ft. Huge back/front yard, great front porch, close to Texas Tech!

We moved in the last weekend of April and enjoying having a home at this point. Sure, we've had a handful of problems, but they have been slowly but surely getting fixed. We have a brand new dishwasher sitting in our living room right now...ha! We have been working on getting settled. Our kitchen is organized at this point and our living room has a few decorative things taken care of. Our 3 bedrooms are a disaster zone still. We are waiting on the rest of our bedroom furniture from Fort Worth before things can really be complete. One room will be an office with a potential twin bed and the other will be a full guest room. COME VISIT! :)

Pictures will come eventually!
We can't wait to have plenty of people come through the door of our home. We love hosting, but haven't really been able to do that as much due to smaller apartments.

-Kelli

Whole 30 challenge COMPLETE

Well, Tuesday we completed our very first Whole30 challenge. Holy moly was it a ride. I wanted to document more, but life got the best of us (aka moved/appointments/support raising etc) and now we are done. Whoops.

I would say that I learned quite a bit about my eating habits and tendencies. I could tell when I was emotional it triggers my desire for a coke or ice cream. Now, I can fight against that. I don't think I understand the control that food had on my life. Now I feel like I have more control over what I allow to land on my plate in front of me. Plus, more self control on what I allow myself to eat. I'm excited!

I would recommend EVERYONE to try it. I will say that it was darn expensive. You don't really eat out so it helps to balance out some of a budget, but there would be NO WAY financially we could do this EXACT diet time and time again. We are in it for a lifestyle change and learning more about food, I believe we found success in that.

Now its time to figure out what our post Whole30 life will look like. That's hard to know currently. So far for lunch's I've had a medium size caeser salad (light on the dressing). Last night we did go eat at Chilis as a celebration of accomplishment. We didn't go overboard while eating. Teddy would tell you that he probably ate a little too much, but I walked away with basically an entire meal & didn't eat my piece of garlic/butter toast...SELF CONTROL. It's truly a learning process.

On our final weigh in after the 30 days:
Teddy lost 16.8 lbs
Kelli lost 13.8 lbs. 

We didn't do it for the weight loss, but boy is it fun reading those results. It's motivating too, knowing that food truly does make a difference in our bodies. I mean it's a no brainer, I know...but still to know that just by changing the way you eat and not working out ONCE during those 30 days can result in weight loss like that. Just goes to show what junk we were eating. We should start working out and eating better, we would obviously continue to see results.

Oh and for the record: I like strawberries in smoothies now. I used to not like them in any form. But I could go for a smoothie with strawberries at any moment now. :) We also grew to love coconut milk, but already purchased almond milk and will make our transition back to just almond milk again (what we were doing before whole30). We had gluten free waffles tonight at home with turkey bacon. I'm interested in testing out this gluten free business. Plus, making the switched to eating mostly paleo.

I think be biggest change is the way I have felt. I will say that the first 2 weeks I still felt pretty darn tired throughout the day. Many people talk about feeling more energy and such. That didn't hit me until about 3 1/2 weeks in. I noticed I could do more throughout a day and not feel so tired by the end of it all. Also, before starting whole30 I had my fair share of stomach issues. Just not feeling well a lot. But through this whole process, I have felt great. I believe that is one of the HUGE factors in this change that I want to continue to embark on. It is more expensive to eat healthy, but I would take that over going back to the ER again due to pain and having to pay at $1500 bill. My body needed a wake up call and that is exactly what it got during the month of April.

If you have any questions about it, let me know. We are pretty excited about it all. I can point you to TONS of resources that I've discovered through this process. It's times like these that I'm THRILLED to have the world wide web. Free free free stuff everywhere. Loads of recipes from different people (just like us) documenting their journey.

Hop in and try it. You will LOVE the results mentally, emotionally, and physically!
-Kelli

p.s. If you have no idea what I'm talking about look to your left. There is an option to read my blogs from April. Head there and you will understand more! :)