the time to head back into snow country is looming ever nearer… a while ago we heard on WHO, which we listen to here online, “IOWA simply stands for Isn’t Our Weather Awful” If it would just stop snowing, I think we could deal with the cold… if it kept snowing and we could just stay home, I think we could handle that, too… if we would have just gotten a LOT more of our goals for our time here accomplished, we could probably manage not to look too unfavorably on our return date either way… alas, probably none of the above will happen. so I guess we will try to grin and bear it. I’m guessing the grins will freeze on our faces. hmm. OR maybe we could just ever so kindly take some nice weather back with us. we’ll try, I promise. we’ll try really hard.
on a cuter note, more pics in the maeve gallery – she has breakfast time with daddy most mornings while mommy forces herself to exercise for a couple of minutes. Maeve also reaaaaalllly likes to go outside. she is not a fan of being cooped up in here with her working parents. but she knows she’s not supposed to go out. so she’ll stand at the door and peer around the corner and call to see if she can get anyone’s attention in Frank & Ani’s house (about 10 feet down) to come and rescue her. poor girl! sometimes it works.
Well, it’s good Tim & Kimberley are leaving soon – I don’t know how much more spoiling we all can take before we are rotten! I’m pretty sure Maeve is going to learn the concept of boredom next week… I think she’ll be happy not to have to spend so much time in her carseat, though, too.
the first night they were here we took them to a local restaurant, which was when we first learned of Kimberley’s purposeful addiction to cilantro, lime, and “tortillas with stuff in them.” (no joke, she actually ended up buying a bunch of cilantro that we cut up and put in a little container for her to carry around, per David’s suggestion) She seriously wanted to order a side of cilantro with every meal, so David’s inspiration was born out of sympathy for waiters everywhere, no doubt. Back to that first night, she had commissioned David to take care of this small but important detail for her, but unfortunately his mouth was full when the waiter came by and so he motioned for Eddy to handle it. Eddy’s eyes were a bit glazed over by his new iPhone, however, so much so that when Kimberley reiterated to him that she wanted a side of cilantro, Eddy proceeded to order her another fork. Much discussion ensued that night and the days following about how Eddy could confuse the words cilantro/culantro with fork/tenedor, and the conclusion was drawn and I maintain that his sometimes hesitant grasp of the English language, combined with his iPhone funk, resulted in an educated guess based on the circumstances of the moment. Guessing/assuming… not really the best plan in relating with a person/culture not your own. fortunately in this case, no harm done, many laughs had.
the first full day that they were here visiting happened to be Valentine’s Day. We basically just went and did some sightseeing. (with some liberal spoiling thrown in) And David found a cool coffee tour, which you can see pictures of in the gallery. David and I really didn’t do anything to celebrate the sixth anniversary of our first date… but it’s cool that it was, nonetheless.
on Friday we couldn’t go anywhere far away because I needed to finish up the bulletin and get it sent off, so we hung out at their hotel and Maeve got to go swimming in her cute little blow-up boat that they found for her. She enjoyed kicking her feet :-) We went out that night to a yummy pasta place to celebrate David’s birthday. It didn’t include cilantro or tortillas, but Kimberley survived. Since they brought Eddy an iPhone, which he had requested, David was kinda wanting one, too, and so all week they have been joking about David doing stuff to earn brownie points in hopes of scoring an iPhone of his own. Some of those things included finding the coffee tour, finding Kimberley’s missing earring, taking them to a mall that was mostly closed (Tim, as most guys, is not a fan of shopping), etc. So on the night of David’s birthday celebration they took him to get i(ce)Scream, the slightly cheaper, much sweeter, food cousin of all the mac products.
on Saturday we made a bit of an earlier start and took them to the weekly farmers’ market. We bought our regular fruit and vegetables, and then also got a few of the weird things for them to try, mainly water apples, booger fruit, and cashew fruit. We’re not sure if the cashew fruit was quite ripe, because as we learned in our later research, it was supposed to give off a “sweet” fragrance and taste, and the one we had smelled and tasted more nearly “like butt”, as David so succinctly put it. I almost didn’t venture near it at all, but when I did daintily sniff it, my sensitive nose detected a bit of a nutty scent. It is one of the weirdest looking fruits ever, so we did look it up and discovered that it was indeed where cashews come from. After Maeve took a nice little nap, we ventured out some more and ended up finding a cool little restaurant with a great view on the side of a mountain.
we had high hopes on Sunday of going to a rainforest and other interesting things, but when the day started out with the car not working, it pretty much summed up how the rest of the day turned out. We mostly drove a LOT and ate some, met Eddy’s parents and little brother, and saw a bunch of stuff. We had much laughter on the way home due to many factors, the least of which were not being tired and stuck in traffic for long periods of time. Adding to it, was Eddy (better known as Ehd-DEEEEE) not being used to driving an automatic, and therefore mistaking the brake for the clutch a number of times.
today we took them to visit Pura Vida Missions, and they enjoyed meeting DeLynn & Gloria. We then bought fixings for a good carne asada tonight, but I think since I’ve been in here with Maeve napping they decided they want to go out instead. They blessedly cleaned up our house, though!!! It was very sadly neglected this week. I mean gross. We were too tired to care, but tomorrow would have kinda sucked if it weren’t for them doing that today.
ok, pictures in “maeve” and “costa rica” (scenes also)
I forgot to post that I uploaded more pictures of Maeve… two pages. Tim & Kimberley are coming tomorrow! oh, I guess I could tell you that in the last week Maeve started vrrroom vrrooooming when she plays with a car of the girls’ that she really loves. We’re not really sure where she got it – I might have done it once. She also says “down” now.
Or so David dreamt last night. And apparently Kelly decided that she was an artist and started painting the wall of the Grand Canyon! In blue with white polkadots, no less.
MY dream that involved The Office people was possibly even more weird, however, because it combined so many things. A bunch of us were on REACH and living in this really cool huge apartment. Jim and Pam were definitely in REACH, too. Maybe Andy. I forget. Anyway, we played some sort of practical joke on Rhonda that involved laundry detergent. It was really funny at the time. There was also some sort of contest in which Pam won a pair of shoes from the Crowded Closet. Um. Yay for her :-) Finally, this REACH compound building thing was located really close to RMM/RBC and it was funny because there was a lot more stuff there, like this big indoor water park thing where little kids could have really cool birthdays. That was right by RMM. Haha.
More Maeve stuff I forgot. She’s really good at peek-a-boo. She’ll cover her face or hide behind stuff. And yeah, she’s been doing it for a long time, I just forgot to relay it. The poor girl has also had a really bad time of it with getting injured here and there in the last week! She slammed her thumb in a cupboard and it proceeded to get black and blue under her nail. She smacked her head into the corner of a door and got a nice welt, which thankfully went down by the next day. And I pinched her skin in her jacket zipper, which left a little red mark! I’m always so careful with that, too! Argh.
I came to the realization yesterday that David is the quintessential Proverbs 32 husband. He definitely doesn’t just chill at some gate with a bunch of his friends. (ok, I’m sure that’s not what they really did, but anyway) He always goes above and beyond… yesterday he made some really awesome bread that came from Elmer that came from Carolyn that came from an Amish lady. We actually ate it ALL yesterday, too. I think. Maybe there are some crumbs left. We did have a little bit of help from some of the family. He was a little sad it got devoured so soon after all his hard work, but I just told him he shouldn’t have made it so good, what did he expect? ;-)
another thing I forgot to mention in the last post was that David is now one year closer to 30. It’s so unbelievable to me. 30 doesn’t really mean too much anymore, but yet, it still does kinda. I don’t know, I guess it just seems like we’re supposed to be more mature by now. Well, hehe, I don’t have to be mature for a good four years yet. We took a bunch of pictures at the little get-together they had for him, but that’s the card that we can’t get pictures off of right now. Or maybe ever. Argh. But David did capture her in the laundry basket again. I think the other ones were funnier, but oh well.
When I wrote about all those incidents I failed to mention the word fire. Apparently the other night while I was in here with Maeve, David and Eddy were having adventures in the kitchen. David had been wanting to make patacones, and so they were being diligent little chefs. Eddy was holding a paper towel for David to scoop the fried squashed bananas out onto, and apparently he got a little too close to the flame. So there they were, two grown men blowing on a flame-engulfed handful of paper towel and banana fries, all the while trying not to laugh to loud and wake up the sleeping baby. While being told this story later, I asked if they would have thought of just putting it in the sink if it got out of hand, and David replied that they didn’t want to waste the patacones. I don’t know, it definitely makes a funny picture in my mind.
I also forgot some stuff that Maeve is doing. She sometimes says night-night, which comes out “nigh nigh”. Not long after we got here she had started shaking her index finger and saying nonono, and she hadn’t done it for a while, but she started again. I don’t know why the finger shaking, as we don’t do that. I think it was a Tia thing :-) One of the first things Maeve does when she wakes up in the morning is grin a big cheesy grin so big that her eyes have to shut. It’s funny and cute that she’s so happy and knows that she’s cute I think. Yesterday I was working on our bed and she was playing with stuff on the floor and I looked up and saw that she had crawled into her laundry basket and was sitting there – a funny site which I got a picture of, but sadly we can’t seem to get the card to work today to get it off! Fortunately we have a couple of pics from today on a different card. I’m sure I’m still forgetting some of her stuff, but that’s why they let me post here whenever I want to…
