July 5th

July 5th, 2010

A quick run down of the last 24 hours.

July 4th:

9pm: After finishing our little firework show Dion sends Jonathan to bed, and lays down in Nicholas's room with him to help him fall asleep, while I work on getting our last minute packing done.

11pm: Nicholas is finally alseep, Dion, having dozed on and off while lying with him comes to bed. I decide to sleep for a bit.

July 5th:

12 am CST: The alarm goes off, Dion and I get up and get showered.

12:30 am CST: Dion gets the boys up, I make sure all the lose ends are tied up. Say goodbye to Mark and the dogs. Dion takes the bags to the car.

12:45 am CST: We are on the road - driving to O'Hare for an early morning flight. Jonathan sleeps. Nicholas refuses to sleep and stays up with Dion and I.

3:30 am CST: We arrive at the boondocks economy lot parking at O'hare.

4 am CST: We arrive at the terminal and check our bags.

5:30 am CST: We board the plane and at 5:50 we take off for Miami. Nicholas and Dion sleep a bit, but Jonathan refuses to sleep and I can't sleep because I can't get comfortable with Nicholas snuggled up on me.

10 am EST: arrive in Miami for a two hour layover. Attempt to find food, after a relativley fruitless search settle on hot dogs (blech..).

11:30 am EST: Board plane for Costa Rica. Flight departs at noon. This time Dion and I each get a short nap, but are kept awake the majority of the time by customs forms, and kids.

1 pm Tico Time (which is CST, but they don't do daylight savings, so right now they are really MST... but we will just call it Tico time... it is more fun!): Land in San Jose Costa Rica. Make good time through Immigration and Customs, but get hung up getting our car. We are clearly being given an introduction here to what Tico time really means... it runs on a completely different schedule...

4:45 pm Tico Time: We arrive relatively uneventfully at the ferry dock at Puntarenas. Jonathan refused to sleep on the drive, Nicholas took a nice little snooze, Dion was an excellent passenger seat navigation helper, and I did my best to drive while refreshing my memory of spanish using the road signs.

5 pm Tico Time: The ferry departs Punatrenas for Paquera. The boys love the ferry ride. Jonathan very studiously watches for whales (which he knows are not down here during this season, but a boy can hope right?). Nicholas has a great time scaring the living daylights out of his dad and I as he tries to "get a better view" by demonstrating his monkey like climbing abilities. The upside of riding the 5pm ferry is that you travel west and get to watch the sun set as you go. The downside is that it is getting dar at 6:15 when you arrive. The picture of the day is of Nicholas really checking out the tree full of pelicans on the shore near the ferry dock in Puntarenas.

7:45 Tico Time: After a ride resembling Mr. Toads Wild Ride at Disneyland, we arrive in the town next to the one we are staying in and stop to get dinner. We enjoy our meal, and the boys enjoy the resident dog. She is very nice and doesn't beg for food, just love.

9 pm Tico Time: We finally are carring our bags into the beautiful house we will be staying in for the next week. We are physically, mentally, and emotionally exhuasted, but we are here and we can wait to enjoy the week!

The take home message is that we are exhausted, and had a long day, but ultimately everything that could go wrong went right, and though they didn't sleep as much as they needed to, the kids really were welll brehaved during the trip

Mark... if you are reading this, tell the dogs we say hello, and that we will try not to fall in love with too many other dogs while we are here. And thanks again for watchign the house (and Marley!)...

As another side note. For the past few days I have been feeling a lot of stress and anxiety about needing to be ready to speak spanish when I got here. When we were driving down I realized that I forgot to grab a spanish enlish dictionary to bring down here with us, and didn't do anything really to brush up on my spanish skills (note to readers who don't know my entire life history... I started learning languages in preschool when I was in a montesorri french immersion program. I studied french up through AP French in High Shcool - a total of 10 years. Then in college I took two years of spanish. It came quickly to me because of the french background that I had, but I really struggled with mixing the two languages together. Then I spent a year studying sign language. At some very specific times I would have clamied near fluency in both french and spanish, but I currently practice neither, especially now that I am not trying to eavesdrop on my students in Texas as they spoke spanish to try to get away with things...). So, back to the point. It has been a long time, and I tried to translate a few phrases in my head and failed miserably. So, naturally I started to freak out about what would happen when we got down here and I had to guide our family around in spanish.

Well never fear the amazing human brain is here.... it took a total of five minutes of talking to a locak who didn't speak english and I was fine. The kids even caught me giving them instructions in spanish on the ferry. Which, by the way, given that they often don't listen in English, which they do technically understand, didn't work very well. They not only could now ignore me, but could justifiably say that they had no idea what I asked them to do!

P.S. sorry about the horrific spelling in this post... I tried to get blogger to do its spellcheck thing, but apparently it knows I am in a spanish speaking country, and it has told me that nearly every word is mispelled... which makes sense seeing as I have written in english not spanish!