Costa Rica

Jon and I just returned from a wonderful week in Costa Rica with Jon's brother Tim and his wife, Erin, and our pals Kerri and Jeff. We spent the first days down in the village of Dominical at a wonderful small hotel. If you are ever looking for lodging by the ocean, check out Cuna Del Angel. It was perfect. We filled our days with whale-watching, surfing, hiking, and a river rafting trip. I loved it all. Our evenings were usually spent with a cool drink on the hotel's patio, watching the sunset, and the toucans, and the sloths, and the howler monkeys. After four lovely days of lounging in the south, we drove north of San Jose to the Sarapiqui river area. We moved into our first hotel around sunset- it seemed nice enough, but very very quiet, and dark- kind of moody. In a non-romantic way. We had picked this place in part because their website boasted of a great chef who catered to vegetarians. So we eagerly sat down at an elegant table and awaited our meals. The waiter entered and grandly lay before us a large platter of....dry, toasted wonder bread? Not what was expected. In the morning we headed out to the other hotel we had considered because they advertised lots of trails through primary rain forest. All four of us (Tim and Erin flew back home after Dominical) fell in love with the forest, our guide, the hotel, and the lovely patio overlooking a rushing river. We quickly canceled our previous reservations and settled in at Selva Verde Lodge. Highly recommend it. Sadly, we only had one day to spend there. Overall, I'd go again in a second. Even though there are so many places to go in the world, I think there is still so much more to do in Costa Rica. And it's not terribly far away, it's in the same time zone, and the people are so amazingly nice. Go!
The absolute best part of our trip was, incidentally, returning home to St. Paul at midnight to find little love notes from the boys on our pillows.

'She's perfect....'

This morning as Theo was getting dressed for school I said, "Theo, you're looking cute today." He replied, "Mom, you know who is cute? Lucy. She's so cute I just have to tell her that everytime I see her. She's so cute. She's perfect. Sigh...And she's so soft too." Like I said earlier, we are going to be in trouble with this one. For the record, Lucy is adorable. I do not know if she is soft or not.

The Amish Envy Club

A friend of mine has come up with the best idea for a club that I've heard in a decade. I'm not much of a joiner, but I do enjoy my book club, and my husband's recently launched (ha) a model rocket club that is much more fun than it sounds. But the Amish Envy Club is tops.

Here's how it works: You gather together 3-4 families of fun people. Each family gets to utilize all club members for one day of the year. We all work on a home-improvement project for each family- plus watch the kids, and contribute to not one, but two feasts (dinner and supper). As in any good club, there are rules. The Amish hosts for the day need to have the project ready to go by 9 am- all trips to Menards completed, tools assembled, work space cleared for takeoff. Any subsequent trip to Menards will cost the host points in the 'Ammy' competition, and probably put them out of the running for the coveted year-end award. I don't know if it's true, but I hear this year's Ammy award is going to be a goat. To be passed on to next year's lucky winner...

Ammy points are awarded for anything you do during a project that will make you seem more Amish. I think we should get something for just having a son named Eli, but no dice, in this club we only go by middle names. New names are essential to any club worth its salt, really. But we plan to get ahead in the point system by introducing kid projects like carding wool, or perhaps biking to the next project with big orange triangles on our backs. The possibilities are endless.

We got the Amish club off to a start by having a potluck planning meeting. Not much planning got done, but the children got used to each other (ok, we definitely lost points by allowing our vast weapons arsenal to be opened- resulting in a few injuries of a minor sort. BUT LET IT BE NOTED THAT THE WEAPONS ARE ALL HAND-MADE WOODEN NUMBERS!!!! That should bring our point total right back to about even. Right?) and the adults had numerous laughs. At one point it got so raucous that I was forced to use my inhaler. Laughing has not caused an asthma attack since back in my camp counselor days. That's a crying shame, to be sure.

Our first project was this past Saturday. We all gathered at the Spencer’s in the Hamline-Midway neighborhood. The project was to move plumbing and begin the process of adding a basement bathroom. It involved a jack-hammer- we do go in for power tools. Predictably, the guys in the group gravitated to the basement for the first shift. Not because they thought they were better suited for the work, but because they were slyly trying to avoid the work shift when the sewer pipe was severed and noseplugs might become necessary. Nice try guys. Anyway- work got done, laughs were had, friends were made, and we ate and drank very well. Jon and I came home tired, but excited to make a plan to put 6 other adults to work for us some day soon.

I hope you all aren’t thinking that we are being disrespectful to another’s culture. Truly, everyone in the group is very thankful and appreciative of the Amish barn raising tradition. I admit that the Ammy’s might be going a bit too far, but we are doing it out of jealousy- not spite. An Amish Envy Club can not get too big for it’s britches- 8 adult workers is about as much as any project in our small, citified houses can stand. And four weekends a year is a great starting point. It took us a full month just to land on a date that would work for all four families for this first project. We have three more Saturdays to try to pin down. But if you are eager to start your own branch of an AEC, please contact me and I can send you the by-laws and other chapter start-up information!

Mr. Social

A friend who has a child in Theo's kindergarten class gave me this scoop on my son the other day: She said that her son has decided to befriend a child who is constantly getting in trouble. So one day when she was in volunteering she asked Mary, the teacher, why her son had to gravitate toward trouble, why couldn't her son become friends with Theo? Mary's response: "Oh Theo, he's way too busy with the girls." And he is. And he's loving it. We might have our hands full with this one in a few years.

Walking home from school

On Fridays, when I am cutting out early from work and rushing rushing to get home in time to pick the boys up from school, I can forget what a joy it is to walk and listen to them process their day. I never leave work early enough, and I should just pull up in front of the school, but I always drive the extra blocks in order to park the car at home and then sprint through the alley to get there on time...then we stroll home and the whole work week falls away as I listen to them chat. I can't remember exactly how this conversation went last week, but here's the gist of it:
Really, it wasn't a conversation because the only one talking was Eli.
"Well, she's finally on to someone else....In music class Gina (the teacher) has decided that Lazaro is her new project. Am I relieved. I mean, I feel bad for Lazaro. As she stands over him, getting him to try to sing over and over I want to go tell him that I know what it's like. But I don't want Gina to remember me and come back to working on me. It's weird...I feel bad for him but I am just so relieved that she's forgotten about me! I'll have to tell him not to worry, that she'll find someone else someday. I won't tell him that she worked on me for over a year..."

The Wet Shower Policy

I admit this little tale is from yesteryear, but it makes me chuckle:

In the midst of an absolutely unorganized and crazy first day of swim lessons we found out that the YMCA has a policy about ‘wet showers’. We knew there was a shower policy and we had relunctantly abided, even though it could mean that you would shower and then end up waiting for many many minutes for your lesson to start, shivering away. So we’ve learned to wait to hit the showers until the teachers are whistling the kids into the pool. Some friends, new to the ways of Midway Y swim lessons, had been foolish enough to shower right when they arrived at the Y. 1 hour later, when the older daughter’s lesson actually looked like it was going to begin, Elizabeth, the over eager ‘deck manager’, asked Andrew to have his daughter take a shower. Andrew explained that she had, but had dried in the ensuing wait. Elizabeth said, and I quote:
“Oh, but the Y has a ‘wet shower’ policy. And I know why. I asked about this and this is the reason…every time you jump into the pool, you displace some water, so if we have everyone jump in wet, then we don’t lose so much water!!!” Big smile. I think she’s kind of a ‘lifer’ at the midway. And that takes a special kind of person. Andrew took this all in stride and went off to give Jasmine her second shower. Eli looked at me with a glint in his eye, but said nothing. That night after we had read books and he was snuggling down to sleep we were sharing a little laugh over the ‘wet shower’ policy. I loved that at 7 he could see the ludicrousness of the policy that Elizabeth, at perhaps 37, was oblivious too. Really. She was. And then Eli said, “Mom, next Monday we need to bring one of those medicine dropper things.” I of course asked why… “Because I ALWAYS come home with water in my ears, right?” “Well, if we bring the dropper and fill up my ears in the bathroom BEFORE I jump in, the Y won’t lose so much water!” The dropper is packed in the swim bag, ready to go.

My middle-aged 8 year old

Today I was walking down the alley with my two boys on the way home from school. It was lightly raining and Eli was thoughtfully spinning his umbrella as we walked along. He said, "Mom, I think I'd like a cup of chamomile tea when we get home. I'd like to relax before I start my math homework." So we get home and I get out the tea. He decides that he should actually just have plain old "Lipiton" because he does need to stay alert enough to do his work. I boil some water and serve it up at the kitchen table. I then am called away by Theo to get out the legos. When I return, there's Eli, legs crossed, tea in one hand, newspaper in the other. He says, "Mom, the only section really worth reading is the Source section." What a kid.