the rhythm of life here in cabuya is slow. possibly even just a tad too slow, although i think a little bit of boredom is a good thing for our otherwise hectic lifestyles. the days are crazy hot, which has led to copious amounts of hang time on our back porch. including some delicious siestas, which i am so very fond of 😉 our general daily schedule goes a little something like this:
- 6.30am: wake up. take blackie for a walk, make coffee. nayou uses his twenty mins of screen time watching a video or playing minecraft
- 7.30am: coffee round 2, breakfast
- 8am: its starting to get hot. i’ll read to nayou, brenda will potter about. we’re reading a series called the 39 clues which is great because its interesting for adults and children alike. we will work on nayou’s reading, which is coming along really well!
- 10am: now its really hot. lunch, and then craft time. we’ve been slowly stocking up on art supplies, and have a pretty decent arsenal now. our raw materials are mainly stones, sticks and shells scavenged from the beach. more on that later.
- 12pm: siestaaaa! its bloody hot. nayou seems to be unable to nap, so brenda and i need to tag team. if siestas aren’t on the menu, we’ll play cards. our favourites are telefunken, uno, or the minecraft card game. playing with the hose in the garden is also a popular item (aka. “going on a waterfall tour”)
- 2-3pm: the laziness continues until the late afternoon at which point it finally starts to cool down. now its time to head to the beach for a swim.
- 6pm: dinner and a show. we’ve been working our way through some cool documentary series – cosmos, bbc earth, human planet, life in the undergrowth, and austin stevens: snakemaster. costa rica is a great place to think about our greater place in the universe, what with the large number of stars visible in the night sky and all the wildlife about.
- 8-9pm: at this point we’ve been up for a long time! its time for bed and get ready to rinse and repeat again tomorrow 🙂
we’ve all been kind of working on our own little art projects during the day. brenda has been using bbq skewers and toothpicks to paint really cute babushka dolls and decorate seed pods. they have been livening up the house and will probably stay when we leave.
brenda also loves making image transfers from old magazines. she started in vancouver and has carried on here as well:
nayou has been doing his own thing, using his sketch pad and pencils he got from santa (merry christmas, y’all!).
my favourite so far has been this series of me doing yoga. one night i wasn’t wearing any pants, and he dutifully reflected that in his art. those are gonna be framed, for sure.
my project has been what we’ve been calling “mini monos” (mono means monkey is spanish). there are these seed pods all over the beaches here that have faces on them. there is a huge variety in their expressions, and many of the pods have convenient holes that driftwood slots perfectly into.
we are toying with the idea of creating little name tags for each of them, and selling them at a market or something to raise money for tanya, the lady who takes care of the stray animals around cabuya. possibly even seeing if restaurants and cafes in the area would sell them – i think they would be popular with tourists. we’ll see if we can get everything together in time!