Good Stuff

Some Ideas, Traditions, Things, and General Good Stuff we’d like to bring back with us from Rio Muchacho:
-Eat rolls with chocolate sauce for breakfast

-Drink chocoláte con leche for breakfast (even in the summer, adds Harper)

-Make muffin top soda cookies (drizzled in chocolate, of course!)

-Make homemade pineapple and watermelon juice

-Find a way to hang a hammock for each person in our family

-Start making homemade marmalade 

-Start making homemade cheese

-Create a daily chore routine for Cal and Harper

-Start my garden indoors each year

-Appreciate pineapples (it takes a year to grow one!) peanuts, coffee, chocolate (all three take lots of labor for just a small amount), and bananas (one banana tree produces just only one group and then dies)

-Make our own tea from fruits (and veggies)

-Chop cabbage and shred carrots for salad instead of greens (this never occurs to me)

-Grow lemongrass (if we can)

-Get walking!  Cal and Harper walked two mile each day at Rio Muchacho so get ready Sadie!

-Make more homemade granola bars instead of buying them

-Make ají (Ecuadorian salsa) for our beans and rice

-Find Maria cookies at home

-Write more letters (especially to the kids at Rio Muchacho)

-Collect our own seeds to replant the next year (this seems too tough but we’d like to try)

-Eat parts of the vegetables we didn’t think to eat before- the flowering parts of broccoli, the hard peel of the pineapple to make tea, blending plantains to make a broth base for soup

-Get some baby pigs (Harper’s addition but vetoed)

-Speak more Spanish

Our future penpals

Harper fed the baby pigs each day and fell in love

Banana tree

Walking, walking walking

Baby pineapple

We know it is an ambitious list but hopefully we can try to incorporate most of these new ideas into our good old life.