I am sitting in front of a wood burning fire watching the sunset over the ocean. My husband is cooking dinner and the kids are happily painting together at the table. I was sitting here reflecting on how fortunate I am in life, and decided perhaps this was a good time to blog.
We planned to not overschedule the kids with activities this year, but somehow we are still running them around continually. They have track and field twice per week, multisport twice per week, homework club twice per week, and flamenco guitar lessons once per week. The only good thing is that they are both signed up for the same activities at the same time. They also seem to have a lot of homework which occupies most of our evenings. Weekends, however we reserve for exploring!
In January we went to Gibraltar and hiked to the top of the rock to visit the monkeys. It was strange to hear and read English everywhere we went. I kept saying gracias, because it just seemed strange and foreign to say thank you. We went to Ronda and saw the oldest bullring in Spain, and hiked to the bottom of the canyon which runs through the town spanned by a very impressive and old stone bridge. We went quadding through the hills and small towns to the north of us, finding the lost city with a population of 5 where we stopped for coffee and cakes. We went paragliding above our town and had the most spectacular view of where we live. We went gokarting with friends, Shane went fishing and brought home dinner for us. We also ventured out climbing, biking, geocaching, hiking, paddling and just plain exploring.
Our spanish was not improving as quickly as we had hoped, so Shane and I registered for private lessons 3 times per week. We are still attending the free group lessons twice per week as well, so by the time we do our homework, and study on our own, we are spending many hours attempting to learn this language.
We are living 10-15 minutes out of town, so once we are home in the evenings, we are not typically motivated to leave again. This means that most evenings are spent with just the 4 of us, visiting or playing games. With our children quickly aproaching their teens, we are savouring the quality family time we get to have this year while they still like us (most days at least).
We have also adjusted to small fridges, and the need to grocery shop every day or two. We are getting to know the vendors at our local market, and have found eating healthy to be easy here with the abundance of fresh fruits, vegetables and seafood.
The weather has been off and on. Most days have been in the mid teens, however, we have had a few cold days, including one where I actually saw snow flakes. The evenings get cold, and a stone house with no insulation gets really cold, but we love the wood burning fireplace in the living room, and have lots of blankets on the beds. During the cold months, we have been missing our hot tub, and being away from home, we have been missing renovation projects...okay, not really, but it is strange to not be renovating something, so...we took on a project here and we built ourselves a temporary sauna. It took three attempts, but we finally mastered it. The first attempt, we built too big, because to Shane bigger is always better, but we couldn't get it hot enough. Attempt two was better, but the wooden umbrella frame blew apart in a major wind storm. On our third attempt, we found a dicarded, broken patio umbrella frame, cut it down to size, covered it in poly and secured it down with bricks. Then we heated flat rocks in a fire and brought them in. Splashing water on the hot rocks gave us a steam sauna so hot, some of us were begging to stop. The steam was so thick you couldn't see the person sitting next to you. It brought back memories for me of saunas we would build on the beach at Shuswap Lake in the summers as a child.
La vida es bueno!
Kristin
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