June highlights (so far):

• A trip to a park in the city called InBIOParque, a place to educate people on preserving nature and wildlife. See our slide show above with pix! Alden got to hold a Boa Constrictor at its 1st birthday party.
• A trip to Manuel Antonio national park and beach, and Alden petting a white-faced monkey in the wild. Seeing a trend? I think Alden is in heaven. Pictures (and video) coming on that later!
• Staying healthy; I can't tell you how many missionary families at our school are facing sickness and trips to the emergency room on a regular basis! So far, we've been untouched by physical sickness.
• Seth and I celebrating our 15th wedding anniversary on June 4. A fellow student babysat for us so we could have a date. Our gift to each other is learning to scuba dive (there's a very reasonable certification program being taught at our language school for interested students). We can't wait to take our dives on the July 4 weekend!
• Having our class of 7 students over to our place this past Tuesday for a fiesta. We cooked out burgers on the grill and just enjoyed each other's company in English for a change!
• Alden turning around his school performance. Yay for him, and thanks for your prayers! God has taught him much in the last few weeks about working through your problems, being disciplined, not giving up, and forgiving folks when you feel wronged.

Lowlights:

• Having the gas cap to the car stolen right out of the garage (the car barely fits into the garage, so I guess someone reached through the gate and could reach the gas door). Who knew we'd have to have a gas cap with a lock on it -- who knew they even had those?
• Other car problems involving the battery/alternator/radio. We hope they didn't sell us a lemon! If so, we pretty much have no recourse down here.
• Sunburns at Manuel Antonio (we apparently didn't re-apply the sunblock in a timely enough fashion)!
• Nearly getting hit in a car accident yesterday when some crazy driver cut us off in a roundabout.

Check out the new pictures (bigger on the photos page now), and please note that I now have a Facebook account (Andrea Reynolds Sears). It's a kind of fun way to share tidbits and snapshots of what's going on with us, so send me a friend request if you're on Facebook and I haven't established contact yet! Seth also has a new email address, which is seth.r.sears@gmail.com.

Blessings,

Andrea