The Truth Regarding What We do All Day

Jaco, Costa Rica

We have been in Costa Rica for two weeks now and have settled into a pretty consistent routine. Kris and I walk to  and then along the beach in the morning watching the surfers. The boys usually get up and get their breakfast and get started on their online seminary while we are gone.  Or sometimes, get up, get breakfast, and don't do a lot besides read books. Lots of reading is definitely happening. When Kris and I return, we eat breakfast, which almost every morning includes fresh pineapple because they are so darn cheap here. My cutting up a pineapple signals to the boys that it is time for second breakfast and frequently is what gets Fionn out of bed. We do family prayer and listen to a conference talk together. Since they currently attend church in a language they do not speak, I am picking the conference talks from the youth lessons that they are largely missing out on. We like to see if they can guess the speaker from the first few words of the talk. Then we clean up breakfast and go to the pool where we swim and then read.

If there were wi-fi by the pool, I would be tempted to stay right there all day, but alas, there is not, so we spend the middle of our day back in the condo or out on the deck working on school work. Currently, Ronan is finishing up a college application and so most of his school time is spent on essays, interspersed with time drawing on the computer when he thinks he needs a break and also thinks that I am not watching. Fionn spends most of the time writing stories and looking on baby name sites for good character names, and finding pictures of various cute animals that she wants to include in her stories or writing blog posts. Liam mostly tries to hurry through so he can get back to reading. They all do math. They are all reading a history book I forcefully recommended to each of them, and then actually downloaded to our Kindle account myself, and then told them all that we couldn't watch The Post until they read it. The book is Most Dangerous about Daniel Ellsberg and the leaking of the pentagon papers.

We eat mostly here at home, and shop at the grocery store that is a few blocks away. We have to walk to and from the store carrying all our purchases. I know the kids miss the days when I would go shopping all alone and bring home a carload of groceries and all they had to do was unload and consume. Now they watch the cart carefully at the store calculating just how many pounds they personally will need to bear home and are willing to do without some extras if it means fewer bags, though also willing to carry a bit more if it means something really good. We tend to head to the store a couple times a week, in late afternoon when it is cooling off and when the road to and from the store is mostly shaded.

Most evenings we also walk back down to the beach and stay until the sun is down, which is early. It caught us by surprise the first few days that the sun sets around 5:30 and it is dark by 6. A few times we have walked back along the main street here and purchased 'granizados,' literally, 'shaved ice', but the name does not quite describe the deliciousness. It is flavored shaved ice layered with powdered milk and lechera (sweetened condensed milk) and, in my favorite version, topped with ice cream. We are already pricing ice shaving machines for when we are back in the states and need to reproduce this treat.

In the evenings, we swim again and we read a book together and/or watch a netflix show together and maybe play cards. Most nights we talk to at least one sibling back in the states via hangouts, because, unlike our cell phone, its free to talk on hangouts (we do text for free still, so there is plenty of communication going on all day long, sometimes in the form of lots of gifs sent back and forth, but sometimes in actual words too). And then we all go to bed. The end.

Addresses are a Little Different in Costa Rica

Jaco, Costa Rica

Getting to church was more complicated than I expected it to be. My usual method is just to find the nearest ward on mormon.org and then put the address in google maps and off we go. Here, the nearest ward is just a branch, but we've done branches before so that didn't bother me. It's an hour away, but we've done that before too. It did give me some pause to realize that next Sunday we will have turned in our rental car and be dependent on public transport, but that is next week and I am a big believer in living in the moment and worrying about the future when it becomes the present. That is probably why I didn't actually try to google map the address until last night. The address on mormon.org was "De la Bomba Costanera 27 300 Este, Orotina," and Google had no idea what to do with it. I looked up how Costa Rican addresses work (I love Google) and learned that basically they do not exist. They describe where a place is in relation to other places. Which is great if you know where the other things are. Or if you can even translate *what* they are. My Spanish, as I may have mentioned, is minimal, but I think that address begins "from the bomb." From the bomb?! What does one do with that? I admit that the thought entered my head that we were about to drive an hour to attend three hours of church in a language we don't even understand, should we even bother? But I answered that right away with YES we should bother, church was where we belong on Sunday and we needed to take the Sacrament. So off we went this morning at eight with only a vague idea of where we were going.

We got to Orotina with no problem, but there was no giant sign outside of town announcing where the church was. We stopped and asked a taxi driver. Like this: Kris said "Donde esta..." and I pointed at the address on my phone. The taxi driver spoke no English, we tried to follow what we interpreted from his waving arms. We stopped at a gas station and asked the attendants there using our same method. They spoke no English, we tried to follow their directions. By now it was nearly nine o'clock. I was feeling panicky. I thought "please let us get there before they pass the sacrament!" We saw a fire station. I noticed it because in really big letters on the front of the building it said: "Bomberos," which seemed sort of close to "bomba." At the fire station we found two firemen (bomberos) one who knew where our church was, and one who spoke English and could translate for us!  Hooray! They sent us back to that same gas station we had been at earlier. "La Bomba" also means means "the pump," a gas station. The church was east of said gas station, about 300 meters east to be exact. De la bomba costanera 27 300 este: "from the pump on coastal highway 27, 300m meters east." Of course. We were late. But barely. I was just so relieved to be there.

As I sat in Sacrament meeting, understanding very little of what was said over the pulpit, I felt so grateful to just be there. Part of my gratitude was for the familiarity of my surroundings and of the routine of church, but much of it came from being able to take the Sacrament. I don't know that I have felt that grateful in the past for that simple few minutes on Sunday to take the blessed bread and water. Maybe it was the desperation I had felt in the possibility of not getting there in time, but I think much of it was simply that with so much going on around me that I didn't understand, the ordinance itself really stood out as the focus of the meeting and I just sat there feeling so happy to be in that little chapel with ceiling fans above my head, seated on a folding chair surrounded by people I didn't know and could scarcely communicate with all partaking together the bread and water and committing ourselves again to always remember our Savior.

In Which We are Totally Scammed in a Foreign Country

Jaco, Costa Rica

We felt like we needed a really positive Costa Rica experience to offset the cockroaches and injured fingers (I cut my own with that same stupid knife the day after Ronan had), and also something worthy of using a rather expensive car rental on before we turn it in next week and start relying on our feet and public transportation, so we decided to go to Manuel Antonio National Park, about an hour and a half south of us. As we approached the park, we were driving merrily along, following Google maps, fully expecting to still drive on for a bit longer when someone started waving us over to the side of the road. He sincerely stepped right in front of our car, and directed us into a parking area off to the side of the road. He told us this was where we should park for Manuel Antonio, he didn't exactly say it was the official parking lot, but it was definitely implied. Then before we could even get out of the car, another man was at the window, explaining the prices involved in entering the park, so much per person for the tour and so much  per person for the entrance fee. We knew the entrance fee, we were planning to walk it on our own. He insisted that a guided tour would be better. Our guide would be a trained naturalist. He would have a scope. He would know where to find the animals. Then he cut his price, offering to let two of the kids on the tour for free. He spoke some English. We speak less Spanish. He stopped mentioning the entrance fee. We didn't notice. We paid him. He said our tour would leave in a few minutes. We slathered sunscreen on our white bodies. Then a woman approached me and asked me to pay for parking. So I paid her too. We met our tour guide, George, he did indeed have a scope and was prepared to show us a sloth right then and there from the parking lot. We looked at the sloth. he pointed out some howler monkeys. Then he gave us and our new friends, Valentina and Patrick from Chile, our pre park pep talk, told them to put their cigarettes back in their car, made sure we had no forbidden foods with us AND mentioned that we all still needed to pay our park entrance fees, we had only paid for the tour. Then he led us on a relatively lengthy walk to the park entrance. Lots of people were parking up here closer to the entrance. We had definitely just been tricked. But we sort of felt like they had won some kind of game, we had been fairly duped, so we meekly went along.

It turned out that George was a genuinely nice guy. He spoke better English than anyone we have yet dealt with here, it was sincerely relaxing to communicate so easily. He even went back and forth effortlessly between English for us and Spanish for our Chilean friends. He really did find lots of animals we never, ever would have seen, like the tiny bat hanging under the fold of a giant leaf, the scarlet crabs along the side of the creek running below us, the stick bird, that really did look so much like a piece of the tree that he had to take extra time carefully pointing him out, and most of all the sloths silently clinging to trees way above our heads. That scope of his was amazing, he set it up for us at each animal sighting, let us all look through it, and then used our phones to take photos through it for us. I don't know if George really had any kind of documentation qualifying him as a certified 'naturalist,' as was advertised back in the parking lot that morning. Are there certified naturalists? But he seemed pretty knowledgeable about each species he showed us, and could answer any questions we asked. He had Fionnula distinguishing between male and female sloths before we were done and taught us how to say bat in Spanish. Murcielago. But Batman is still Batman.

So we were taken in by a minor scam maybe, but it turned out to be a pretty great day anyway and maybe because of said scam. I am pretty sure it can't be a bad day if it includes sloths.

Midnight Flights, the Metric System, and Really Big Bugs

Jaco, Costa Rica

Here we are in Costa Rica. Yesterday started with a midnight flight and finished with Ronan and Liam madly chasing a cockroach across my bedroom floor in a super spiritual prelude to bedtime scripture reading.

The midnight flight was fine, we had spent our day packing, weighing luggage, cleaning, getting last minute shopping done and saying goodbye to Grandma. There was a general attitude of sleepy anticipation on the way to the airport where we said goodbye to Grandpa and he graciously drove our car back to wait safely in his garage until our return. We had a minor hiccup in the airport when one boarding pass didn't print and as it was one of ten we didn't really notice until we were trying to check bags. Luckily, it was a slow time at the airport and the woman checking us in managed to keep her total impatience with us mostly in check and finally consented to print us up a new one, not that there was ever an old one. None of the kids had flown before, and the first flight was very exciting, from the take off to the private television screens to the snack cart wheeling down the aisle. No one slept much, or possibly at all. By the time we got to Miami some of us were really feeling that lack of sleep. We found cheap empanadas and pastries for breakfast and settled down to wait. There may have been some napping on the airport floor. The second flight was less exciting I guess, because most people managed to sleep at least some of the time, Fionnula who had maneuvered to get the window seat on this flight so that she would have a window when we got our first look down on Costa Rica, could barely be roused to consciousness most of the flight. When Liam tried to shake her awake for that much anticipated first look, he just got a really dirty look. And then we landed in beautiful Costa Rica where the police carry machine guns and--Surprise!--everyone speaks Spanish.

We took a longish way to Jaco instead of the highway and saw lots of  beautiful scenery. Liam says he spotted a monkey and I saw a toucan I think, but mostly we saw a lot of cows and chickens, which seems funny when you are used to cows and chickens belonging on acres of flat prairie. We drove over a river that we knew was full of crocodiles, and there were lots of others people there peering over the bridge for a view of said crocodiles,  but we were all so tired that we lamely opted not to stop and look! When we finally arrived, after much trial and error, at our rental house, it was to discover that the key left for us didn't actually fit the door to our house. It did fit the house next door.  If the house next door hadn't been under construction and therefore empty of beds, I might have just decided to settle there. A neighbor came to our rescue when Kris emailed the airbnb host, but she stubbornly continued to talk at us in rapid fire Spanish despite our very clear nearly complete ignorance of what she was saying. All I understood was "llaves," keys, yes llaves were definitely our problem. She did get us a functioning key in the end though. Inside we quickly ascertained that this house was pretty low on what we consider basic amenities, like a washer and dryer, or towels... or hot running water in the sinks. There is hot water in the shower, it involves exposed wires  connected to the shower head. Neat. Still, there were beds, and I at least needed a nap.

After nap time, the next challenge was grocery shopping in a store where the measurements and the monetary units and the language are all completely foreign to us. It was an exhausting exercise in our (mostly Kris's) Googling skills to purchase a few pounds of chicken breast. PS: even though centimeters are smaller than inches, kilos are still bigger than pounds. In addition to food for a week or so we also acquired the towels and hand soap and  bowls (!) that we had expected to be part of our accommodations. Fine. After dinner Kris got to polish up his hard earned first aid skills when Ronan sliced his finger open washing dishes.  There's no hot water, but there are really sharp knives. Well we didn't bring enough towels for everyone, but we do travel with a first aid kit that includes steri strips for closing gaping wounds, because gaping wounds have been relatively common in our years of rearing children. The finger splint had to be improvised with q tips though No swimming for Ronan for a few days. Then we found ants in our cabinets and all the food got moved to the fridge. All of it, we have frozen oats now. And finally, there was a cockroach under the bed, which is why my boys were jumping around my bedroom, slapping the floor around their dancing feet with Kris's sandals.

None of these obstacles were really all that insurmountable. We got in, we bought towels, we taped up the injury, we killed the cockroach. Specifically, Liam killed the cockroach and he is still feeling like a mighty hunter. But it was an exhausting first day. Still, it is beautiful here and I can't wait to see monkeys!

Books on the Road

Greeley, Colorado

We have been nomadic now for 9 months. Nine months! When I think of what things have made this lifestyle possible for us, one stands supreme. Digital readers. Seriously. I don't know how this would work otherwise. When I tell people that I love my Kindle Fire, a lot of them, I mean A LOT of them, tell me "Oh, but I love real books." Never mind that an electronic book is very 'real,' I still get it, I love bound paper books too, but more than that, I just love books and books aren't so much about the paper they are printed on as they are about the stories and ideas inside them and those come through just fine no matter the format. I read approximately a book a week, my kids certainly outpace me, but even if we each read just 4 books a month that represents a whopping 40 books we would have needed to haul around with us, or else obtain and then discard somewhere and somehow, over the last 9 months. Foreseeing this obstacle we purchased readers for each of the kids as their birthday gifts in the months leading up to our trip. At most given, waking moments, I can almost guarantee that at least two of them are using theirs.

We use ours in conjunction with Overdrive through our library in Colorado, so we haven't actually purchased a single digital book. We go through the Overdrive app to look up the book we want and check it out. Our library checks books out for three weeks at a time. After the three weeks are up, the library automatically takes them back, so no overdue fines ever, but you do have a time limit in which to read your book, especially if it is a popular book that other people may have holds on so you can't just check it right back out. If you do need to check your book back out, the reader remembers where you were in it. If the library doesn't own the book I want, then I can recommend it for purchase. So far my library has purchased every book I recommend. We loved library trips when we were living in one place, but it is also very cool to sit on the couch, look up a book I want to read and with a few clicks, have it in my hand ready to read. It can be panic inducing though, when in the course of a few hours, several books you had on hold all suddenly come in and now you have three weeks to read all five.

But there's still more! Our kids' devices all have curfews set on them, meaning they cease to function at 10:30 pm. I think it is cool. Ronan says he misses staying up till 2 am reading paper books! But they have figured a way around the curfew (of course), downloaded audio books still play even when all other functionality shuts down at 10:30. So, with a good pair of earbuds, it is even easier to be sneaky about how late you are up with your book, as no flashlight is even required. Our Fires also all have the Gospel Library app installed, meaning all the scriptures, hymns, church magazines, conference reports dating back to the 70s and complete church curriculum. We use duolingo on them to study languages. We take notes on them.

Yes, we all still take advantage of a chance to hold a book in our hands when we get one, but tomorrow when we get on a plane, I will be so grateful for the little handheld libraries that we each carry. The alternative would obviously have been a lot of additional and very weighty luggage.