It's been too long...

I haven't blogged in a really long time. There certainly should be posts in between my last on and this one but rather than "catching up" I'm just going to be transparent and blog from the heart.

Life hasn't been moving along as smoothly as I had hoped since we have moved back to the US. We are all happy to be home in fellowship with our friends and family, even meeting new members, born in our absence. But things have not gone according to "my plan". We are living in a church. We have half our belongings stored in a room two floors down from our living area. We have boxes half unpacked and frequently find ourselves looking for belongings that could be in one of several locations. My dreams of having a cozy house decorated to my liking are on hold and I miss having a kitchen where my family can hang out and eat together. I have not had a dishwasher for over a year. But this blessing of living in a church has allowed my husband to pursue a career path suited to his talents and giftings. It has given him time to seek and listen to the will of God in his life. For this I am thankful.

Last week we started our 8th year of homeschooling. It was not wonderful. My kids have been out of school since the end of April and they aren't falling back into the routine as smoothly as I had hoped. We weren't able to have the kids start math because we had to set up 3 different computers and find working keyboards and mouses (mice?). Last night my wonderful husband was able to get the computers working and this morning all 3 kids completed 2 math lessons (it's mostly review in the beginning anyway) so I was hopeful that today would be a good day. But we started my teaching portion of today by yelling (OK, it didn't start as yelling, but escalated to yelling) at the kids to clean up the mess from yesterday. Later on the Holy Spirit convicted me about my response to the mess.

After school was over I came across a link a friend posted on Facebook called Exposing Major Blind Spots of Homeschoolers by Reb Bradley. It's a great article that really should be about Parenting Blind Spots, since it applies to all parents trying to raise kids that know and love God. There is a lot in this article and it is worth a thorough read. As I was reading I realized that my conflict with my kids (mainly one) wasn't about an issue of disrespect or disobedience. I was angry because it stresses me out to teach in a cluttered environment. My kids didn't clean up after themselves yesterday and they should have. The level of my anger and frustration, however, wasn't in line with the infraction. They weren't refusing to clean it up, they just weren't doing it well enough or fast enough for me. They should clean up after themselves. But I need to check my heart and figure out what is going on with me. I have some struggles of my own I am working on. I struggle with anxiety. My anxiety level has been high for the past few days and while I have not reacted inappropriately (until today) to my kids that anxiety has been seething under the surface and today it came out, not just about today's infraction but everything that has been bugging me this week. While there is nothing wrong with expecting my kids to clean up after themselves and have personal responsibility for their things and their space, it should not be more important than the love I have for them. It is my job as parent to teach them responsibility but I do not need to make it my idol. It is not more important than having a relationship with my kids. I need to work on my own "junk" and not put in on my kids and make it their fault. I can barely handle it myself and I have been walking with the Lord for 16 years, it's not fair to put it on them. I want my environment to be peaceful but more than that I want to teach my kids that we can have peace in an environment that is not peaceful. It is not our circumstances that dictate our attitude but rather how we respond to our circumstances. You'd think that after losing our house and living in a foreign country for a year I would have learned that one. I thought I did too. But today it was brought to my attention that there is still work to be done in this area. I think I will start with an apology to my kids....

Ticabus from Granada to Costa Rica

I sit here typing this blog post from the comfy seat of a fully air conditioned Ticabus. I thought it might be appropriate to reflect on my feelings as we leave the country we have called home for the last (almost) nine months. I would love to say I am sad to say goodbye to Nicaragua but those aren't the feelings I am having right now. Most of the people we said goodbye to over the past few days, I am sure we will see again so it didn't feel like a real goodbye. We left our house in Matagalpa 3 days ago but we really had our minds set on going to see friends in Granada and then more friends in Costa Rica. I think my farewell to Nicaragua might have been more dramatic if we had flown out of Managua (the airport in Nicaragua) instead of traveling by bus to Costa Rica for 6 nights before we are actually home. If I had to do it over, I think flying out of Managua would be the way to go. It would be a clean break. However, because we are leaving via Costa Rica, we got a chance to spend a couple of nights with our friends Don and Jacque before we left and we get to spend 6 nights with a family we met in Costa Rica when we first arrived. I am a little nervous about how that is going to work out and I hope we aren't an imposition on their family. They wanted to see us on the weekend and we don't leave till EARLY Thursday morning so we get a nice long stay with them. Hopefully the fact that they will be in school/work on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday will give them enough of a break from us. I am also hoping to cook dinner for them every night which should help too. The kids are looking forward to having some kids to play with and it doesn't hurt that there is a pool at our friends' apartment in Costa Rica either!

So I guess I am feeling unsettled about leaving Nicaragua. I am not sad but I am not happy either. I don't know what or life will look like 1 month from now so I am trying to live in the moment and not worry about what I will miss about Nicaragua and our life here. Realistically I don't even know what it will be. I know I will miss the people we have met (until we see them again) but what differences between life here and in the US I will long to go back to I can't say. I do think I will miss Chicken Buses (they are old school buses that make up the public transportation system in Central America) since hopping on a Metro bus during rush hour will never resemble a packed chicken bus where it's totally appropriate (or unavoidable) to spoon a stranger for the duration of your ride (30 min-3 hours). I don't anticipate being home in the US on a Thursday afternoon and saying "You know what would be great right now? A Chicken bus ride!" but I will look back on it as a unique experience that cannot be duplicated in the US. Most of the food I would miss, I can still get in the US, aguacate (avocado), mango and piña are all readily available at home (although we won't be able to get the mangoes from the back yard) even though they will be more expensive. I am sure I will miss the easy pace of life here but right now I am excited to get back to a more structured life.

All things considered (and there are a lot of things to consider) I feel at peace with our future. We don't have a house to live in when we get back but we do have the shelter of a church. In January I went to a seminar about prayer in Matagalpa and one of the speakers, who is a missionary in Panama, talked about needing a large sum of money for their mission work and he prayed for "extravagant provision". He said he worships a big God who can do anything, even provide extravagantly. I was more unsure about what our future would hold in January so I clung to that prayer for "extravagant provision" and began praying and asking God for that. God is wonderful and amazing and funny. He has answered my prayer, but not with a big check deposited in my checking account (like He did for our speaker) but with lodging in Granada, lodging in Costa Rica, kitchens to cook in during our travels so that we don't have to eat in restaurants and so that we can bless those who have taken us in. He has extravagantly provided a place to live in until we can find a rental house and get back on our feet financially. This is His extravagant provision. Even though we barely have enough money to get home I am very much at peace with that knowing that God will provide. He has extravagantly provided us with friends throughout our travels (and of course back home). We have met people from all over that we will keep in touch with and who know that if they are ever in the Seattle area, they have a place to stay and eat with us. And we know that if we ever end up in their neck of the woods, we have a place to stay too. We have met a lot of people without kids who have gotten to know our kids and I think our kids have made friends with a lot of the adults we have come to know, in a way that they wouldn't have back home. Kids talk to kids, while adults talk to adults. But since we are a package deal (no such thing as adults only evenings) we have all gotten to know new people.

So far (1.5 hours into it) the Ticabus seems to be a good experience (compared to our Transnica experience) although there is no toilet paper (I should have known). We were all up at 5 this morning so the kids are all asleep in their luxurious bus seats (compared to a Chicken bus) and we will cross the border in less than an hour. The border crossing is the most stressful part of the bus ride but our much improved Spanish (mostly Joe's) and a general idea of what to expect (we haven't taken luggage to Costa Rica before so we don't know exactly what to expect) and the fact that we are "only" traveling with 7 checked bags and 6 carry ons (instead of the 9 checked bags, including 100 lbs of books that we came with). So what could possibly go wrong?

OK, We made it through the border crossing out of Nicaragua, and we were even able to help a couple from the US that didn't speak any Spanish and they thought they were being told that they bought tickets for a bus but now there wasn't room on it. They had been waiting at the border since 7:00 in the morning and it turns out that someone had told them that the bus left at 7:00 so they arrived at 7:00 at the border. They did have tickets on the 7:00 AM bus but that is the time it leaves Managua. There are no official stop times for the route in between capitals so they told them they had tickets on the 7:00 bus but they failed to understand that that was the time it left Managua. So Joe was able to translate between the driver of our bus (the 6:00 bus from Managua) and the couple that had been waiting at the border for 2.5 hours.

We also made it through the Costa Rican border. We didn't need proof of departure in 90 days when we came to Nicaragua (even though they have the same requirement as Costa Rica, to leave the country every 90 days) and we do have plane tickets home in 6 days but we didn't think to print out our tickets (oops!). We have an email confirmation on our computers but we didn't think to pull it up so that we could show it and since there isn't internet we thought there might be a problem. Another couple on the bus (from Boston) said that they had to go to an internet cafe (in Panama) and pay $3 to get on the internet and another $3 to print off their flight info. We were really hoping it wouldn't come to that because I can think of a lot better ways to spend $6! We were the last ones off the bus, we did our passport stamping and the couple from Boston stayed at the counter with us in case there was anything that we didn't understand. I prayed in line that everything would go smoothly and AMAZINGLY the immigration officer listened to the explanation that we have tickets on Frontier Airlines for May 12th but that we don't have the paper, only a confirmation on the internet. We smiled a lot (we were told that sometimes it can make the difference when we did our border crossing in November) and the immigration officer must have been having a good day because he believed that we were actually leaving the country and stamped our passports on our word. God is so good! Then we had to go to the bus and pull off all 7 pieces of luggage so that they could check them (a very challenging process when we came by bus to Nicaragua). Since we were the last people off the bus, we were also the last in line to get our bags checked. The bus needed to go and we hadn't been checked so our bus driver just brought our bags back to the bus for us. Hmmm....not sure how that works but we already had our passports stamped and no one tried to stop him so we got away easy this time again (last time they opened every single bag and ripped the tape off our 2 boxes of books and left us with the mess to clean up). The only issue we had was not enough time to use the bathroom at the border. So we are stuck with the less than sanitary conditions of a bus restroom (no soap, or toilet paper). As we were leaving we saw the couple that was stuck at the border come in on their bus (an hour behind us) so we were glad to see they got their bus and we were glad to have helped a little.

So now we have made it through the only stressful parts of our bus trip. Now we can sit back, relax, and enjoy the movie. The movie they are showing is Inception. What is it rated? Our kids are watching it in Spanish. I hope it isn't bad. It was funny because when it started Bridget said "I know what this is." I was shocked, "really?" she said "that's what he said, 'Yo se que esta eso.'" "Oh, you were translating, I though you knew what movie you were watching!" She didn't, so I told her it was called Inception and then she asked me to tell her the plot. Yikes, how do you tell someone the plot of Inception? She's watching it and keeps asking me questions about it, but I told her I didn't understand (or remember) enough of the movie the first time I saw it in English, so I probably can't help her. The boys are watching in another row and don't appear to have any questions.

So I am so happy that our Ticabus ride seems to be 100 times better than our Transnica experience. I don't know how much our 2 different experiences had to do with different bus lines and how much had to do with our lack of understanding how the system works and our greatly improved understanding of basic Spanish. But I will only be recommending Ticabus to fellow travelers just to be on the safe side.

So think concludes my bus blogging experience. I hope that nothing else blogworthy happens for the remainder of our trip, about 3 1/2 more hours. (nothing did)

León, Nicaragua

Today we made a trip to León. We have wanted to visit for a while now but every time someone talks about León , they talk about how hot it is there. People in Granada, San Juan del Sur and Managua all talk about how hot León is. This scared me a bit because I think Granada, San Juan del Sur and Managua are plenty hot! But, hotness aside, we still wanted to see it. León is a colonial city much like Granada in architecture but with a different demographic. León is a university city with lots of students. There are several museums, a movie theater and a respectable nightlife. Granada is very much a tourist and expat city filled with restaurants and cafes that locals never go into. Granada and León are rival cities and for years they fought for capital status with the capital city changing back and forth from Granada to León. Liberal regimes elected León as capital and conservative regimes elected Granada as capital until in 1858 when a compromise was agreed upon and Managua was made the permanent capital.

We rode to León with our neighbors who have a daughter who is attending medical school there and their son, whose girlfriend lives (and it was her birthday). The drive was about 2 1/2 hours from Matagalpa. When we arrived we stopped in to visit with our neighbor's daughter at her house. Then we headed for Cafe La Rosita where were told the best brownies in Nicaragua were made. They had cheesecake too and I almost got it but our neighbors said it was OK so I went for the brownie! I was not disappointed. Bridget got Selva Negra cake (Black Forest) and Joey got a 3 layer chocolate cake which tasted like real chocolate cake (most Nicaraguan chocolate isn't anything to write home about). Gus opted to get a brownie and 2 chocolate chip cookies with his 40 cordoba treat allowance. We had a lovely time in a beautiful little cafe figuring out what to do next. We went to the cathedral and the central park. We had planned to go on a tour of the cathedral which was supposed to be 20 cordobas per person (~$1), but when we returned for our tour we were told it was 100 cordobas (~$5) for extraneros. So we decided we didn't need to spend $25 on the tour (when we were expecting $5). We tried to get them to give the kids the local price, but they wouldn't budge (it has worked once or twice so it doesn't hurt to ask, there are no kids prices/meals in Nicaragua, so we get charged for 5 adults most of the time). So we headed out to an art museum where we weren't allowed to take pictures but we could take pictures of the garden. I did get one shot of the garden, where you can see one of the paintings behind it. The art museum was really cool, very diverse. There were lots of religious paintings as well as modern Central American paintings, mixed media, and sculptures. We all really enjoyed all the museum had to offer.

We had lunch at a French bakery that was highly recommended in our guide book. It's called Pan y Paz (bread and peace) and the guide book said they had real sourdough bread. Joey ordered a sourdough baguette and a mango smoothie. He ate the whole thing, although they did cut it in thirds. Gus had a roll and a croissant and ended up with a dusty powdery face. I had broccoli quiche and it was amazing with buttery flaky crust and mango juice which was only lightly sweetened (highly unusual in Nicaragua where all the refrescos are very sweet). It was truly wonderful.

After lunch we went to the museo de la Revolución. The tour guide talked to us (in Spanish) about the history of the revolution and we were able to follow some of it. Fortunately I read The Country Under My Skin by Gioconda Belli which talks about the history of the revolution when she was involved in during the late 70's and 80's but I was pretty lost on the early history about Sandino in the early 1900's. Our tour guide spoke no English but his Spanish was very clear and he answered all our questions. After he told us about the history he took us up to the roof of the museum where we actually walked on the aluminum roof to see the view of the city. Gus' favorite part of the tour was when the guide took us to a balcony window and said, in Spanish, "this is where Sandino would speak to the people, blah, blah, blah" Gus thought it was hilarious. On our way back down from the roof we spotted a birds nest on top of one of the columns in the house.

We wandered around a bit and then met up with our neighbors to go to the Museum of Legends and Traditions. It was "interesting". The museum is located in an old Somoza fort that was used to torture and imprison revolutionaries. The walls are covered with graffiti like paintings of daily life in the fort. The outside walls depict the different types of torture the Somozas used and there is a water torture "station" that is set up in front of the museum. We were all allowed to walk on the narrow wall around the top of the fortress where the railings were broken and rusted away. They did insist that we hold Gus' hand while we were up there. The kids had fun pretending to guard the fort from the turret. There were 2 large mango trees on the grounds and the kids sat around and ate mangoes till they were full. It was nothing like any museum experience I have ever had in the United States.

After the museum we wandered back to the Central Park to decide what to do next. We found out that most of the movies shown in Nicaragua are in English (and only $3) so we decided to check out the local theater and see Rio. We were paying for our tickets when we thought to confirm that it was in English when we were told that it was in Spanish. Apparently movies for kids are all in Spanish as it would be difficult for a 4 year old to read the subtitles. There were a couple of other movies that were in English but they were both rated R. I tried to convince the kids that a Disney movie in Spanish would probably still be funny, but they were adamant that they would rather wait till we get home and see it in English. So now we had time to kill and since we'd been grazing a bit we weren't particularly hungry. We hung out at the Central Park and watched a local artist for a while before we tried to find a restaurant for dinner with our neighbors. We ended up at a place callled Via Via which was recommended to us as a place that's "good for gringos" (that's what the guy on the street told our neighbors). The food was good and cheap. Joe and Joey shared a "filet mingon" (which wasn't a filet mignon but rather a pretty decent steak) and Gus had chicken wings, Bridget had a plate of tajadas (fried plantain chips) and I had refried beans and chips. We weren't particularly hungry. Since it was hot in León we stopped for ice cream and cold Cokes throughout the day. But our light dinner was very satisfying and Joe and I had Mojitos that were the best Mojitos we have ever had. After dinner we headed back to the car and headed back home to Matagalpa. It was a good day and great to see the city. While it was hot, and I wouldn't want to live there, it wasn't as uncomfortable as I had anticipated. I do enjoy the climate in Matagalpa.

Ziplining at Flying Frog in San Juan del Sur

When we first talked about going on an adventure to Central America, we played the ziplining card pretty hard. The kids watched youtube videos of people doing it and were sold. When we moved to San Juan del Sur in August we had 9 months ahead of us and the thought of dropping $150 on 2 hours of fun had us putting it on hold. Then we left San Juan del Sur to visit with friends in Jinotega on October and see if we wanted to live up north and we decided we did. We were suddenly 4 hours away from San Juan del Sur's zipline. As the weeks (yikes) tick away till we return home to Washington we knew we had to get it done. So we planned a trip to San Juan del Sur to check some things off our to do list before we leave Nicaragua. In the morning we checked off "volunteer with the Biblioteca Movil" and in the afternoon we added "zip line canopy tour" to the list!

The pictures and video speak for themselves but we had a great time. We traveled to San Juan del Sur with our friends Jason and Karena and our neighbor (and friend) Raul drove us. All 8 of us went on the zipline tour. It's so much fun to do things with friends! It was a little intense sending my 3 kids off speeding on a zip line high in the air, but everyone did just fine (even me!). Gus told everyone after "there were all these rules and I thought that if you did one thing wrong, you would fall, so I was a little scared, but then it was fun!" I have to admit I was a little concerned too. But we all survived intact and with smiles on our faces. There were 16 cables totaling over 1.5 miles of cable. Some were long some were short some were fast and some were slower. It was awesome!!

Here's video of Joe and Bridget heading off on the first line

Here is Gus and Joey heading off too. I don't like the way Joey's left hand is off the cable when he first starts!

El Cristo

This is just a quick post from our trip to San Juan del Sur. We "hiked" up to El Cristo (the statue of Jesus that overlooks the bay of San Juan). I use the term "hiked" very loosely since Joe hiked up to El Cristo from our house and ran up there when we lived there. We never made it up there as a family when we lived there (it didn't help that I had bronchitis for a month). But we didn't really hike up there. We got a ride up as far as we could drive and we walked about 1/3 of a mile the rest of the way. The last "block" of the trip up is REALLY steep (see photos) so even though we didn't hike up there, it kind of felt like we did.

The "hike" to El Cristo was high on the kids' list of things to do in SJDS. We got up that morning and went out with the Mobile Library to 2 schools just outside of San Juan del Sur, then we had lunch, then we went ziplining, then we went to El Cristo, then the kids played on the beach till it was dark, then we went to dinner. So this was a busy day to say the least. But even though it was a small part of our time in SJDS the view was amazing and the kids really enjoyed it more than I thought they would. No one asked if it was time to go and we probably spent about 45 minutes just checking out the view. Enjoy the beauty...