Week 34 in PR

We started this week with awards coming out of kids ears! Desh, Beck and Keen came home with first place medals and certificates for winning the math week challenge! They were all so excited that they won, but I’m not super surprised about this. They are all really good at math, but more importantly they LOVE math! They are constantly playing their favorite math game, Prodigy Math and improving their skills while also engaging in a mild competition between brothers :) Anyway, so proud of them for their first place finishes! Keen was also selected as the Student of the Month and was honored for that at school this week as well.

And last but certainly not least, Rhen got an award for her proficiency in the Spanish language! Seriously what an accomplishment. What a week for the Beutlers!

Other things:

Beck and his best friend Sophia showed me their very long and elaborate handshake they’ve been working on for weeks. They are soooo cute!

I’m officially short and being outgrown by almost all my children including my boys who are getting so close to looking me in the eyes. 

Desh had an outdoor picnic at school 

Rease and Rhen continue to work hard at the gym, even if they sometimes have bad attitudes about getting up so early…

Midnight swims

Family room sleepovers when the power went out…

And so many other things but those are the few I snapped pictures of :)


This week was also Easter week and we started our traditional teachings on Sunday with Palm Sunday. This year I had each person take a day to be in charge of, leading the discussion and carrying out the activity that they wanted. It worked out great and the kids did amazing taking charge! More Easter week pics to come but wanted to add these from the kids during teaching Tuesday and sharing their favorite parable of Christ. 


Josh and a few of the boys took a long walk along the road today meeting neighbors and checking out new things. They came up a favorite flower of Josh’s down the road from us that had been infested by colorful caterpillars. They look amazing with heir bright colors but turned out to be stripping the plants of all their leaves and poisonous to boot. The boys loved watching them but in the end decided they were not good creatures to find on your own plants and flowers. They also did some yard work together and moved a big pile of sand that was leftover from a cement project Pepo had been working on. It’s so good for those boys to work and work hard!

We welcomed Chad, Britt and family on Thursday evening and met them at the temple for baptisms just after they flew in! It was so amazing to be there with all those teenagers together doing something so cool together! It was Lievs first time and he said he was a little nervous, but mostly that he would have to do it say something in Spanish. When I assured him that he wouldn’t have to say anything at all he was more excited and calm about it. We LOVED being there with all our kids and mostly taking Liev for his first visit. What a special day in a beautiful place!

We started out their trip with a bang and took them to Culebra the very next day! We always love taking people to this most favorite beach of ours and showing them all the reasons we love it. It turned out to be a busy day at the beach because it was a holiday weekend (Santa Semana) but it didn’t keep us from having our own space to set up our hammocks in the trees and set our chairs out by the water. It was a gorgeous day with just a bit of cloud cover that helped keep us from feeling scorched all day long! The kids had the best time together and played in the water, hung out in the hammocks, played spikeball and sunbathed. All things that make for a great beach day!

Pina coladas and pinchos at the tienda before we showered up at the end of the day. It was really just a great day overall! 

The boys made a night out of it and ended up stringing up the rest of their hammocks and bug nets and staying overnight on the beach. Britt and I took the girls and headed home on the last ferry of the night. We left the boys to have a father/sons night out together. And also we were worried it was going to rain and didn’t want to get stuck being wet in the middle of the night :) We wussed out a little bit. 

Josh said it ended up being the perfect night on the beach and I’m so glad because mainland Puerto Rico got completely dumped on! I was worried they were going through a miserable night in the rain but it turned out not to be so. Late night spikeball and an early morning red sunrise made the trip a success. We are so blessed to live somewhere so beautiful as this!

Sunday came and we celebrated Easter together with a great day at church remembering our Savior. What a blessing it is to know Him and remember His life. 

We spent the rest of the day playing games and counting even more blessings of having our family here with us for this week! Rhen and Britt worked on charm bracelets together and we searched for Easter baskets amidst the maze of string that fills up our house every Easter morning. You may think the kids have outgrown the string/Easter basket hunt but believe it or not, they always look forward to it! 

We ended our evening at the concha playing frisbee, basketball and hanging with the neighbors. We love when we get the chance to run out all of our built up energy on a Sunday afternoon! 

And here are the results of our Easter Week! A tradition we always look forward to as we recall and learn of Jesus Christ. It’s such a hands on way for our kids to recognize the blessings we’ve all been given and show gratitude for the life of our Savior.  We love this week of remembering. 

Week 33 in PR

This week passed in a flash and just like that we’re into a new one! So many things that were fun and great and lots of things that were pretty routine too. We’ve fallen into a great routine with school and fitting visitors into the routine is part of the fun!! Rhen and Lily had such a fun time catching up on months of being apart from each other and stayed up late every night chatting into the night! We spent some time writing letters to old friends, making homemade empanadillas, funny sock day at school, growing out of school pants (all the boys!), and Desh had an activity day at school.  

Beach day is always a fav and we loved showing Lily our favorite spot and teaching her how to boogie board. There were good waves this week and they had fun catching all the waves they could! 

Liev worked hard on a science project that was due this week. He had to take pictures of every step and then make a presentation with all his work. He presented it the next day in class and said he got 100% on it! So proud of him and his hard work!

We took a day away from school and went shopping at the Plaza las Américas mall in San Juan. Laura met us for lunch after she got done with her school and then spent the rest of the afternoon with us. It was a fun break from everything and always fun to spend it with just the girls! 

Josh, Rhen and Lily packed their bags and took the ferry to Culebra one day this week and spent the day and the night in the beach. It’s such a fun experience to be out there all day and then sleep over with the waves crashing beside you and a full moon above. They had a blast and said it was the perfect day and night with no rain and little wind. I’m so glad Lily got to do that while she was here and they all made it through with just mild sunburns :)

Rease was part of a really special ceremony this week - the Cuadro de Honor (Honor Roll). She has done exceptional in school this year despite the language gap and I’m so so proud of this girl! Making the Honor Roll is a big deal here. They have a full on ceremony similar to a graduation and honor each of the students that have worked so hard in school this year. I was so thrilled to see Rease part of this group and couldn’t be more happy to support her. She has come so far this year and has really embraced her role in school this year. We walked around the school and she showed me all her classrooms and places she hangs out during the day. It was so fun to be a part of her world. So proud of this girl! 

The end of the week brought more of the same with random projects (having our gate remade with perforated metal), final days with Lily, painting the back wall (we pulled out the sprayer and finally got this wall done), and playing in the pool in the hot afternoon sun. Lots of good happening around here. 

We had the special treat of watching general conference this weekend and it was just what we all needed. We hunkered down at home for 48 hours and enjoyed listening to our prophets and leaders teach us all the good things. Saturday morning we continued our tradition of making scones before the first session and invited some of our branch members to join us. Carlos and Laura, David, Hector and the missionaries were with us for the day and we listened together and were fed physically and spiritually! It was a great day. 

Sunday afternoon we watched conference at Carlos and Laura’s house then had dinner and time for bike riding before we wrapped up the weekend. Such a fun week with lots going on, but ending on a high note listening to conference and being with loved ones! 

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!

Week 31 in PR

Pool days are awesome at our house these days! It’s getting warmer and we find ourselves often jumping in for an hour or two when we can. This week the boys had a splash contest and tried all sorts of junps to make the biggest splash, smallest splash, highest splash, etc. The perfect activity to get all their energy out! 

We have a few weeks without any visitors and decided to take advantage of the down time to get some projects done. As much as I didn’t want to, we picked up the paint brushes and started to work on the end of the paint projects around the house. This week we tackled the front blue garage gates. They were chipped and paint speckled so we switched colors and painted them all gray to match the railings upstairs. It made a big difference in my opinion but when the kids got how from school it took them a while to figure out what we had painted :) I guess that’s what we were going for, a subtle but nice change. It didn’t take us long and it was a project that we knew we needed to get done. So now I’m glad it’s done and we can finish up the other paint projects. Next in the list: the back wall of the house and the big outside wall. Those will take a bit longer :(

Other than a few projects, it was a pretty normal week for us. Desh had a birthday party for one of his friends at school one day, Liev and Josh went on a father, son fishing outing, Keen and Rhen finished up presentations for school, and we finally got some rain after a 2 week dry spell. It’s amazing how much we have missed the rain and noticed the difference without it. We were happy to see dark clouds roll in and dump some much needed moisture on our grass and plants. 

And we’ve been blessed with some amazing sunrises and sunsets this week. Taking note of these is our goal as we sit up on the deck in the evenings and wind down from the day. It’s something we certainly don’t take for granted! Life on the island is pretty great. 

Week 30 in PR and Rhen’s 14th birthday!

For the first time since we left Utah and landed in Puerto Rico, I took a trip off the island to meet my friends in Orlando! Shelley turned 40 a few weeks ago and we couldn’t get away with that big birthday without a trip to celebrate! We came from three different spots and ended up in Orlando within a few hours of each other and it was such a sweet reunion! Oh how I’ve missed these 3 wonderful humans. We didn’t have much of a plan before we got there but ended up with 5 days completely full of fun! Mostly we were just so happy to be together and catch up on lost time. Among the mix though came lots of laughs, fun and late nights. 

One day we rented bikes and rode along a beautiful trail and through quaint little towns. We walked down to a huge lake and saw baby alligators and lots of different birds. It was so fun to be in bikes for half a day and see the town in a different way! 

We also got pedicures, walked around downtown Disney, took a super fun yoga class with silk hammocks, ate so much food I can’t even believe it, went to the temple together and laughed and laughed and laughed! It was just what I needed and SO MUCH DANG FUN that I didn’t even want to say goodbye after it was over. I love these ladies so much and am so glad we got to celebrate Shelley’s big day face to face! 

Meanwhile back at home, josh held the family together  and got everyone to and from where they needed to be for a few days. To be honest, I’m sure they had so much more fun with their dad than mom could ever be! 

When I got back to the island, we had Josh’s cousin and family here and got to spend a few days with them before they headed back to chilly Canada (think negative 20 chilly!)  It was so fun to see them and be with them and show them some of our fav spots! We took them to Old San Juan the last night they were in town and we loved walking around the beautiful city with them. We ate pizza and gelato and even stopped in and watched a choir performing at one of the old churches. We ended up overlooking the dock and watching the cruise ships come in and out of port. This is one of my favorite places in the evening because it’s so nice and cool and fun to see so many things going on around us. We loved having Drew, Bronwyn and family in town with us and hope we get to see them again soon! 

At the end of the week Rhen and her class got to take a trip to San Juan and be a part of the game show “Puerto Rico Gana”! They were all audience members and some even got to be in the show and up in stage. Rhen loved being there and part of the crowd and they even got to meet the host after! She said it was so fun and she was so happy she got to be a part of that. 

Some other happenings this week:

Spike ball in the pool - a new fav. 

A new Elder arrived in the branch. Elder Bedke was transferred to the Virgin Islands and elder Ashton joined elder Barnes in our branch!

Josh bought some new plants for the yard. One is a gorgeous orange hibiscus that I can’t wait to plant. 

Desh continues to get tips on his push-ups. 

We found a new favorite restaurant - Pa-onde-Sea. 

Josh and I took donuts to Rhens class for her birthday. It was so fun to see her blush as her classmates all joined in singing happy birthday to her! 

Saturday we celebrated Rhen’s 14th birthday with a party and some of her friends! I can not believe that she is already 14! This spunky girl came into our home in a whirlwind and hasn’t stopped since she arrived. Wow it’s been such a fun ride with her! 

She had some of her closest friends over to swim and play ping pong and had cake and ice cream as we all sang Happy Birthday to her! We are so blessed to have this girl in our family and love the important part that she plays in our mix. We wouldn’t be Beutlers without Rhen! 

14 year old stats:

Height: 5'8" - 95%

Weight: 156 lbs - 93%

Week 29 in PR

Josh joined us for beach day this afternoon! He doesn’t often get to come right during the work day but since he traveled over the weekend he was able to take some time Monday to be with us. It’s always better when he’s around! We found a man that was climbing the coconut trees and selling coconut water to all. The boys were so impressed with his climbing skills and couldn’t stop watching him climb tree after tree. He brought down a coconut for each of the boys and opened up the top for them to drink. Coconut water is an acquired taste…and not many of them finished the whole thing. But it was fun to have a fresh coconut right in their hands anyway! 

The rest of the afternoon we made sand castles and held each other up with this huge log we found in the ocean. It was fun to see who could stay on the log the longest without tumbling to the water. 

It was a beautiful day at the beach and though the sea has been rough the past few weeks, it was fairly calm today. I have a feeling we’re pulling out of the rough sea season and headed into spring! 

The rest of the week passed in pretty normal fashion. The missionaries came for dinner like they do every Monday and taught us a good lesson about the Book of Mormon. 

Rhen took a field trip to the rainforest with her class and continues to say that one of her favorite things to do is ride the bus with her classmates! They love to sing and dance and be loud and she soaks in every second of it!

We got a valentines package from Grammie Beutler in the mail. We have a bit of unreliability with the usps here so sometimes we get packages quick but most of the time they’re a week or so late. It doesn’t matter! We’re just happy to get something in the mail from our Grammie! 

I had a couple of encounters with a large (pretty humongous actually) spider that kept creeping around in the dark. One morning it was right above me on the gate as I opened it to leave for the gym. And another morning as I was getting in the car for the gym again, it fell from the top of the car right in front of me onto the ground. I didn’t realize what it was until I crochês down close and saw the same huge spider scampering away. Lucky for me, Josh stepped on it and that was the end of him. I called Jared (our pest control guy) that day and had him come respray for us. I can usually handle spiders fine but when they’re as big as my hand, I get a little spooked. 

Tilly continues to be lazy all around the house except for her one or two trips around the yard during the day hunting for lizards. She’s living her best life in the tropics. 

Josh keeps up with his flowers (his darlings, the kids call them) and checks on each one of them every morning before the kids leave for school. He has a lot of them named after people he got them from or those that helped him plant them. So far we have some Kinleys, D papaya, a few Millies, a Sandra (for the woman down the street), a Hector Jr. and many more. He takes care of them with as much love as he has for the original owners. Such a sweet little garden we have gathered these past few months. 

This week we also had Andy and Kristi with us! It was so fun to see them and catch up after so long! They did lots of fun excursions throughout the days and then hung with us in the evenings. Kristi and rhen made windchimes together and she went home with such a cute one out of all the treasures Rhen has collected!

Of course we had lots of pool and sun days and of course the kids continue to get darker and darker as the weeks go by. Beck has the best tan line right now. 

And we finally named our house! It’s been asking and arduous process trying to come up with the perfect name to describe this little patch of heaven we live in. We finally came up with La Brisa which means the breeze. And that’s exactly what this place has become to us. Not only does it have the most perfect breeze on a hot day coming off the deck, but it also is a relaxing, breath of fresh air spot for us and something we just have thoroughly come to love! 

Desh came home from school this week and was so excited to announce that he was chosen as the start student for the month! He loves his class and teacher and is doing such a good job with his Spanish. I can’t think of a better star student than this boy! 

Sunday was a day filled with lessons learned, homemade bread (made by Rease) and games on the deck in the breeze that we just named the house for. Overall such a great week with loved ones and good friends!