Up to Paradise

We went back to Elizabeth's house this summer. We weren't planning on going because we went last summer and saw Elizabeth in December, but Joanna and Rayne were going to be there, and they said they would be "extra nice" if we came. We were brave and decided to do the full 14 hour drive in one shot, and it worked out surprisingly well! It turns out our kids actually can look at screens for pretty much an entire day and not be too sad about it. Road construction on road trips is a lot more enjoyable with an Isaac in the car craning his neck to get a better look at the trucks. 

We arrived just in time for an evening walk!

There was a nest of almost full grown owls nearby, and we got to spot them quite a bit. I love this picture I took that has the owl's reflection in the water. This is a happy place. 

And a peaceful place. 

Mom Blood and Claudia had birthdays, which means we were treated to some delicious and gorgeous Elizabeth cake!

Kids in the creek

I got my steps in running the zipline seat back up time after time

We hiked to the waterfall! The weather was beautiful, but the water in the creek we had to cross multiple times was PAINFULLY cold. 

Tauriel and Isaac. Those cousins are so good to my kids. 

Ethan and Isaac with Kade on a swather! Isaac now says he wants to be a farmer when he grows up so he can drive big trucks. Kade is a champ for letting the kids ride along with him. 

At one point, Kade diverted some of the water towards the field past the house. It got the water pressure high enough for a one day water slide! 

The water goes past the slide through this ditch, which was temporarily full enough to kayak on. Usually the kayaks are used in the pond. 

Fun fact- cougars love to eat 8 year old boy brains. 

One fun thing we did quite a bit of this year was scavenger hunts! I made some by myself and with Elliot helping, and Rayne made some too. It was fun having the kids scamper all over the place looking for clues. 

Bree's ability to command the attention of small children is incredibly impressive. 

The Bloods love their vegetables! Elliot and I had fun making this.

Isaac turns 3

 Isaac turned 3 on May 15! He's a universally adored little buddy. His obsession for many months now has been tractors, so we celebrated with an oreo crumble truck scene atop some brownies. 

Below is the cutest video of Isaac's tiny voice saying happy birthday as he soaks in his cake with typical chaos in the background

This boy adores trucks. For a while there, the majority of his limited vocabulary words were types of trucks.

 I saved up the dregs of cereal boxes for a bit so that he could play with edible dirt and all his trucks on his birthday. He approved. 

Another addition to our lives- songs by Twenty Trucks, a band which has written far more than 20 songs about trucks. His favorite is probably "Garbage Truck." It's really a banger. 

Checking out his truck sticker book

Our builder boy can frequently be found building with magnatiles in the loft. 

Isaac spends a lot of time playing with kids at the church between playgroup and volleyball. His best little friends are Cooper Ashcraft, Coulton Bues (although that friendship involves an unfortunate amount of punching), and the Gardner Girls. 

His absolute best bud is probably Annie. Or Breezy. Or Mimi and Grumpa. Or Bree. Actually, he adores a lot of people. He's a little fella with a big smile and a bigger heart.

We started potty training! It has come with some highs and lows. 

Quail chick trains were one of our many "keep Isaac near the potty" activities

...Not sure what led him to this pose. He chilled in the potty chair like this for a weirdly long time. 

Speaking of weird poses...

Isaac is an absolute light in our lives. He is so happy almost all the time and loves his people dearly. He is playful and imaginative. 

Every time he comes into our bed to snuggle, he wants to hide under the sheets and pretend it's a zebra cave. I bet you didn't even know zebras lived in caves. Sometimes the zebras eat other zebras. Other times they turn into lions to eat the zebras. He spends a weird amount of time playing games related to eating for a picky eater. 

We have no idea where he picked it up, but he frequently does this thing where he yells "KNIFE!" and pokes/chops people while pretending his hand is a knife. One time he said, "I'm just an Isaac. I knife people. Here's my knife!"

I can't imagine life without our Isaac to keep us laughing!

Summer Begins!

 The kid's last day of school happened while I was in Sao Paulo, so I came back to the full swing of summer fun!

The beginning of summer is always kicked off with peach palooza. We had a record number of peaches this year, probably close to 500. Elliot dedicated himself to documenting and quantifying our harvesting efforts.

This was not an exaggeration, there really were 83 ripe peaches in a day at the peak. Note his use of tape on the card to make a dry erase updatable section. 

Running and daily total cards conveniently attached to our chore and prayer charts

Other members of our family were dedicated more to consuming the peaches rather than documenting them.

We ventured up Madera Canyon with the Bradys

I love pictures of Elliot genuinely laughing

Elliot and Annie did another year of VBS and loved it. 

While the big kids were summer camping, Isaac and I enjoyed cookie decoration day at the clubhouse. I love having this little buddy!

Annie at the park asking me to take a picture of yet another special rock. She's the best.

Both Annie and Elliot did a week of summer camp at the clubhouse as well. They are in different age groups, so they met different weeks and had different field trips- Elliot to a bowling alley and Annie to a science museum. The rest of the days were filled with crafts and activities. It is awesome living in a  community that has so much free stuff available for kids. 

We also had swim lessons at the clubhouse in the evenings after VBS/Be Well camp. The evenings were fun- we didn't need to mess with sunscreen and it was a great way to end the day. We did many evening swims over the summer because we liked it so much at swim lessons. 

Our favorite flowers- the Mexican Bird of Paradise of Peacock flower!

Sao Paulo

 I have worked for a company called Gistia since 2017. They were one of my first bookkeeping clients. The owner, Carlos, is great at finding and growing employees across his business, and I am the lucky beneficiary of a lot of mentoring from him. He has a lot of entrepreneurial knowledge and has given me great advice on how to grow my business over the years. In the meantime, his business grew to the point where the finance work was more than I could take care of with my part time schedule, so I brought Alexandra Knell on with me. We are the finance department together. I've had weekly calls with Carlos for years and have loved the depth of work that he trusts me with. 

The company has grown to about 30 people, the majority of them living in Brazil. They hold annual retreats to help build company culture since everyone works remotely but had cancelled that several years in a row due to Covid. 2023 is the year that they brought it back, and Carlos wanted me to be there in person. I was very doubtful at first. It seemed like a big deal to leave my family and jaunt off to a South American country by myself to hang out with a bunch of people I've never meet in real life. But then they offered to pay for Alexandra to come too, and that sealed the deal. An all-expenses paid trip to a fancy hotel in Sao Paulo with one of my best friends in the world? I couldn't say no to that!

Aaron had a work trip to Chicago the same week. The timing worked out great- his arrival and my departure were close enough that I picked him up from the airport, and he drove himself home, leaving me at the airport. All the flights out of Tucson to Sao Paulo were red eyes with layovers. I landed on Friday morning, waited around a bit for Alexandra's flight to land, and then we caught an Uber to the hotel. 

By the time we got there, everyone was already gathered in the conference room. It was great to meet so many people in person! We spent most of Friday getting product and industry updates and doing some teambuilding exercises. 

There was a picture of a complicated lego creation in the hall. I had to go look at it and give the team instructions on how to recreate it from memory. It was hard!

This is the hotel restaurant where we had breakfast every morning and lunch one day. It's aptly called "Terraço Jardins" which translates to "Terrace Gardens."

The honeycomb drips onto the fruit! Fanciest thing I have ever seen.

The only thing in the entire restaurant that didn't taste good was this cashew fruit. In retrospect, it may have been there just for decoration. 

We headed to a pizza place with the team for dinner that night. Somehow it evolved into everyone teaching each other magic tricks and the types of figure tricks everyone learns in elementary school. 

It turns out that I can talk to Alexandra all day for two days straight and not get bored of it! I did talk at least a bit with every person there and got to know a few people really well. The Brazilians were so happy to tell us about there hometowns all over Brazil and tell us which foods we had to make sure to eat while we were in town. 

On Saturday morning, those of us who were not too hungover and wanted to explore met in the lobby. We walked up and down Paulista, which was kind of the main strip through the nice part of the city. There was so much to see! We saw at least 3 groups of people filming music videos. 

Things I want to remember:

-Victor diligently translating all the Portuguese for us

-The street vendor who had tattooed the whites of her eyes black and was selling cute mini terrariums

-Learning about Amaia and Julia being female engineers in the VERY patriarchal Paraguay. They are both super intelligent- Amaia is working on her PhD in Electrical Engineering- but they struggle to find jobs just because they are women. Carlos hired them immediately after learning they survived engineering college in Paraguay as women because his wife is from Paraguay and knows how much grit that must have taken. 

Everyone should find a friend like Alexandra. Or better yet, find Alexandra and be her friend because she's just the best.

We saw at least 3 groups of people filming music videos on Paulista.

The world has thousands of McDonald's... but there is only one Mequi 1000! Apparently this was the 1,000th McDonald's ever built. There was a live DJ, photo booth with a line because it was so popular, and a stand selling McDonald's Merchandise.

I'm lovin' it!

A cool satyr statue in the park across from the art museum. This city was so green!

One of the coolest places we went to was Beco Do Batman, or Batman Alley. It's a part of town that is covered in graffiti (much of it batman themed, at least originally) and full of street vendors and artsy stuff. 

Fabricio tried to help me improve my reenactment. I don't think either of us have what it takes to start life as vigilante crime fighters.

We tried to convince the guys to take a group picture by the cow graffiti next to the butterflies but were not successful.  

We had been told that we should find some brigaderos to bring home to our kids. They are a common Brazilian treat, a kind of chocolate ball. There were a couple of girls in beco do batman saying "brigadeeeeeeros! brigadeeeeeros!" We went up to buy some. With our Spanish we were able to sort out how much they cost. Right as they were handing them to us, Alexandra said something like "thank you, my kids will love these!" The girls looked at each other and then back at us and said "Marajuana." So that's the story about how we almost bought the Brazilian equivalent of Pot Brownies for our children! We kept our shopping to grocery stores after that. 

There were people selling coconut water all over the place! They whack the top off with a machete and hand it to you with a straw. It was delightful.

Still carrying my dear coconut

We popped into an art gallery and found this one that I relate to as a bird owner

Coconut was empty but I was enjoying carrying it around still

For lunch/dinner the group congregated at a live music bar called Todos os Santos. I tried Feijoada, the national dish of Brazil. It was delicious but I didn't love the venue- it was LOUD. Like you had to yell right into someone's ear for them to hear you. Alexandra and I snuck back over to Beco do Batman with some people who had missed it earlier that day and explored a few other parts of town for the rest of the day.

The next morning Alexandra and I explored some more sites with Anthony and his wife. We searched for an evil eye for their new house and took an uber to Parque Ibirapuera. 

A raspberry tart and something that had chicken in it! Not knowing Portuguese made ordering things extra exciting.

I made friends with some birds

It was interesting going around that day with no Portuguese speakers. We wanted to go to an old cathedral that the internet said was cool, but thanks to google translate we were able to hear from our uber driver that it was a super sketchy part of town, and he would drive us by it but didn't feel comfortable letting us out. After driving by, I think his advice was solid. He took us to another area that had a good place to eat for dinner. 

I wish I had taken a picture of my fish with banana sauce that I ate at a different restaurant- I ordered it because it sounded weird but it was soooo good!

This trip was wonderful and I still can't quite believe it happened.