We MISS you a Merry Christmas and a Happy Monteverde

Merry Christmas from Costa Rica!

It took a lot of bribing and a few threats to achieve this photo, where all of us are pictured and smiling.  I count it as one of my few successes as a mother.  I sent it out to all of my friends and relations on facebook to show it off, and to stand in place of the Christmas cards which I never end up sending out anyway.  This was the backup photo.  I posted it on FB too. 

We had a wonderful Christmas here in Rio Piedras. Something about the holidays makes me want to bake and cook, and settle into what ever little nest we might be in.  We tweaked a lime cheesecake recipe I had, and came up with a delicious passion fruit cheesecake that was devoured in 2 days.  My mom's brownie recipe is consistently fantastic in Costa Rica as it is in Utah.  We've also been experimenting with some new dinners as I've tried to use the local, fresh ingredients that are readily available instead of searching out the imitations of ingredients for what I would usually cook at home.  

Passion fruit cheesecake.Yes, we ate the whole thing!

I called it tropical bruschetta.  It had shrimp, avocados, and mangoes, with a touch of cayenne pepper on a ciabatta bread.

We are getting pretty good at making Pupusas.  These are tortillas cooked with cheese and or meat inside.  They are an El Salvadoranean staple, and very good with a little cabbage salad. 

In lieu of visiting friends and family like we would normally do at Christmas time, we explored and adventured. On Christmas Eve, we decided to drive in to La Fortuna and found ourselves at a great little water park which uses water from the nearby hot springs and creeks to create several pools and mineral baths of differing temperatures. We loved the seeming absurdity of going to a water park on Christmas Eve, and the kids loved the water slides. 

A beautiful view of Lake Arenal on our drive to La Fortuna

We found a tribe of these little beggars near the Arenal Volcano on our way to La Fortuna.  These Coati Mundis are cousins of the raccoon, and are not shy about approaching cars and pleading for snacks.  Unfortunately, they get used to walking toward cars, instead of running from them as they should, and we have seen dead Coatis on the road.  We don't feed them, but the kids love seeing them.  They are squishy cute. 

Los Thermales las Laureles

Although she looks naked, she is actually wearing a pink swim diaper cover as a swimsuit, and she kept it on the entire time we were at the water park.  A little success, but still a success. 

The warmest of these mineral baths were around 111 degrees, but each one was a little different.

Because we are just that rebellious. (Read the sign).

When we got home on Christmas Eve, we feasted on delicious Costa Rican Tamales, bought from a local Tica (Costa Rican woman). Here, tamales are wrapped in banana leaves, and are filled with corn masa, rice, potatoes, carrots and veggies, and pork or chicken.  And, like many other parts of Latin America, it is tradition to eat tamales on Christmas.  

We told the kids they weren't allowed to wake us up until 7 am on Christmas morning.   At 6:45, they thought they had waited long enough.  Honestly, Violet is about as stealthy as a bulldozer, so once she was awake, there wasn't much hope for anyone else to keep sleeping. The kids were so pleased that Santa had found us in Costa Rica, and had received their letters requesting Super Tops (a toy we had seen in a local toy store). Santa had also filled their stockings with treats, tiny boxes of sugary cereal, flashlights, and fireworks.  Chad and I got them a few toys, and the girls some new swimming suits, but we tried to keep in mind that we already have very full suitcases.  

Silly Santa gave a roman candle and other fireworks to my almost 3 year old. She loved it!

The sneaker hits of Christmas were 3 wooden old-school tops that we have loved learning to "make dance" as the locals say.

We couldn't find all the ingredients to our traditional caramel pull aparts, so we made pan y popo.  It is a Polynesian dish where you cook rolls in a sauce of coconut milk and sugar.  They were delicious. 

Hanging out in their new swimming suits, playing connect 4.

We called Grandma and Grandpa Richards on the internet phone, and had talked to Grandma and Grandpa Collins the night before on Skype (they are in Fiji, so their Christmas morning was 19 hours earlier than ours).  Then I napped while the kids played with their presents.  Ella and Violet wanted to try out their new swimming suits, so we went down to the lake near Nuevo Arenal to play.  There were many families at the little park by the lake.  Some had picnics, and bbqs, kids were swimming, and the older kids were showing off on their dirt bikes.  After a walk along the beach, we got out our sparklers and then lit our fireworks.  We had a little following of local kids who shared our sparklers, and oohhed an aahhhed at the fireworks.  It was a beautiful warm day, and although very different from our Christmases in the past, it was a fun day of playing together and loving one another. 

This was our little nativity play.  Ella and Michael were Mary and Joseph, and Violet played the angel, and the star, and in the spirit of being "great with child" acted the whole scene with her panda stuffed in her shirt. 

The next day we drove to Monteverde Cloud Forrest. It is about a 2 + hour trip down a very bumpy dirt road, but Chad and I had a great time there when we were here 9 years ago, so we went.  Our first stop was the Children's Eternal Rainforest. In 1987 some kids in Sweden heard that people were cutting down rainforests in Costa Rica and elsewhere. They began raising funds, and soon got the attention of kids and other groups all over the world.  They purchased what is today the largest privately owned reserve in Costa Rica. Most of the area they purchased is off limits to the public in an effort to keep it a pristine. We toured through a very small part of the reserve called Bajo del Tigre, where they have a visitors center and a casita full of games for kids to learn about the rainforest, as well as trails on the edge of the reserve. We walked the trails and had a really nice morning. 

Next we headed to Hummingbird Alley... which is really just a bunch of hummingbird feeders outside of a gift shop. We saw hundreds of beautiful hummingbirds in varying sizes and colors.  They buzzed right past our ears, and later, even perched on my finger while taking a drink. 

 

This purple hummingbird was my favorite. It was much bigger than the others, and such a pretty shimmery color.

After lunch we went to a bat museum. Bats are very important to a rainforest as pollinators, as well as insect devourers. The man who runs the museum was almost creepily obsessed with bats, and had more information than he could possibly share in our short 1 1/2 hour tour.  We learned that the largest bat in the world is as tall as Ella, and has a larger wingspan than Chad.  At the end of the tour we got to walk through the bat cave, where they have a colony of live bats, separated from the public by glass. We watched as the nectar bats hovered at hummingbird feeders just like hummingbirds and the fruit bats ate papaya upside down.  It was a fun tour. 

Violet had a hard time listening to our bat tour guide, but she loved watching this Agouti out the window.

Our final activity in Monteverde was a night tour through the Monteverde Cloud Forrest Reserve.  Our guide showed us more hummingbird bats, a tarantula, a frog, and some really pretty mushrooms that glow in the dark in the middle of the rain forest.  The kids loved walking around with their flashlights, and staying up way past their bed time.  

We have our own scary spiders in our back yard.  This beauty that Chad and the kids found behind our house, which has been giving me nightmares ever since. 

Michael was in such need of a haircut, that we took him in to Tilaran to find a barber. After his haircut, we walked around the park, and it seemed like the whole town was there.  There were little kids on the play ground and the bounce house, older kids were skating and skate boarding around the pavilion.  We noticed one tree completely covered with medium sized parrot-looking birds.  I think they might have been peach faced parakeets, but they were pretty big. It was fun to see so many of them in one place. No one else seemed to notice, but we thought it was amazing. It seems like that happens a lot here in Costa Rica... Things that we are just blown away by, seem so commonplace to the local Ticos.  Like when we first heard the Howler monkeys, and no one else thought much of it.  We are constantly blown away by the beautiful displays of nature all around us here. It is crazy amazing.