borrowed time

T-minus 35 days. We’re beginning to feel like we’re living on borrowed time. We’ve already cycled through the full gamut of feelings and emotions several times: excitement for what lies ahead, sadness for our impending farewells, relief at not having to deal with the myriad small consternations that are unique to our current living situation, apprehension at the new challenges that await just around the corner, the anticipated joy of reuniting with friends and family during our all-too-brief home leave, grief at losing the close friends we made here, whiplashing to advance nostalgia for all the wonderful experiences we enjoyed but are leaving behind. It’s exhausting, honestly.

musical education, pt. 2

Munchkin entered first grade at the height of the pandemic. Facing school closures and restrictive social bubbles, we homeschooled him for part of the year. Being the one to teach our little man to read and make sense of arithmetic remains one of D’s most rewarding parental memories. We never formally “game-schooled” — there is a movement that incorporates strategy games into homespun learning curricula — but we did (and still do) play a ton of board games with Munchkin, helping him develop logic and strategic thinking skills through gameplay. Had he been a little older, we may well have incorporated a song-based module into his curriculum as well. The little man is now approaching the end of fourth grade, and D’s music class is very much in session.

too soon!

Our Costa Rica countdown clock is ticking down rapidly — we’re down to just under two months. Naturally, we’re trying to pack in as much as we can even as we focus on packing up and preparing for our next transition. This means there is frequently entirely too much going on and no time at all to process any of it, much less write about it.

the tapestry of our lives

Whenever yet another international move approaches, an urge to wax nostalgic takes over. Every get-together and outing, every beer shared with local friends serves as a poignant reminder that these simple joys will soon be in our rearview, even as new adventures and friendships in the next country we’ll call home await around the corner. We are now well inside our 100-day countdown to departure from Costa Rica — less than three months until we set foot on U.S. soil ever so briefly before packing our bags again for our onward assignment. The advance nostalgia is coming on strong and fast.

double digits

Munchkin considered a couple of options to mark his double digits, including a VR experience with his closest friends, before opting to reprise last year’s festivities with another pool party in our condominium. The gifts he received reflected well his current interests — both new ones and those acquired long ago: anime and manga, sports and board games, and plenty of books. Observing the utter chaos in the pool felt like watching a rerun. Looking at our growing son, now a year older and wiser, we see many of the same tendencies and characteristics that defined him as a nine-year-old. We see important changes too as he continues to approach what he already told us will be his “sassy teenage years.”

leaping forward

A bonus day in February only served to underscore how quickly our remaining months in Costa Rica are flying by, time slipping through our fingers like grains of sand sliding through the hourglass. We are about to start our hundred-day countdown to departure and already have spent about as much time and effort over the last month on pre-departure logistics as on our actual jobs. Hopefully, this advanced planning will help smooth the transition when the time comes to bid adieu to the life we’ve built in San Jose over the last two-plus years.

bottom of the barrel

We just returned from Boca Tapada, leveraging Presidents Day to check off one more place on our Costa Rica map. We can’t say this was our favorite of the many trips we’ve taken all over the country in the last two years, but that has little to do with Boca Tapada itself, which more than lived up to its reputation as a stellar destination for wildlife viewing. Rather, the trip came together very last-minute, leading to some sub-optimal decisions that did not set us up for complete success.

where Marie Kondo and George Carlin meet

Whenever another move approaches — and our next overseas move is just around the corner — George Carlin’s brilliant A Place For My Stuff inevitably comes to mind. A house is just a place to keep your stuff, Carlin quips, and when you travel, you take smaller versions of your house with you until you pare your stuff down to the bare essentials. We move quite a lot more often than an average family, which thrusts the questions at the heart of Carlin’s humor to the forefront every year or two. Which of our things are absolutely essential and which are nice-to-haves we could do without in a pinch? Which items have sentimental value and which ones simply take up space?

bush to beach

One of the joys of exploring Belize is that it is small and supremely easy to navigate. An hour’s drive west from our lodge would have brought us to the Guatemala border. Two hours in the opposite direction, and we found ourselves in Hopkins on the Caribbean coast. Compare this with our recent travels in Colombia, where renting a car in Cartagena and driving to the Santa Marta Mountains locked us into the Caribbean corner of the country for the better part of two weeks. It was time well spent, as D tracked down almost all of Santa Marta’s two dozen endemic birds on repeated visits to the El Dorado Reserve, but we also found that we had less flexibility than we thought a rental car would have afforded us. At any rate, this was not a problem in Belize. So, after spending a week exploring the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve, we headed to the beach, stopping for one final Mayan cave tour on the way.

exploring Guanacaste

Because we frequently write about our travels while purposefully bracketing our professional lives, this blog sometimes suggests that we may be on permanent vacation. This month, such an impression would be more accurate than most of the time. The kids are nearly two weeks into their holiday break, which comes much earlier and lasts much longer in Costa Rica than in the States. We too have taken time off this month to make the most of our kids’ vacation.