Pura Vida

SADIE  We saw a turtle and it was 3 feet tall and my dad thinks it was 5 feet long but i think it was 2 and 1 half feet long I!!!!!!!! WANT!!!!!!!!!! SNOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and theres GECKOS !!! and the GECKOS! come in your house+

So, we're about to hit our 3 month mark and I had it in my head that my Spanish would totally be great by this point and that the kids would be pretty far along. I am definitely feeling today like I'm not even close to great with my Spanish and the kids still hardly know any. I realize I'm probably being overly dramatic, but I'm still frustrated. Church is a crazy house with all these gringos. The majority of them have no idea what's going on, so instead, they entertain themselves by playing together through all of primary. Now, I realize that they did that a lot in primary in the U.S., but I feel like our responsibility to be a good example for all these new converts is much greater than it was back home. I just don't know how to help my kids when they really don't understand almost any of it. They start school in 2 weeks, which is another huge source of anxiety. I'm super worried that getting them to go is going to be a complete nightmare and we

 Everybody's excited.  Wait, not looking quite so excited anymore.  Yeah, I think Sadie is definitely not super excited anymore. I think this is the last moment of the excursion that Sadie is with us.  I think she started surveying the situation and decided, unwaveringly, that this was not for her. Kevin spent a good 10 minutes trying to talk her into it, but she was not going to be swayed. (Jack and Autumn had already made it across the zip line and said they could hear her screaming "no" from across the jungle.) So, Kevin and Sadie hiked back down and met us at the end.

 Last day at our Panama house.  The pan of fish the house owner brought us. He went out and caught these and then brought them over prepped and ready to go in the oven. Only Jack was brave enough out of the kids to try them after seeing them like this.  Starfish beach  Not sure if we were actually allowed to pick them up. I've never been very good at following rules, though. We made it back from Panama on Tuesday. We set out from our house in Bocas Del Toro at about 7:30 a.m. to catch the water taxi back to the mainland at 8:30 a.m. We did all our border crossing in reverse, but the lines coming back were about 2-3 times longer and we got the luck of having one quirky official We were at the end of the line and when he got to us, he sat there and just stared out the window with our last passport in hand. It was so weird. He just kept glancing at the passport, glancing at his computer screen and then craning his neck to look out the

 We set out on our first visa run, early Thursday morning. We’ve only been here 2 months, but found ourselves between homes for a few nights, so we decided to take a trip to Panama. So, at 2:30 a.m., we loaded all our sleeping kids into the car and tried to set off for the other side of Costa Rica and miss all the crazy holiday traffic we’d heard about. Unfortunately, our car didn’t agree and decided not to start…again. So, I got behind the car and pushed and Kevin pushed on the side and then jumped in to pop the clutch once we got going fast enough and we were on our way. This is the view of the sun coming up through our dirty windshield. Only one side of the windshield wiper spray stuff works. The kids all slept until we were almost to San Jose, which was awesome. We stopped for breakfast at about 6 a.m. and then continued onto Limon, which is on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica. It’s the only substantial city on the coast on that side of the country an