2022 At a Glance

February

 -Grayson got a big boy bed!

March

-Lucas lost his first tooth

April

-finally took a camping trip to the Dugway Geode beds—some 9 years in the making. It turned into one of the worst camping trips, but memorable. I achieved one of my childhood dreams of finding my own geode. 

-Grayson turned two

May

-went to the tulip festival with all the Washburn women

June

-Lucas turned seven

-Stephen finally got to go back to work at the office after 2.5 years of being home since the pandemic hit. 

July

-spent a week at Mount Rushmore with mom and dad, Joseph’s and Adam’s families. That was such a fun week! But I also had one of the biggest scared of my life with Hannah almost getting hit by a car.

August

-Hannah turned five and had her first birthday party

-went to Bear Lake

-Zander and Lucas started karate  they both have earned their orange belts

October

-Zander placed first in his first karate tournament. Lucas placed third. They both did amazing!

-We were one of the first ones to stay at the cabin after it had been completed. 

-Grew my first rainbow corn crop!

-Hannah’s first dance recital

November

-Zander turned nine

-We took the two older boys with us to Costa Rica for Thanksgiving. They both got to play in the ocean for the first time. Zander learned how to surf. I got to walk and swim through the rainforest  Another childhood dream come true for me.

It was a fun year with two really fun big vacations we got to go on. We have been so blessed to live the life we have. We all have our health and are happy. 

New Years

 Ringing in 2023! 

Christmas Continued

 We stayed at the cabin overnight to have the Pettingill family Christmas party. We had lots of fun, but I felt like it was so short. We played games, had dinner, and Stephen won the pot this year. There was $53.40. I was off by exactly $1.00. Them Joseph did the nativity. We played a “pass the present” game with the nativity story. I’m pretty sure every one of our kids ended up with a present. Scott and Sydney gave us homemade cookie dough, puppy chow, and several loaves of sweet breads. It was awesome. The kids got to go sledding the next morning with uncle Brad towing them around the pasture behind the four wheeler. I wish I had taken pictures. 

When we got home Stephen and I did our annual scavenger hunt for the kids so they could find their new pjs. They got Spider-Man and Frozen Jammies and a new book.

This is the best I could get Christmas morning before heading to church, lol.

This was my favorite gift. Lucas gave me an envelope with a quarter and a slip of paper in it that read, "Dear Mom, I hope you have a good Christmas. Love, Lucas" 

Christmas

 Another fun dinner party at Uncle Loren’s house. Grayson loved getting to meet Santa. After everyone got their gifts Santa announced that our whole family will be going on a Caribbean cruise to the Dominican Republic courtesy of Grandma Washburn and Loren and Debbie. Along with the cruise we all decided that since we were going to be in Orlando anyway, why not go to Disney World for a week, so that’s this next years big vacation.

Costa Rica Part 4

 Day Four

We went to church Sunday morning...or rather a baptism. We got there and found out they were doing a baptism of a woman and that they had stake conference that day, so we stayed for the baptism and got lunch. On the way to lunch Lucas started throwing up. Poor kid was having a hard time. We made it back to the condo to get packed up to make our way back into San Jose to stay at a hotel since our plane left at 6:00 AM Monday morning. We left in the afternoon so we'd have time to stop at Crocodile Bridge and give us plenty of time to get to the hotel in daylight, but we were so wrong, lol. Traffic was a nightmare and it was raining cats and dogs. I mean it was bad and scary. There are potholes all over the highway that we were constantly having to dodge, the sun was going down, and we had our 7 year old throwing up in the car. What should have been a 2.5 hour drive ended up being almost 5 hours of drive time, and we didn't get to bed until around 9:00. Anyway, because it was raining there weren't many crocodiles out as there normally is. This bridge is home to the largest congregation of American crocodiles in the world! And they are huge 15 foot long beasts.

We finally made it home Monday afternoon, and flew straight into a winter snow storm. We went from hot and humid and playing on the beach to a freezing snow storm and playing in the snow in a short 24 hour period. Again, this vacation was so amazing and probably something we'd only get to do this one time. 

Here are some more random photos from the trip.

Costa Rica Part 3

Our family got up early to see the tide pools, but we weren't able to get out there at the lowest tide before we had to leave. And it started raining on us, but that didn't stop us from having fun climbing on the rocks and collecting seashells. We saw some crabs, but that's about it. 

 Pure Vida! Saturday we split up. Most of Shule and Loren's families went ziplining, and I would have loved to do that, but we decided to take a chocolate tour instead. We went back into Jaco and joined four other people to learn all about cocoa trees, the wildlife, and how cocoa beans turn into chocolate. We got to taste the cocoa beans right out of the pod. They looked like animal innards if I'm being really honest. They look disgusting, but tasted really good if you sucked on them. They tasted like mango and passionfruit. Then we got to taste them raw, dried, roasted, and finally ground with sugar which was the best tasting stage. The boys loved it and gorged themselves on chocolate. We saw lots of morphos butterflies flitting around too.

That afternoon we all met back at the house and a small group of us headed to the beach for some surfing lessons. This is what Zander had been waiting to do. It had been raining all that day, but suddenly there was a break in the clouds just in time for us to surf. Lucas didn't want to do this either, but he got a boogie board and played in the waves. Zander was a natural! He was so good, and was able to stand on his board about 75 percent of the time. The others had a harder time with it, but fun was had. Our instructor, Jorge, gave us some lounge chairs, and set up a table with ripe fruit and coconut water to drink. It was fabulous.