A Pretty Great Day

We look forward to Saturday's all week these days. We all love hanging out with Spence and having a moment together as a family. The last couple of Saturdays have been really awesome because they've been the first in a while that we weren't working on a rental house.

Last Saturday we went to the Sportsman's Expo. The kids thought it was pretty fun to see all the animals, the guys fishing, and the dogs jumping and swimming in the water. After the expo, however, was their favorite part of the day. We rode the shuttle back to the parking lot and they were thrilled. When they saw it coming, they started yelling, "We're going to ride the bus?!" The short trip to the parking lot was funny. They checked everything out and continued to tell us that it was so cool to ride a bus. When we got back to our car, we went to lunch at the Mayan. That place certainly isn't my favorite as far as the food goes, but Spence thought the kids would like the divers and boy was he right. They lit up watching guys dive and thought it was so cool. We had a fun day and continued to hear about how much fun they had riding the bus.

Today while the kids were eating lunch Davis said, "Remember the fun fun day when we rode the bus and watched the guys jump in the water?" Blair said, "Yeah, and we saw all the animals and had lunch. The bus was fun!" It made me laugh. I'm glad they had such a fun day and I'm super glad we decided to ride the shuttle instead of walk back to the car.

Happy 29th Spence!

For Spence's birthday this year, he didn't want me to have a party. We showed him- we went to dinner with my family on Saturday, and had his parents and the girls over for dinner Sunday, and celebrated even more on Monday by bringing treats to work in the morning. Sunday is the only day I had my camera though. He wanted a cheesecake dessert my mom makes instead of a cake so we had that and opened presents.

I bought him new waders that he's been wanting for a while. Come to find out, he knew he was getting them. He saw a charge on our credit card and googled it to see what store it was from. He went to that store's website and started adding different things to his shopping cart to come up with the amount he saw on our online banking. What a fun hater. He went all the way through the process to calculate shipping taxes and everything and he told all of the people at work how excited he was for his birthday because he was getting new waders. I'll have to do a little better keeping the next gift secret.

Clean Up

Last night Spence had just cleaned up the toys when the kids got out the dress ups and the Mr. Potato Head stuff. Spence told them if they wanted to play with the Mr. Potato head stuff, they needed to clean up the dress ups. Blair started cleaning up and singing, "Clean up, Clean up, Everybody do your share..." Then, she turned to Spence who was watching her and said, "Daddy, can you please do your share?"

Sheesh Dad, why weren't you helping? Clearly, it's your job too.

Costa Rica

In November we went to Costa Rica with Spence's cousin Nicole and her husband Brad. We had the best time. It was one of my favorite vacations for sure.

We hadn't planned on any more vacations for the year, and we had just gotten back from Mexico, but Nicole called with a great deal we couldn't pass up. We were so glad we didn't. Nicole and Brad were awesome tour guides. They had done so much research and found awesome things for us to do. They also found the sweetest place ever to stay. We had a HUGE, super nice house with everything we could ever want and more and they got it totally cheap. I will have to get some pictures of the house from Nicole. The house we stayed in was in the middle of the jungle, but it was just a few minutes from the beach- the best of both worlds.

The only downer of the vacation was the fact that my camera, Spence's wallet, both of our phones, and Brad and Nicole's iPod got stolen. That part wasn't fun, but the whole thing was so awesome I'd go back in a second.

One day we were at the beach and saw the fishermen going out for the night. We talked to some of them and arranged for them to take us out first thing the next morning. We were excited and thought it would be great, but apparently the fishing is better at night- we didn't get a single bite. It may, however, have been Brad's bad luck. He says he never catches anything. Next time we'll go on separate boats... It was fun to go out and see what the fishermen do and catch all the great views from the boat. Nicole and I put an end to the fun though. The boat was small and we were both feeling sick. Brad and Spence still had a great time even with no catching.

Later that day, we went on a hike to the most beautiful waterfall I have ever seen. You'll see in the pictures below that we were soaking wet from the spray when we were pretty far away from the whole thing. It was so amazing. We went swimming just below the waterfall too. Everything in Costa Rica is so beautiful; hiking through the jungle was awesome.

It's kind of hard to see, but the picture above is of a fence. They use sticks as fence posts and over time they grow into full on trees. It's pretty cool to see.

The pictures were hard to get because of all the water...

I need to get the names of all the places we went (I can't remember any of them), but the pictures below were at one of the most beautiful beaches I've ever seen. The cool part about Costa Rica is the fact that there aren't a million tourists everywhere. This beach had some cool rocks with windows that went all the way through from the beach to the water. The boys had a great time in there, but I was nervous because the waves crashed so hard in those rocks.

This is another waterfall we went to one day. It had a rope swing that the boys and I did a few times, but we didn't think it was the best idea for the pregnant girl. Getting to this place was an adventure. We got lost and had to get directions. Those directions weren't very clear and the boys thought we should try driving the rental car through a pretty big river. We decided against that and walked around only to see people driving to the waterfall. Apparently there was a much easier route we never discovered.

The last day we went to Manuel Antonio National Park. We hiked through more jungle, saw more beautiful beaches and a bunch of really neat wildlife.

On the way to the airport we stopped to check out all the crocodiles that hang out here. There were tons on each side of the bridge we were standing on.

Below is the only picture I have of the house we stayed in.

Getting home from Costa Rica was an adventure. Luckily when everything else was stolen our passports didn't go with it all. We arrived at the airport with $10 in cash only to find out there was a tax of about $60 each person to leave the country. Thank heaven we were with Brad and Nicole because the airport employees had no sympathy on us.

We did so many more things I don't have pictures of. We had a rental car so we drove ourselves everywhere. The morning after Spence and I got there, we drove a few hours to the place we were staying. It was such a cool drive with so much to see on the way.

We loved every minute of the trip. Thanks for the invitation Christensens.