Some of you know that my family (my husband and my two kiddos and me + my brother and his wife + my sister and her husband + my parents = 10 of us!) traveled together to Costa Rica at the beginning of 2023.
It was a beautiful adventure. We got to swim on gorgeous beaches, watch incredible jungle life (monkeys! iguanas! parrots!), hike, zipline, explore, feast on fresh fruit and delicious meats (yes we got food poisoning too but that’s par for the course!) … but more than all of that, we got to experience it together.
Family and community both mean more to me these days.
Now that my children are above the age of five, I don’t immediately break out into hives at the thought of traveling with them. We’ve done it before when they were quite young, and those experiences were wonderful/exhausting/amazing, but not ones that I’d rush to repeat. Traveling with kids is just…incredibly complicated. And keeping the little ones entertained and safe during a vacation demands a different amount of energy.
The previous statement is not designed to discourage people from having kids or from traveling with them!
Though of course, you’re free to make whatever deductions you choose. I highly endorse traveling with another set of hands to help with the kids or visiting people who have kids to play with, or (as was the case with this vacation) bringing the grandparents and the aunties and uncles along!
For this blog post, I mainly wanted to post a bunch of photos from this amazing trip. Because getting to take a trip like this all together is only going to happen a handful of times in a lifetime, and that’s if we’re lucky.
To my dear Rica Family in Costa Saba (this title is a bit of an inside joke): I love you all so much.
As they say in the beautiful country of Costa Rica: Pura Vida!
