Easter

Mary Laine and I made Easter cookies for her school egg hunt and party.

Mary Laine was holding Langdon's hand and making sure that he was included (for the 2 seconds while I took this picture)

Mary Laine and Annie

Mary Laine and Ann Grace

My dad was in the hospital on Easter morning (he's fine now), so I get a big fat F for my picture-taking. The blurry photo below is the only pic of my kids in their Easter clothes.

But the focus remained. Mary Laine is really starting to get a better grasp of the crucifixion. She learned about the crown of thorns and had alot of questions about that. It lead to some great discussions about our need and how Christ filled it. Hallelujia, what a Savior!

March 2013

Here is a glimpse of what we were up to in March:

Aunt Sis came to visit

Gary took Mary Laine to play golf one morning

Cheering for Florida Gulf Coast in the NCAA tournament

Potty Training

Playing with Uncle Wa-Wa

Driving the jeep around the yard

Learning to garden

There were chickens at the garden show

Going for a walk and buying lemonade from our friends' stand

Terrible picture, but I usually forget to take them of Langdon with his buddies. Here is one of  Langdon and Cole

With Mrs. Streeter (whose house we bought)

Playing in our new front yard

Cheering for the rebels in the tournament

Learning how to use the computer at the library

Mary Laine has been practicing her letters

Gary and I ran the Viking Half Marathon (my first!)

A friend got a picture of him crossing the finish line. With as fast as he ran it (1 hour, 34 minutes), I'm surprised that he didn't roll across the finish line!

Gary placed second in our age group

Costa Rica 2013

Gary and I took a much-anticipated trip to Costa Rica to celebrate our 10-year anniversary. It was such a great trip! Since we had just sold our house, we contemplated calling to have the kids sent down and just moving to Costa Rica. Pura vida!

Got the rental car and we're ready to go!

Our first stop was the Arenal Volcano region. The volcano was active, but we couldn't see any lava. We stayed at Nayara and it was amazing. The hotel is made up of private bungalos. Great start to the vacation!

View from our room at Nayara

This macaw joined us for breakfast at the hotel every morning. He could say "hola"! 

I always love the fun pillow animals

View from the restaurant at the bottom of the mountain where we ziplined

Ready to zip line

This is our "famous" person of the trip. I don't remember his name, but he writes a travel blog and Gary had watched several of his videos before our trip.

If you can see a little yellow speck, it's me (Kathryn) coming down the zip line

These are Coati Mundis that we saw at lunch after zip lining

Another view from our hotel room

From Arenal, our next stay was Papagayo Bay, but we stopped on the way to hike Rio Celeste

Hiking Rio Celeste

Beautiful river views

Waterfall at Rio Celeste

The water was so pretty!

Soaking our feet in the natural hot springs

The Hilton Papagayo exceeded our expectations.

One of the views from the Hilton Papagayo

View from our room

Relaxing by the bay

We went into Tamarindo one day for surfing lessons.

Ready for surfing lessons

Getting the hang of it

Tandem surfing - ha!

We LOVED our instructor

That night, we went to our favorite dinner spot. It's called Mario's, but it's just Mario and his wife, Ericka, cooking at their home. They usually have 3 couples each night, but since Ericka was pregnant with her fourth child, it was just us that night. The food was amazing, and Mario actually talked to us about the local culture and the food that he was cooking through the kitchen window while we ate. Such a fun experience!

One of the few things that was on my "must-see" list while we were there were monkeys. And I was beginning to realize that we weren't going to just happen upon any monkeys, so we decided to take a river cruise along Palo Verde to see some wildlife. Our guide got the monkeys to come down to the boat so that we could see them up-close and personal. We also saw some howler monkeys up in the trees, but all of those pictures came out blurry. 

We got to go kayaking around Papagayo Bay (and Gary went snorkling later that day). I have a bad history with jellyfish, which we saw alot of on our kayaking trip, so I opted out of the snorkling.

We saw a "Jesus Christ" lizard by the pool - there were actually two there that day and they got into a fight!
(They got that name because they walk on water)

Infinity pool

So much fun. If we ever fall off the map, chances are we've probably up and moved to Costa Rica!