One month later

Moving is traumatic, it doesn't matter what age you are.

This experience has been quite the range of emotions. I can describe it in a few words, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Here's the ugly....(I am writing this post laying in bed, in a rented home in the canopy of Quepos. )

me. Since getting here, I have gained around 10 pounds. It's annoying, calorie counting, here I come.

The Bad

Kids miss their friends, Angie doesn't have her friends. Don't get me wrong, they have friends here. Just not close friends yet. Obviously it's only been a month and those type of relationships take time to develop. Life is much less rich without your close friends and it's a reality that we live with moving down here.

The Good

Our family is spending an enormous amount of time together. We have been here for 5 weeks now. We have spent a Saturday at La Paz waterfalls

 

We Came to Manuel Antonio (The most visited national park in Costa Rica). We found one artist here who uses the snouts of the marlins for knife blades. We plan on buying one sometime.

We went for a day trip to the beaches of Jaco (Crocodiles)

We have gone to the park after church (Free park day)


We go to the farmers market every Saturday (we found these cool flower pots on our first trip)

We are having a very unique experience here!

The kids are also getting into sports. Zach was able to play a few minutes on the High School basketball team. Parker is playing Soccer for the Junior High. Alena, Aiden and Luke have started private tennis lessons. Zac and Parker took their first guitar lesson, where the teacher taught us the spanish translation to E,F,G on the base string....Mi, Fa, Sol.  They use Do, ray, me, fa, sol, la, si to teach music.

Reflections

Two Years.

It's one of those life moments where I can remember vividly what I was doing, the weather, etc. It's funny how that works.  I usually can't remember to pick up my daughter if Angie asks me to pick her up 20 minutes before I leave work.

I'm not running around sad all the time, but I definitely have times where I see dad. I see a man with dad's gait, or suspenders and a scraggly beard. Sometimes it's just a pair of white sneakers with velcro straps. Whatever the case, it jars loose the sadness and reminds me that he's not around.

The world changed forever 2 years ago today. Maybe not in the eyes of most of earth 7 billion people. It changed.

1:55pm

I remember.


Dad and Mom really loved us. Our family may not have been very verbose about it, but I have realized how they showed it. I'm very thankful for the lessons, because as I make mistakes as a father I just hope that in the end, my kids feel the true feelings that I love them like my parents loved me.  They were not perfect in a lot of ways, but there is no question of their loyalty to us.


I remember.