Home Leave: 58 Days, 58 photos

To be honest, I am still heart broken over Brazil.  Which makes vacation hard. We were out of the country for two years and there was nothing more I wanted to do than to throw myself at the USA with open arms, but I'm not the same person anymore and that is now impossible.  This will sound crazy to anyone that hasn't lived this expat life and excluding perhaps as well, know that I don't mean it that way. It is just that I feel like we've been given this gift to know more, to live beyond the boundaries of ourselves and of our country. Go places where we have to learn to blend in, to survive, to thrive and to live this life to its fullest, for our kids and for our jobs and for ourselves, yet we are also expected to remain American, so we can come back and be normal, act normal, pretend nothing ever happened. However, we return with greater knowledge. Our challenge, to spread that knowledge gently among our fellow citizens and to try to meld the beauty that the world has shown us with those that don't believe or will ever have the opportunity to see. Try to do that without offending anyone, just try. I'm sure like every other aspect of this lifestyle, we will get better at it with time. Please and thank you for bearing with me until then.

I'm still finding my words, but 58 days with our family, friends, Mickey Mouse, snow, sand, Seattle, coffee, donuts and my tiny perfect family certainly has provided the threads to mend my broken heart.

58 days is a long vacation. It is long by normal person standards, it is really long even by State Department standards. 

It was busy, so busy that even though I had a brand new camera awaiting me in Florida, I didn't even have the chance or the heart to take it out of the box for the first week. Thank God for the iphone, for Instagram and for my obsession with photographing every moment. Which you can recap in the sidebar or just follow me on instagram @elisehanna ------------------------------------------------------------------>>

I took a lot of photos. We traveled a lot. We were together 24/7, which is a lot of time, but doesn't leave a lot of time for blogging. It was so filled with love and generosity and "welcome home's" when I didn't quite feel home and hugs and reunions and sacrifice and patience, where there should have been no more, and shared beds and good dreams and nightmares and acclimation and sweat and tears. So to wrap it up in just one blog post. Here are 58 photos from our 58 marvelous days of togetherness that speak all the words I would try to...only better:

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty One

Twenty Two

Twenty Three

Twenty Four

Twenty Five

Twenty Six

Twenty Seven

Twenty Eight

Twenty Nine

Thirty

Thirty One

Thirty Two

Thirty Three

Thirty Four

Thirty Five

Thirty Six 

Thirty Seven

Thirty Eight

Thirty Nine

Forty + Days (of Beard Growth)

Forty One

Forty Two

Forty Three

Forty Four

Forty Five

Forty Six

Forty Seven

Forty Eight

Fourty Nine

Fifty

Fifty One

Fifty Two

Fifty Three

Fifty Four

Fifty Five

Fifty Six

Fifty Seven

Fifty Eight