Week 32 in PR

It’s springtime around here! Without living here it would be hard to notice the subtle changes in temperature, rain or foliage on the island. But now we are accustomed to the smallest changes happening around us and it’s exciting! A really beautiful tree, the African tulip, has been in bloom all over the island for a month or so. Big beautiful orange flowers can be seen everywhere and I love it! But it’s just preparing us for my favorite tree of all, the Flamboyan, to be in full bloom within the next month or so. Even though the temperature is still so pleasant and warm, the trees go through dormant times and lose their leaves and blossoms for a certain amount of time during the year. All winter the flamboyan trees around here have been completely bare, but just this week the leaves are starting to come back and pretty soon they will be filled with their orange or yellow flowers that make the whole tree look like it’s on fire! I love these so much and am so looking forward to having them back in full bloom after the winter! 

Anyway, here we are in spring on the island! The kids just started their last quarter at school and of course now can’t wait until summer break. School is just school no matter where you live :) We’ve had a great week with lots of random things going on. Here’s a quick peek into our week:

We look forward to Monday nights when we have the missionaries for dinner. We’ve grown to love every set of elders that comes and goes from our branch and mostly love having them part of our lives! 

We started doing one day a week tutoring from home instead of at school. Liev and keen have needed just a bit more one on one attention to their Spanish so we brought them home for it and it has been awesome! Love having some close up time with my oldest boys. 

Randomly there have been two or three different water main breaks this week in Palmer right by each of the schools. So of course that made for shortened school days multiple times this week since the schools were without water for periods of time. It’s always something…

I ran my last 20 miler this week and that pretty much is the end of my intense marathon training. I have been doing most of my training around the parking lot of the gym (a two mile loop) early in the mornings. For this last run we took it downtown and I ran around the lagoon in Condado and up to San Felipe del Morro and back. It was fun to switch it up and was such a beautiful morning to run along the lagoon! Josh ran part of it with me and it’s always great to have my trainer along with me :) So grateful for him and his support with my crazy running schedule! 

Keen was so proud that he finally hit the 100 lb mark. It was a big day for that boy! 

Another milestone: Liev got his first pack of wife beaters and looks like a true Puerto Rican now. No turning back boy. 

I’ve been working on getting our house listing up for airbnb and took pictures of lots of the rooms this week. It took some effort to clear it out of all our personal stuff and make it look nice and rentable. I got a lot of the rooms done this week and got the pictures ready to go. It’s looking so nice! I’d rent it :)

We had projects going on outside as well. Josh called his friend Ramos and had him come down and spend the day with his tractor in the jungle behind our house. We have been trying to figure out the drainage that comes into and out of our yard and decided that it needs to be channeled behind the house and wall first and that will help with the water leaking under our wall and into our house. So Ramos made a big trench to help guide the water into the drain that we had put behind the wall and hopefully that will help with the flooding that we have had in the past. I’m so hopeful that it will make a big difference! He also found us a fern palm that was up the hill and brought it down for us to plant just above our yard. Josh was so excited about it! 

Later josh and the boys took a machete walk through the jungle to find new plants and shrubs for the yard, but I think mostly they just wanted to chop things with their machetes. I don’t blame them. Such a beautiful sunset on their nature walk! 

This week ended the 3rd quarter for the kids at school!  They are all doing really good and we hear lots of good from their teachers as they try to navigate things in spanish.  So proud of all of them!

Saturday we took a short day trip over to aguadilla and watched the Exotic car roll race at the aguadilla airport. We took just to boys and they were outside their minds excited about it! I don’t know if all boys are this way, but ours are obsessed with all types of cars and can spot a mustang, bmw, Tesla, Honda civic, charger, and any other car they think is cool from a mile away. So this was like a dream for them to be able to see a Lamborghini in person and sit inside cars that they’ve only dreamed of. We loved looking at each of the cars and then watching them race along the runway. It was a roll race to see which car could get to the fastest speed and so many of them got well over 160 mph. The fastest one we saw went 191 mph! So crazy! It was such a fun day with just the boys and well worth the trip over to the other side of the island. 



And to finish the week off on a strong note, Rhens darling friend lily flew in to join us for the week! These two are such cute friends and were in tears when they saw each other from afar. We can’t wait to spend the week with her!

That’s our week in a nutshell. What a beauty it was!