It had been a year and a half since Elysia moved to her new command at Norfolk, Virginia, seven months pregnant with Citrus while Mitja stayed in Silver Spring, Maryland. Then, in the first half of 2007, Elysia was deployed to the Middle East. While she was gone, a silent two-dimensional replica stood watch in her absence:
Flat Mommy
It was almost balmy weather yesterday — nearly 50 degrees — so we took a quick trip to the National Zoo. We were too late to see the elephants and zebras, but here we have captured our daughter visiting with one of her favorite exhibits. The zoo has quite a collection.
She is too young to realize it, but she is descended from a long line of ice cream lovers. Here we see her instinctually reaching out to the oracle and absorbing the wisdom of the ages. (The monolith neither disappeared nor was beaten with a bone.)
We visited Costa Rica for ten days at the beginning of the year, and had a wonderful time. Our big challenge was to keep things easy enough for Citrus, but not stay too long in one place that we’d get cabin fever. In the end, we spent half the time at Playa Grande on the west coast and several days at a small jungle lodge near the Corcovado rain forest on the Osa peninsula. A few photos are posted HERE.
I’d been to Costa Rica twice before in the early 1990s and it was amazing how much had changed. We did not need to exchange currency and everything was priced in Dollars. Playa Grande, a place I hitchhiked to in 1993 to see the leatherback turtles lay their eggs, now had a paved road and about 100 or more lots for sale by Century 21 only a block or so from the beach. This is very unfortunate because the turtles will not come ashore if there are lights, and the number of visiting turtles has already dropped from about 1,000 per year in the early ’90s to about 52 per year.
Citrus had a wonderful time, though she mainly recounts all of the perils. “I saw BIG scary spider!” “I went in boat. Big wave GOT ME!” She was really looking forward to seeing monkeys and soon after we walked into the rain forest, a monkey appeared high in the treetops. Unintentionally, a stick was knocked down. And bounced off her forehead. For weeks after we heard “Monkey dropped stick on my head! I don’t like that. That was a naughty monkey!”
Hello to our friends and family. After years of procrastination, I’ve finally gotten around to getting a blog going so we can share some highlights of our life on the run. At least it sometimes feels that way. In the last eight years we have lived in New York City, Seattle, Silver Spring (MD) and Virginia Beach, with one deployment to Bahrain. It can be hard to build and keep in touch with a geographically diverse community of friends when we keep moving but we like to think that some interesting things have happened along the way. Please stop by often and say hello!