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.
No comments:
Post a Comment