The Brauns in Brazil: Visit to the Homeland....aka NJ

I have quite a few posts to catch up on since we've been traveling. The first leg of our trip was to NJ where we visited our home church and supporters and family.

Eli did great in the car, all things considered.

The first stop was him meeting his great-grandpa!

Grandpa loved Elijah and kept saying over and over how beautiful/pretty he is. Then, he would apologize for saying that about a boy and then do it again haha! So sweet! Elijah loved grandpa's slippers and sat on his lap for some pictures once he got over his initial shyness.

The next day was Elijah's birthday!

Birthday breakfast at Grammy's house....looking SO big!

There wasn't much we could think of to make his birthday special in the cold weather, but we brought him to Barnes and Noble to play with the train table

And he also loved snuggling with the stuffed animals

He fell into a super deep sleep in the car on the way to get some NJ pizza and missed the whole thing, though I'm not complaining, we got a lot more talking in :)

There's nothing like a slice of "pie" from NJ! I loved the flavors available at this mom and pop shop...buffalo chicken

eggplant parmesan,

And chicken caesar salad pizza...seriously can't beat that!

That evening we had dinner with Grammy (Elijah's great grandma), who's house we were staying at. He got spoiled with a few gifts.

And into bed he went

This huge bear was not a gift...it was just around the house. We could never fit that into our bags to go to Brazil! But he loved wrestling with it!

The next day we met a bunch of our supporters and friends from NJ for lunch at Wegmans. We had a nice turn out...we were 15 people all together. It was a fun, encouraging time, but forgot to get a picture.

Then, we went straight to visit my lifelong friend, Katie, and her family for the evening.

We slept there since it is close to our home church where we spoke the next morning. We were so blessed to have 15 minutes to share about what we've been up to, but it's still so hard to fit it all in! We were very encouraged to see old friends and to know people are keeping up with us and praying for us from even so far away.

Last stop was a family get together at Grammy's house Sunday afternoon. They were all so thoughtful and celebrated Elijah's birthday while they were at it.

Elijah did not get the concept of blowing out the candle. Instead he started touching the icing and then even trying to touch the flame! He LOVED the frosting on his cupcake and he started reaching across the table and touching putting his fingers in and licking every cupcake he could get at :)

Part of the Ciotta clan

We had a wonderful, whirlwind of a time in NJ and were so glad we were able to visit with so many people in such a short time. From NJ we headed down to Virginia for Thanksgiving. A post on that coming soon!