Pics of Samara

We parked a little far away from the RMs favorite spot, thinking they wanted to try something new, but then the kids all decided they wanted to play on the reef and watch crabs, so we walked west to the reef.


The reef behind the kids. Melodie drew a hopscotch game in the sand.

All right, now we're all set up. Who wants a sandwich? Melanie on PB&H (honey) duty

Lily and one of the twins feeding sand covered cookies to each other and to the RM's dog Sadie

Abi and Leah are good friends.


Here they are playing in the mud


And all the boys in the mud


Rachael and me

Boys Bangin' Coconuts

The boys love getting down coconuts and cutting them open. It's cute. And all the rest of the kids love to stand around and watch the process.


Michael - working up a sweat - can you see it dripping down his face?


Michael kept one and Joe took another one home, worked on it for an hour...


and I was then treated to a delicious tropical smoothie this morning: Papaya, coconut water, bananas, and pineapple! Mmmm.... (with a little vanilla stevia, thanks to Kristi Approved for introducing that into my life. Very glad I brought that from the US, although I don't think it will last me through our stint in Chile...)

Samara - The Drive Down

Leaving the home in Nicoya -

Ready to leave. Everything looks normal here, Officer (right?) Just don't anyone say "Hey kids!" to the crowd in the back or it'll totally blow our cover.


Woah, woah! How many kids you have in there? There are 14, Mr. Officer, sir. Those children two years and under are secured in car seats on the van benches. The rest will have to fend for themselves as they are all in a pile in the back. What are ya gonna do? We gotta get to the beach somehow, and we can't leave them or make them walk, right?

First, gotta fill'er up. Then to the Maxi Bodega (CR version of Walmart) for 4 loaves of bread for sandwiches and lots of Pozuelo cookies. The kids were jammin' to Ace of Base while we ran in for food. Made us Mom's laugh. They are having fun, we love it.

It's about an hour drive from Nicoya to Samara. It is a beautiful drive, similar to going up a canyon in Utah in that you're winding your way around the corners and streams. Different in that in Utah you're going up or down the mountain. Here on the drive to Samara, you are going up and down the whole time, like a roller coaster, going up the hill and then down the hill and up the little mountain and down over the bridge, I almost felt dizzy on some of the really curvy parts.

I also was quite distracted by the scenery - I'm too much like my Dad that way. I was in my car following the RMs, and they were frequently out of sight cause I was looking around and (tisk tisk) trying to take pictures. Listen, it's not my fault... there's no space on these roads to pull over for a quick stop, nor is their any shoulder to squeeze onto for a moment to snap a photo, so I did the best I could snapping with one hand holding the camera and the other hand on the steering wheel. I really wish I could have stopped, it was beautiful. Like a fairytale. Maybe like a tropical version of the rolling hills of England, cows grazing, beautiful slopes and hills, small cottages t

They have small trees that double as their fence posts, so that's what the blurry images getting in the way of these gorgeous hills are. Look close, can you see the hill behind? It was so pretty. I wish I could go again and walk and take pictures with a really good camera. Maybe I can find some online quickly...

I also thought someday I'd love to come here at night, take a blanket, and lay down on one of the hills and just stare at the stars. I'm sure they've got to have a lot of stars visible here, there are hardly any houses or lights. It was beautiful. Could be my promised land if I was a Pilgrim looking for a place to freely live my life and worship God. But I'm married to a Puritan, so I'm a Puritan also. Do you know what the difference is between Pilgrims and Puritans? Corey will tell you, or I can too. Listen to Michael Medved's Thanksgiving Lecture. Corey is a Puritan, and thus so am I, that's why we're off on another adventure next week!

Trash or Treasure

I've got one week until departure. Today I accomplished one thing to help us get there: I cleaned the upstairs where there are three kids rooms. It took me about an hour, but that doesn't count the time I plan on spending tomorrow to wash the walls where Lily, bless her heart, keeps drawing with pens on the cheaply painted walls. Magic Erasers get it off, but they also take the paint with it. My apologies to the owner of this house.

You know, it's really easy to houseclean a small house where rooms are small and when you don't have a lot of stuff to begin with. All of their clothes have been moved downstairs. Pillows, blankets, legos, and Webkinz are allowed to remain upstairs. So the only other thing to deal with was all the paper on the floor. Is it garbage or is it a special drawing, perhaps an important family document? Most of it was trash, and I am very grateful for the garbage bags here for lawn clippings. They are the perfect size for the mess my 7 kids make. As I sorted through the garbage, I did find one gem that made me pause, smile and love my cute kids.


I think if you click on the above image it will enlarge for you to see. It reads as follows (misspellings in original document):

Attention kids Dont Let mom see this. If you dont understand this ask melodie what it says. next morning Lets All wake up and instead of turning on the tellavision Lets all clean up for no Darn reason. If we cant do it that day we will do it the next day. And try to be good the rest of the Day. Though Im pretty sure we will not succseed. you dont have to. But I think Its a good Idea. so Im going to do it. If Your doing it sighn Your name --> _____



Joe, Melodie, Ethan and Hyrum all signed it. I smiled as I confronted Melodie and asked her when this paper should have been dated - there was lots of garbage on the floor, and I didn't notice if/when this "clean the house and be good" event particularly happened. She said it was just from this week. So that was fun, she laughed and I laughed. I told her my favorite part was the "for no darn reason" - Love it. I also liked the "I'm pretty sure we will not succeed." I love my kids! They make me laugh. 5 points for Gryffindor.

The Family Car

So here we are driving in Costa Rica. After Samara beach, we stopped to say a last goodbye to the RMs as we parted ways in Nicoya - them for their home, us heading back to Villareal. They said they had to get a picture of all of us jammed into our 5 person car.

Me and the 7 kids cause Corey's gone in Chile, yes, that makes 8 people in a 5 person capacity car. Shhh - don't tell the car rental people! And this isn't even our record. I'll try to get a picture of us on the way to church this Sunday, cause I think Esteban and Magaly will need a ride again... So if they come with us, that will make our 8 plus 2 more = 10 people. Thankfully those 2 are skinny and my 7 are small.

I actually have very fond memories of road trips as a kid in our white Buick station wagon, other memories in our hatchback Nissan Datsun -
(could be our old station wagon, minus the wood paneling... who would do that to a car?)
(almost like our Nissan - my sweet set of wheels during highschool)

...we'd just fold the seats down, everyone would grab their pillow and blanket and claim their space - we drove like that to Disneyland, up to Idaho to visit Grandma and Grandpa Hibbert, it was so fun. If we were driving at night in the Nissan, we could position ourselves to see the stars as we were laying down by the back window. What freedom! And lo and behold, we are all alive to tell the tale. My 2 cents right now as I'm basking in this lack of strict law enforcement of seatbelt laws... you're gonna die when your gonna die. If your work is done on this earth, God will take you home. He'll let you drown or let you get sick, if he needs you he'll take you. (knock on wood that no kid dies at the beach tomorrow) - So always choose the right and say a prayer of thanksgiving for another day of life. I survived my youth of driving around sleeping on a pillow in the car, we survived our time in Brazil driving around this way, and once again with a prayer and putting our lives in His hands, we are safe at home and have been safe while Corey's been gone. We're doing the best we can in our current circumstances.

Still, I'll admit, this is definitely not the safest way to drive with a 5 year old, huh? Wesley would surely be the first go through the windshield in an accident. And not only am I driving at night with a child straddling the stick shift, but as has probably occurred to you by the very existence of this photograph, I'm talking a picture of myself while I'm driving that way. In my defense this is a dirt road in the middle of nowhere in Costa Rica and I am not driving very fast (too many potholes). Still, I'm sorry for being recklessness. ...although I'll probably have to do it again tomorrow.

Here are the 7 and 8 year olds ~ asleep in the front passenger side of the car equipped with airbags. (That one was also taken by me while I was driving... bad Mom.) Thank you all for your prayers, I'm sure it's YOU that are keeping us alive! Thank you and we love you all! See you in a few months.

Samara Beach

Today we went to Samara Beach. I'm usually behind the camera, so we grabbed a kid and made him take a picture of the three of us. Hyrum did a great job, don't you think? Centered, positioned well, I was impressed!


Just another day in Costa Rica, where you'll always find young Mormon mother's from Utah!

Bread, PB&J, 8 packages of Pozuelo Cremas cookies, diapers, wipes, folding chairs, um, what else did we pack?

Oh yeah, 19 kids.
It looked like a school class field trip!
I thought it was very funny. Love it.

Kids having a mud-ball fight, since there's no snow.
First Michael (next to Joe) got Ethan...

Then Ethan got Joe

It's Two Face!!

I took lots of pictures, wanted to get some uploaded before I go to bed. I'll post more tomorrow!

Coco Joe

Joe's ability to climb palm trees began back in our BYU MBA days...

Living at Wyview Student Family Housing brought us together with families from all over the world, people from Chile, Yap, Guam, you name it. Tonga is another one of those countries. We would see the Tonga kids climbing up the black lampposts like they were palm tree trunks. "Hey Joe! You should learn to do that" said Corey, and the quest began. Joe learned to climb the lamppost in the front yard of our Sandy home. Here in Costa Rica, he's gotten to try the real thing.


It was a lot harder than the lamppost. I'm sure because of the trunk is thicker than the lamppost. Joe said his feet couldn't stick on the bark. I wasn't too excited about him doing it in his Sunday clothes. Luckily we've been back to visit lots and he's had other chances to pick a coconut. He got 3 coconuts on Thanksgiving.

Jacob and Dannan broke through those for him, Joe cleaned out the coconut meat. Has a texture like really rubbery and slippery ham. Joe brought one home and on Friday, after working on it for a half hour he'd gotten through.


Seems like an unusually large amount of work to do for a small amount of food.


But I am grateful! The coconut makes my fruit smoothies delicious! I love coconut! :)

Thank you to Joe, the coconut kid.

We Are A Cyber Family

Corey - Santiago, Chile 10:23 p.m.
(isn't he handsome?)

Tiffanie and kids - Villareal, Costa Rica 7:23 p.m.

Like Plankton of Bikini Bottom, Corey now has a computer wife!

and computer children...

Who miss their daddy...

They want to play with and abuse him! Corey does the best he can as a digital image by coming to eat them...

Let's hear it for Skype and webcams!

It's funny that when we talk to each other with the video, we really don't talk much. Corey put it best, (he usually does, he is so witty) "All this technology so we can sit and stare at each other." Amazing.

Corey's Happy Surf Day

We went to the beach Monday night. Sort of a FHE, sort of a surfing farewell for Corey. We parked a little too far south on the beach (my fault) so had to walk to the surfboard rental shops and to the part of the beach where there weren't rocks.

Corey went and rented a surfboard and two boogie boards. He looked so macho walking back with his boards that I wanted a picture. I was too slow fumbling around for my camera, so I had to tell him to stop walking... "Ok... got my camera, it's on, ok, go!" He stands there. "No no, pretend you're walking" I said, and this is what he gave me.

Isn't that hilarious? That is his "I'm casually walking to the beach" pose. "Oh fine, just stand there then if you're gonna walk like that."

Ok, I guess that'll have to do. Here's our handsome hero for his last hurrah.

The man and boys got situated, who gets to go first, who gets which board...

Joe's heading out

There we go! That's the "walk" I was looking for! Bent knee, casually walking, looks natural!

...only now I can't see his face. Blast. No dashing features to grace the photo, but oh well...

These four kiddos got busy doing what they do best


Lily in her squat, love it, patting the sand with Mel. She eats the sand, I think she's iron deficient or something. The kids kept making mud balls - They'd go to the waves and get wet sand, run up with it to the dry sand, throw it in and roll it around and it would make a good ball of dirt. Lily thought it was an apple and would bite it.

Then she chased me around trying to get me to try it too. No Lily, I will not partake of your fruit of the tree of dirt!


But she is persistent. And cute. Hmm, well, okay, just one bite.

Cute kids.