Summertime

We have been loving our summer!  Lazy mornings, not much on the schedule, and lots of fun at home and with friends.  Ben and Alex have played a lot together (and fought a lot together) and invented all kinds of new games.  I have really enjoyed having time with both of them, with the exception of the hard days when I'm losing my mind and desperate for 10 minutes alone...but that's motherhood, right?

Ben is an office supply junkie and I regularly find things like paper, tape, and pens migrating to his room.  This paper was destined for a slightly different purpose - slippers to "keep his feet warm", as though 103F outside is getting chilly!

 

 We found this cute little guy at the pool and the kids begged to bring him home.  Let's just say he hasn't been as hardy as the grasshopper we've had since March, but he was fun for a week.

The kids and I made a trip to Dallas to help their cousin Reid celebrate his second birthday.  First stop was the great splashpad and pool in his neighborhood.

The boys were so adorable together!  Reid learned a lot from his cousins (hopefully good things) and even wanted to join them at their little table for meals.

Ben and Alex had a great time with all of Reid's toys, as usual.  Size doesn't seem to matter to these guys.

Even after an afternoon of swimming in the big pool, the little backyard pool was still lots of fun.  I love watching these three play together.

I didn't get any pictures of the party or Reid blowing out his candles, but I can promise you that the cake was enjoyed by many.  Especially this guy!

 

 Back home, we've been hanging out with our neighbors and keeping cool in several pools.  We had a fun playdate with several other families at our neighbor's new pool one afternoon.  The game of jumping and screaming never got old!

We made a day trip to Galveston to enjoy some sand and surf and it was a lot of fun.  The kids are both taking swim lessons twice a week and their swimming is coming together really well.  Both boys had so much fun playing in the waves and digging in the sand.

 

It's hard to believe June is nearly over!  Even though the days seem long and lazy the time is flying past.

We Have Liftoff!

Ben got an awesome rocket for his birthday and it was killing the boys to see it sit on the counter while we waited for a good day to try it out.  Our side of town is flat and generally pastureland and it's almost always windy.  Alex kept looking out the window and telling me it wasn't windy, but the grass in the backyard isn't always the best indicator.  I knew one morning when I saw hot air balloons in the sky that we had perfect weather, so we grabbed all our things and headed out to the field behind our neighborhood.

 Lots of questions and investigations, and it was time for a launch.

It was so fast that the kids didn't know what to think!  I should have recorded the second and third launches when they were really cheering it up but I was enjoying the view myself. 

 

 Alex got to launch it the second time and he thought it was pretty awesome.

Blastoff!

 

Thank you, Scott and Lou Anne, for such a great gift for ALL the boys in our family!  Speed, smoke, and fire always equal a good time to these guys.

Costa Rica Wildlife

One of my big reasons for wanting to visit Costa Rica was to see some of the amazing wildlife and it definitely didn't disappoint!  We didn't manage to get pictures of everything but we saw wild scarlet macaws, 3-toed sloth, amazing butterflies, lots of howler monkeys, some kind of possum, many different crabs, a few snakes, frogs, a family of falcons, and birds every color of the rainbow.  It seemed that everywhere we looked there were creatures and insects living and thriving in the jungle.  I enjoyed it immensely but I was very glad we weren't camping!  Especially after we saw a decent sized (non-poisonous...whew!) snake going straight past the porch of our casita and followed it to make very sure it didn't detour inside.  We also had several crabs come near the door and while I thought they were cute, I didn't want to share my space with them.

Just after white-water rafting, we crossed a bridge on the way to lunch and saw this caiman crocodile sunning himself in the middle of a river.  I was very glad that was NOT the river we'd just left!  (click to enlarge)

 

While on our nature tour, we saw lots of animals through the spotting scope.  We came much closer to other howler monkeys but this was the first one we spotted in the trees.

Costa Rica has something like 50 species of hummingbird and we were lucky to see several beautiful ones.  They loved certain flowering bushes all around but they only time they were still enough for a picture was at the feeder.

This was a gorgeous Blue-gray Tanager

The clay-colored Thrush is the national bird of Costa Rica.

This crimson-collared Tanager and his mate were quite the lovely couple.

This is the outside of a blue morpho butterfly in a large habitat.  We tried many times, very unsuccessfully, to get a good picture of the beautiful blue on the inside but it still felt like cheating since it wasn't wild.  I was thrilled to be enjoying the waterfall at Montezuma when a wild blue morpho lazily flew by a few times.  Again, couldn't manage a picture but I sure enjoyed the moment.

A red poison dart frog...very cool! 

The red-eyed tree frog, also very cool.  He was so sleepy those big red eyes would just drift shut on their own.

This little eyelash viper was curled up in a tree right off a path.  It was only our second day in country but I knew immediately I wouldn't be wandering through the woods anywhere!

Leaf cutting ants were blazing their own trail across the path.  I discovered that they also really like to bite brown flip flops but very fortunately got them off before they found my toes.

We really enjoyed spotting this gorgeous toucan and would have loved to get closer to him!  Even from a distance you could spot that beak with the naked eye and immediately identify the bird.

We saw lots and lots of iguanas.

Crabs in the ocean, crabs on the sand, hermit crabs and these land crabs everywhere else.  They were pretty interesting but I started wearing shoes after dark when I realized they were wandering in the grass beyond our porch.  

 These green parakeets were nesting in the trees near our resort.

It was such a great trip.  God's creation is so amazing.

Costa Rica

Matt and I just returned from a wonderful, almost perfect holiday in Costa Rica.  It was so much fun to just be a couple and not be parents, although we missed the kids and talked about them a lot (and greatly appreciate all the grandparents for watching them!), and reminisce about all the good times we've had over the last 10 years.  We have always loved to travel together and this trip was quite an adventure.

The not-so-perfect part came just a few hours after we left the airport in Liberia.  I'd been warned on several occasions that the roads would be bad, street signs few and far between, and many areas pretty remote.  I was not expecting to come down a winding mountain road almost half an hour from any intersection and find its bridge missing.  But such was the case around midnight on our way to our first hotel.  The road was blocked but there was otherwise no warning and no detour.  Thank goodness we'd gotten the GPS and we backtracked to the closest town and tried the only other roads on the map.  Turns out they weren't even really roads but dirt tracks through a farm.  It all worked out with a 90-minute detour, a little four-wheel drive action, and my brave husband who would go check out the road when the puddles looked too deep to attempt.  Welcome to Costa Rica!

Our second day dawned much better.  We went to La Fortuna to spend a couple of days exploring around the base of Arenal volcano and the view was amazing.  It's been very active for several decades but everyone said it's been quiet now for the past year, so my hope of glowing lava was dashed.

 

This was our lovely little house with a great view.

 

Our first adventure was a white-water rafting trip and on the way we saw that our unexpected detour wasn't so bad when compared to this one!

 

A bus took us to the Rio Balsa for our rafting trip and this was the only picture I got because it was pouring rain and I didn't want to get my camera wet.  We were very fortunate with the weather because it was the rainy season and this was the only time we got soaked.  The rest of the time we saw rain it was either a drizzle or overnight.  The rafting was lots of fun and afterward we went to the outfitter's restaurant for a great local meal.

 Afterward, we soaked our tired muscles in the thermal springs at our hotel.  There are all kinds of hot springs all over town but we chose the easy route and relaxed at the one just past our doorstep with a great view.

We watched the steam come out of the crater at night...pretty cool.

Our second morning we ended up on a nature tour looking for birds, frogs, and other wildlife with a great guide.  I'm saving all the wildlife pictures for another post because there are so many.  This was the guide's frog sanctuary where he also led night tours...after seeing so many critters during the day there is no way I'd be out there at night!

I have to share the red-eyed tree frog because he's one of the unofficial mascots of Costa Rica and amazingly beautiful.  When he closes his eyes and tucks in his toes, you'd never see him on the leaves.

We did lots of bird spotting as well and saw an amazing variety.

Our two days at La Fortuna went by quickly and it was time to pack up and head towards the beach.  We drove several hours through mountains and cute little towns like this on our way to Puntarenas.

 

In Puntarenas, we queued up for the afternoon ferry, grabbed a bite to eat, and headed across the bay to the Nicoya peninsula on the Pacific side of the country.

It was a really nice ride and took over an hour.

Once we reached Paquera, we drove several miles on paved roads, then another hour on unpaved dirt roads to Santa Teresa, a charming little surf town on the outer edge of the peninsula.  Our home sweet home for the rest of the week was this casita nestled up with two others and a shared pool and restaurant on the beach.  We spent many hours enjoying the hammocks and couches on the porch while relaxing with books and soaking up the sun and waves.

 

The inside was nice as well....

...and my favorite part was the outdoor shower.  Pretty cool to hear the ocean from the shower.

 

Our view was wonderful...trees full of birds, iguanas, and squirrels.  Grass with crabs, lizards, a snake (eek!), and a myriad of interesting insects.  The beach was just beyond the thatched-roof restaurant.

View from the beach looking back toward the casitas and the hills beyond.

The beaches were gorgeous.  They are almost completely undisturbed and no high-rise developments have come anywhere close to this corner of the world.  As much as the kids would have loved this beach, I was so happy they weren't there because the surf was huge and would have been too dangerous for them in many places.

I was happy to share my walk with this lovely yellow flycatcher one morning.

Driving through Santa Teresa was a lot of fun.  Just one dirt road going through town lined with little cafes, tiny stores, and a few quiet hotels and surf camps.  Transportation is by foot, bike, horse, ATV, motorbike, or car.  All are equally acceptable.  Swimsuits and bare feet are the norm.  (lucky for me!  I took a vacation from makeup, shoes, and even my hairbrush!)

 

Bridges, on the other hand, were not so fun.  This was a typical one-lane bridge, which is basically just a big drainpipe over a river with no guardrails.  Thank goodness we never had to find out what happened if one of these collapsed.

 

 Our trusty car wasn't much to look at but it sure got us around. 

One morning we explored through some hills and a nature reserve and ended up in Montezuma to check out a waterfall we'd been told about.  We paid an old man $2 to park our car on his property and then followed his grandson up some muddy riverbanks to a beautiful waterfall inside a little canyon.  It was about 70 feet tall and we watched with our jaws dropped as some guy jumped over almost the entire length.  And he lived!

 The scenery was beautiful, the weather was perfect, the wildlife was amazing.  It was so much fun to explore and so refreshing to relax with no schedule, no email, no little people to worry about.

We ate at the restaurant on site every night because the food was great and the location couldn't have been any more convenient.  I couldn't have asked for a better way to celebrate our first decade or better company to share it with me.