Friends!!!

Since the Tenny's watched our kids so I could go with Mike to San Andres, we decided to return the favor. While Alex and Nate went up to Cartagena Makayla and Ariana stayed with us. Jay and Amaya had such a great time! The first night Mike and I were in our room and the kids were playing in Jay's room. Ariana and Amaya wandered into our room and when I looked up I was shocked to see this!

Two little ghost babies! Mike and I immediately started laughing. Come to find out Ariana and Amaya had squeezed an entire bottle of Desitin onto their hands, pajamas and faces! Any mom can tell you that original Desitin is nearly impossible to get off of skin, that's kind of the point. Needless to say after a very long shower they were both still pretty greasy. Especially their hair! Silly babies :) It was fun for them while it lasted!

Jay and Mika were so cute together. They had a BLAST playing. They spent most of their time outside. Mike took them rock climbing one morning. They had so much fun. Jay was nervous about it at first but Mika convinced him to try and he ended up loving it!

While they were out climbing the girls were having plenty of fun on their own. They both love ring around the rosy and played it together a lot!

Such sweeties! The weekend was a great success and we've all determined to make this a regular occurrence. Switching off watching each other's kids is a great way to get away! And having the extra littles at our house ended up not being too much extra work. So glad they could come stay.

Castle 3!!!

I don't know how I haven't done any posts about our side business yet but I plan on going back to recap eventually. In the meantime, here are some pictures from our newest Disney-themed vacation home in Anaheim: the Castle House 3, Rapunze's Tower!!! Wow, what a lot of work and what incredible results! I didn't actually go to Anaheim to help with this one but I did help designing some of the rooms and I spent a ton of time and finding and setting up appointments for the furniture on Craigslist. Mike went out for 5 days to help too but it was mostly Tal and Jess (mostly Jess) who got this one up and running. It's going great so far! I can't wait to see it in person someday.

Here are the before pics...

And the after...

9 years and counting

Mike and I celebrated our 9 year anniversary on May 9th. We went to the temple today in Bogota to remember that special day 9 years ago. The temple was so beautiful. It still amazes me that there can be over 100 temples in the world. We are so blessed to live to close to one of them! How crazy that we had to move outside the United States to be closer to the temple. It's only a 15 minute drive, if you don't miss your turn. If you do it might take twice as long... there are way too many one way streets in Bogota and it's nearly impossible to get back to where you want to when you go the wrong way! The temple felt so peaceful. It felt so good to be there. I just seemed to disappear from the world for a few hours and it was wonderful. There weren't a lot of people there but we did get to meet the temple president and his wife. They are very nice. They just moved here from the States too. I hope we can make it back to the temple frequently while we're in Bogota.

An unexpected getaway to San Andres

Mike had to go to the Colombian island of San Andres last week to brief a bunch of navy guys coming in for a ship visit and the Tenny's suggested when they found out that I go with him and leave the kids with them! Seriously, how do we always find such amazing friends wherever we move? It was so unexpected and SO wonderful. It was a perfect 9 year anniversary trip (we celebrate our 9th on May 9th!). The island was beautiful. It's not too touristy like some of the Caribbean islands but the sand is white and the water seven shades of blue.

It is also extremely humid, but that was a welcome change coming from Bogota. San Andres has a varied past having changed hands several times in "recent" history between the British, Spanish, France and even Pirates! English pirate Henry Morgan used San Andres in 1670 as one of the operational centers, attacking Spanish ships carrying gold and other precious material that sailed in the Caribbean waters.The bounty looted by the pirates is still believed to be hidden in some underwater cave in the area. Sadly, we weren't able to locate it. Oh well, we felt rich enough just having an opportunity to vacation there!

We spent our time walking the beaches, swimming in the warm water, laying out in the sun, kayaking, scuba diving, eating yummy dinners, watching movies and sleeping in as late as we wanted. There's nothing like a vacation without kids! Of course we love our little ones but it's so nice to have a break on occasion. We also rented a golf cart one day and toured the island.

It's only about 8 miles long and 2 miles wide. It took us a while drive it though since our cart only went about 10 miles an hour. It was beautiful and relaxing though. The whole trip was wonderful and we are so grateful to the Tenny's for making it happen!