Fun Together (by Maeve and Zaylie)

This is post that Zaylie and I wrote together. Zaylie and Tayo and Jet and Patti and Rich have come to Costa Rica to stay with us for a few weeks!!!

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Every day we go to the beach and come home with at least 12,000 shells (that might be a little over the top.)  Usually they are limpets and trumpet shells and olives. Most of our time is spent in the waves which are GINORMOUS. We play over, under, through and we added a couple which are toes, cannonball, fish, and ride. It’ll take too long to explain what all of those are but you can use your imagination. It’s super fun to body board. I (Zaylie) just learned how to ride the waves all the wave back to the beach (and scrape my knees on the sand but it’s still really fun.) Also, we like to do sand acrobatics which means cartwheels, walkovers (front and back), handstands. Mommy (Patti) helped  us. We’ve seen amazing cool different types of animals at the beach like starfish (bright purple and we got to hold it!), anenomes, a black sea urchin town, sea cucumbers, and dorises (which are medium sized, squishy lumps on the rocks), crabs that waddle around with their giant eyes, big and small fish. Also at Playa Guiones there are these REALLY HOT tide pools that we call Tide Pool Hot Tubs and when you sit in them it feels super good. It was time to go right when we found them and we wouldn’t get out until they threatened to leave without us. 

Speaking of interesting creatures, in the jungle-ish, woods-ish trees around our house, there are other animals we’ve seen. There are the coatis (raccoon type creatures with their long snout like pig noses), the howler monkeys (with their little babies making a huge ooooooooooooooooooooooooo in the trees), variegated squirrels, scorpions, lots of awesomely colourful birds and butterflies (that look like flying handkerchiefs.) And now we will tell you about the events of the night before. There are grasshoppers longer than our faces. One came in while we were playing Sequence. All of the kids screamed and ran into the kitchen and shut the door tight (but we could still see everything because the door is glass.) What we saw was not to our liking. It landed on the glass door right by our faces. Patti came over and caught it with her bare hand and then threw it outside off the deck. It kept coming back all night. We’ve seen those grasshoppers mating, one small one and one big one. Also, the gecko pooed on me (Zaylie.)  

In the evenings and in our tiempo libre (free time) we play lots and lots of games together. These include Spot It, lots of normal card games, Sequence, Spoons, Can You Name Them All. Tonight we’re going to play Family Flux. Th e other game which is not really a game but is more like an exercise challenge is our Family Plank. We are working up to get from 20 seconds to 5 minutes. Yikes. To distract us, we sing ridiculous songs while doing it, like I Know A Song That Gets on Everybody’s Nerves, and The Titanic Song.

One project that we did over the first few days was Secret Notes from the Fairies and the Coatis. We were doing it to get Tayo to read. We made up the notes and tied embroidery notes to them and then we said that goblins would write her notes too but they wouldn’t have floss on them. We also made her a wand which was a stick that we covered in black and white embroidery floss and at the end we tied more floss on it to make it a wavy stringy fun thing. This was a good project and an awesome idea except instead of loving it (this is a quote from Tayo), “It was really annoying because they wouldn’t let me into the part of the house where they working and I felt excluded.” 

Tortillas!!! We have been eating tortillas non-stop with all our meals. There have been mouthwateringly delicious things to put inside such as mango salad, salsa and guac, egg things, beans and rice, lentil salad, cabbage/carrot slaw, and good ol’ peanut butter and jam. We also had the most amazing milkshake made with coconut milk, banana, and pineapple. It was delicioso. Today, we get to go to Robin’s where we get to have gelato but only if we finish this in time so gotta go, bye.