Happy Anniversary!

So blessed to be celebrating my 26th wedding anniversary today! See last year's post because I said it pretty well there. :)

Here are some of my favorite pictures of us from this past year...

So, that's seven pictures. I'd thought I'd shoot for one from each month but then realized I don't have one for each month and have a LOT from our trip to Greece in February to celebrate our silver anniversary, lol. So, here are 19 more pictures from our Greece trip...for a total of 26 pictures from 2022. :)

Yup, this latest year has been full, and I'd still pick Nathan every time. :)

Four on Friday

Continuing to wrap things up a bit...

We've had a lovely, low-key holiday here. Since our trip, we've finished up our Christmas stuff (got most of it done before we left thankfully), celebrated a quiet Christmas (just a handful of gifts since our primary gift was the trip), enjoyed our time together and now are wrapping up our 2022 with Nathan's parents who arrived yesterday. 

Four specific notes to go with these pictures:

1. This year we experimented with and learned how to make fudge. We made a number of batches to gift to friends and neighbors and ate a fair bit ourselves as we figured out which flavors to make and how to package it. :) 

2. We repeated our climbing wall Christmas tree this year...stringing lights on the climbing wall in a tree shape and hanging our ornaments from the lights. It worked out particularly well for us since we were gone in the middle of the month, so having a live tree didn't make good sense for us.

3. The boys all did a good and thoughtful job of choosing gifts for each other and us. The wrapping of said gifts varied, lol. Micah just put things in grocery bags. :)

4. As a "gift" to Noah, I relented and agreed to play Monopoly. My standing policy has always been a refusal to play, though Noah always asks. (No idea why he likes the game or where he played it with others, lol.) I don't know that we've ever played it altogether before this Christmas but we did. Unsurprisingly, Noah won. ;P

As I said, we're just enjoying the end of the year and Nathan's parents are here. So...back, now, to visiting and playing games and all that. Hope your year is wrapping up nicely, too!

Thankful Thursday: Curacao wrap up edition

I'll be back tomorrow to talk more about Christmas and all. In the meantime, here's a bit of a wrap up of things I'm thankful for related to our trip to Curacao...(in no particular order)...

1. Time together. Obviously, we all live together right now and spend plenty of time together. But, in our day to day life, it's easy to get distracted and stay busy doing our own things. During our trip, we had plenty of down time for actual conversations. I particularly enjoyed the debates about the rankings of things like Marvel movies and vegetables. :) 

2. Age of boys. Just like all the parents who tell you to cherish your kids when they're little, I'm well aware of the time. I'm actively appreciating the age my boys are now. They're all pretty much independent (two have lived on their own and one desperately wants to) so traveling together is definitely easier than when they were younger. They're old enough, too, that we can split up when we're traveling...it doesn't have to be all of us doing an activity or going to a site. It's lovely, really. 

3. Getting home when we did. Even though we had some travel inconveniences, we'll take that. We're incredibly thankful that we got home when we did and recognize that ours were just inconveniences, not problems. So glad to have made it home before the extreme weather and travel messes across the country.  

4. Toilet paper in the US. Maybe I'm spoiled. Maybe I haven't traveled enough. Either way, I'm thankful for toilet paper here in the US. So far all of the other countries I've visited have had less nice toilet paper. It's definitely not a deal breaker or anything. I'm just saying...I'm thankful for the toilet paper here at home.

5. Air conditioning, low humidity. I enjoy time at the beach and warm weather during winter. Definitely. I also, though, very much appreciate things like air conditioning and lower humidity. Yup. Even though it's considerably easier to pack for warm weather vacations, I may actually prefer cooler weather most of the time...or at least I want my warm weather to go with dry conditions rather than humid. ;) 

6. Pokemon. Okay, this one seems odd, right? During our trip, we learned that Micah has shockingly little knowledge about animals in general...and what he does "know" seems to come from Pokemon, lol. It made for some interesting and hilarious comments.

7. People who speak English. I've said it before but I'll say it again. Thank you to the millions (billions?) of people who speak English. I'm so grateful to be able to enjoy and participate in more cultures despite only speaking English. 

8. Facebook groups and Pinterest. I'm a planner. If you know me, you know this. Ahead of the trips we take, I do a good bit of research. Facebook groups and Pinterest are my friends. Thankful that these things exist and enable me to learn more about a place before we get there so that we can do our best to make the most of our time. Heck, even while we were in Curacao I was able to post to the Curacao Visitors Forum group to ask for recommendations on where to watch the World Cup final game. The responses were almost immediate and quite helpful. :)

9. Tropical cocktails. Yup, I ordered a number of fun cocktails while we were in Curacao. Sometimes I knew what was in them, sometimes I didn't. (Literally, on the catamaran, I told the guy to just surprise me a couple times, lol.) We'd have loved to bring back some authentic Curacao actually from Curacao but opted not to bring back any liquor, having heard some horror stories of dealing with customs in Miami. Thanks to our distillery tour, though, we do know how to verify the genuine product here in the states. Maybe I'll learn how to mix my own cocktails. :) 

10. The ability to travel. Overall, too, I'm so incredibly thankful that we're in a position to be able to travel. We're tremendously blessed and we know it.

Okay, that's it for now. It was a good trip. :) 

Curacao-Part 4

Okay, almost done! :) 

DAY 9 Sunday: Our last full day in Curacao found us heading to the Mambo Blvd area to The Green House. (I'd asked on a Curacao Visitor group on Facebook and received numerous recommendations and this place got the most votes.) We managed to snag one of the last tables and settled in to watch the World Cup finals. We ate and drank and cheered and had a great time enjoying the game alongside everyone else there watching...

Since the game went to overtime and penalty kicks, we had to hurry when we left there...and returned to the theater to watch Black Panther 2 and enjoy more air conditioning (and the cheaper movie tickets). (PSA: Watching a movie in English, that's subtitled in Spanish, means that when the movie actually speaks in Spanish, you don't get subtitles. Yeah. We're going to have to watch it again, lol.) 

We had dinner once again at Bayside Restaurant (with four of us ordering the karni stoba this time, lol) and played more Dutch Blitz before packing.

DAY 10 Monday: We finished packing and checked out about 10 and headed to the Ostrich Farm for the 11:00 tour. We didn't realize that there would be so many animals beyond ostrich...

Also, I didn't realize that peacocks liked to perch up high, lol. We saw peacocks, warthogs, iguanas, emus, and crocodiles. (There were also chickens...which seem to be for the crocodiles, lol.)

Anyhow. Our terrific tour guide drove us around the farm and taught us all kinds of things about ostrich (in both English and Dutch based on our tour group)...

...and let us all stand on an ostrich egg at the end to show how strong they are. (Also, tangent to say that multi-lingual people freakin' rock. I'm so very impressed by people who speak more than one language and so appreciative for everyone who makes my life easier by knowing English.) 

Toward the end of the tour, we also got to feed the ostriches...from a bowl and from your hand if you were brave enough... 

The boys declined the offer to feed the ostrich from their hands, and I didn't do it very well, lol. The ostrich are a bit aggressive and bit my fingers (fortunately, they don't have teeth), causing me to drop most of the food. Twice. :) 

(Note: I'd read ahead of time that we might be able to ride an ostrich and was looking forward to that. On account of how unpredictable, not smart and aggressive the ostrich are, though, they don't let you ride them these days, and I'm good with that.) 

After our tour, we enjoyed lunch there at their restaurant. Nathan and I had ostrich burgers. ;) 

We then drove down the road a bit and stopped briefly at the Aloe Plantation. Unfortunately, their tour times didn't line up with our schedule but we had a nice few minutes reading their information boards and such before continuing on to the airport.

We had plenty of time at the Curacao airport (we'd been told we should get there 3 hours before our flight but had more than enough time), flew to Miami and then endured the Miami airport for hours. Nathan, Asher and I already have Global Entry and TSA Precheck but Noah and Micah did not. We'd gotten them conditionally approved but they needed an enrollment on arrival interview to complete the process. (You can do the interviews at a number of airports--like the other three of us did--but the backlog on interviews was almost a year...so they asked people to do the interviews when they re-enter the country instead.) 

So, we waited more than an hour in the immigration/customs line as we were directed (they said the enrollment on arrival interview would be when we got in front of a person checking our passports). When we got to the booth, the man there (who was one of the few friendly people we encountered at the Miami airport) instructed us to go to a secure room and wait for another 60-90 minutes for the official interview. Fortunately, having been forewarned about the Miami airport, our flight home wasn't until the next day so we figured we'd just get it done. And the secure waiting room (which we weren't allowed to leave once we entered) had Shrek 2 on the tv so that was something, lol. (Course, it also had four employees sitting behind the desk discussing how to switch the tv to Monday night football for an hour rather than helping the line get done faster.) 

Anyhow. We finally got that done (all that waiting for two minutes of having their fingerprints taken), caught our shuttle to our hotel, got to our room before 11pm and crashed. It wasn't a lot of sleep but it was better than trying to sleep on a plane or in airport chairs. :) And then we got up and caught the 5am shuttle back to the airport. We happily said goodbye to Miami and made it home to Denver, found our van, grabbed some lunch and drove home. Whew.

So, that was our trip to Curacao! 

I'll be back later with some wrap up and such. I need to get back to finishing Christmas prep now. :) 

Curacao-Part 3

Lots more pictures still...

DAY 8 Saturday: Saturday was a bit of a lazy morning. (Sidenote: I find that trips with boys require more time for sleeping, lol.) We headed back into town to try to do a bit of souvenir shopping and got lunch at El Gordo Grill again (town was quieter with no cruise ships in port). Nathan also managed to watch the end of the World Cup third place game and I found a number of murals...

Yup, the artwork was impressive (and this is just a small sample...some I didn't get pictures of because it was dark and some we didn't make it to but I've seen in photos so know we missed them).

After that, we headed to the north end of the island to Shete Boka national park, which we enjoyed right up until their closing time at 4:30. We stopped at three of the bokas...pocket bays with waves pounding against coral rock formations...

The pictures really don't do justice to the awe and beauty.

From there, we drove to Playa Jeremi...a nice little beach south of Grote Knip (where we went on Tuesday). It was basically empty and we enjoyed some time there while Nathan snorkeled, I beachcombed, Noah photographed, Asher flipped, and Micah meditated. 

At sunset, we continued on and stopped at the Bahia Beach Restaurant overlooking Playa Lagun for dinner.

That top left photo is just a beach we stopped at along the way (Playa Kalki or Playa Piscado maybe??). We didn't even walk down but I thought it was pretty. :) Next is a cat Micah found at Playa Jeremi...my cocktail at dinner...Playa Lagun...and Asher and Micah enjoying the Christmas decoration at dinner. 

Okay...almost done...