While we love our home in Puerto Rico, the summer months tend to get pretty brutally hot (and the surf is notoriously flat), so we find this time of year to be a good time to see the world. This year we decided to visit some friends in Costa Rica and soak up the Pura Vida for a month. Costa Rica was actually first on our hit list when we decided to run away from home (although we have no regrets on ending up in Puerto Rico!). The surf, beaches, jungle, culture and food in Costa Rica is SO amazing and we are having a great time with great friends. Sydney is getting so much easier to travel with (not that this stopped us before!) and it’s nice to shake up the routine of our daily lives.

The place we are currently staying at is absolutely the most awesome place I have ever stayed at, anywhere. Seriously, I can not think of one thing I would change about Batik Blue.

Some pictures of our temporary home away from home:

Batik Blue is an amazing villa located a very short walk, through monkey filled jungle, to a great surf break and kid friendly beach. This place was built green, is the ultimate indoor/outdoor living situation, private pool, wonderful/friendly owners, dreamy beds, plush linens, and is literally located across the street from Stefan’s BFF, who is an amazing private chef here in Costa Rica (yes, we’ve been eating very well!). Our original plan involved a lot more “roughing it”, but thanks to an unfortunate day, good friends and good karma, we ended up in the ultimate spot for what we budgeted for practically camping.

Sadly, my camera was stolen (darn it!), so we don’t have any great pictures to share, but we’ll be back

Summertime is really the best time in Rincon. The only thing missing is the surf. All the other great things of the tropics are available to us; lots of fruits and vegetables are in season (like: avocados & mangos), all the plants grow, leaves turn green, grass gets green again and everything grows like wildfire.

My mom has been visiting us all week and flies out of Mayaguez this morning on Cape Air. She flies to San Juan and her flight will then connect to Philadelphia via US Air. We are hoping this weather passes in time for her to fly out and catch her flight to Philadelphia. It looks like San Juan is already clear.

Today, we have some South East wind, minor leftover swell in the water and a nice tropical storm reminding us that summer is right around the corner. It is pouring outside right now. The rain is bouncing off the tin roof and I am drinking a hot cup of coffee. Life is good.

I’m thinking that it is pretty obvious that we are really busy with Sydney, the house and work by the infrequency of our blog posts since July 26, 2010. I check out our archives and we have some months with months with over 30 posts! Wow, things sure have changed. We haven’t gone a month with no posts yet, but we have been close.

I took a picture of Sydney in Jose’s bakery in Puntas last June and thought it was so cute I saved it to my phone as the desktop picture and it has remained there since. The busy season (winter when we usually have waves) gets a little too crazy on the Puntas side of the point and our friend Annie over at Rincon Vacations turned us on to a new bakery in Rio Grande off of the 414. She recommended the Cubano sandwiches and we’ve been a weekly customer ever since. Honestly, do yourself a favor and go the Panadaria Boriqua off the 414 and order a sandwich. They are around $4.00 and can practically feed two people.

Sydney and I were in the bakery a few weeks ago and I took a picture of her in front of the pastries and it dawned on me that it was the same shirt she was wearing in the picture I took 6 months earlier. The only difference was that 6 months earlier she was wearing the top as a dress, not a shirt!

Two closing notes; She is growing super fast. She’s the best!

Today was a great day. These three photos are from today.

We have three mango trees planted on the property that may one day grow us delicious mangos like this one. The mature mango trees we have are all ‘con fibre’ which are really stringy.

This will be the fourth pineapple we have grown in our patch. We have about 10 pineapple plants growing in this patch. Weeding is difficult.

We have been using the same little Weber portable grill since we bought the house. It lost its luster a long time ago, but we’ve been toughing it out, waiting for the new deck. Check out the lettuce Summer is growing in the background. That is 2 week old spicy lettuce from seed.

We have been slowly building our house for almost 5 years now. That’s a long time! That’s 1,825 days. In the beginning it was tough to live without the comforts of a home (electricity, water, kitchen, chairs, furniture) but we were so excited to buy a house that those things didn’t matter. We were inspired by the “Do It Yourselfter” shows we watched on TV and by the fact that we wanted to become home owners and stop paying rent (someone else’s mortgage).

We have chosen projects and materials that we can afford (we blew through our budget in 4 months) and completing home projects one at a time. Obviously, more important things came first, (bathrooms, kitchen, flooring) and now we are at a point where we have all the important construction projects done. The only two things we have left are framing and adding French Doors downstairs and building the back deck…and we just built the back deck.

My friends from Jersey flew in for 7 days and build the deck of the back of the house. The footings have been there since day one as have the plans and the ARPE permits, but we just couldn’t prioritize a back deck over the downstairs offices, bathrooms, nursery etc. Well, we haven’t done any major projects in over a year and we have been saving, flew Brian, Jamie and Wil down and they built the deck.

Brian flew down a week early to relax and surf and we used one of those days to drive around the island and find high quality lumber for the deck. We ended up finding everything we needed at a lumber yard in Lajas called Don Benja True Value. We ordered all of our lumber in Spanish (a little nerve racking) but when we paid for the lumber at the register, the manager spoke perfect English.

We are re-doing the back deck with bar tops and trim

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From the back corner towards the kitchen

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Looking through the kitchen window at the girls.

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Looking up at the deck from the backyard

Here is a gallery of the deck going up and the finished product. From start to finish.

Summers mom is in town visiting and having fun with us. As usual, Summer and I are busy running around doing our think with work, landscaping, home repair/completion so grandma (abuela) and Sydney have been hanging out having a good ole time! We have done the usual great things in Rincon like go to the lighthouse, go to the beach at the Marina but have mostly just been spending time together. It’s been awesome!

Stay tuned for some house updates, we’ve been going hog wild! In the past two months, we finished the back deck, built an outdoor shower, replaced the steps to the shed, built a new shed down the hill AND planted tons of new plants. Also, Sydney is still growing…bigger and bigger every day. She even started singing songs with us this week. Paddycake has also been a blast. Stay tuned.

Apparently papaya is easy to grow because we have papaya trees popping up all over the property! Another nice thing about papaya is that they produce fruit very quickly. Where as citrus/avocado trees take several years to start producing fruit, papayas start producing fruit in a year or less. Unfortunately, I am not a big fan of papaya! It just smells like funky foot cheese with a little bit of aroma de puke. Regardless, I have tried to figure out ways that we can use all of these papayas, rather then let them rot and be wasted. So far there have been several attempts at different uses for papaya that we have tried:

- Feed them to Sydney (she doesn’t like it that much)
- Dehydrate it (still tastes funky to me)
- Make pepper from the seeds (wasn’t flavorful enough to be used in place of pepper)
- Add green papaya to our salads (this is really good! Thanks for the suggestion Katrina!)
- Feed them to the horses next door (they love it)
- Add it to smoothies (just don’t add too much so you don’t get that funky foot aftertaste)
- Make papaya jam (this is REALLY good!)

Most recently I made papaya jam and it was really, really good and really, really easy. This is what you need:

5 cups of mashed papaya
1/4 cup orange juice
2 cups of sugar
60g of pectin

Remove the papaya seeds, chop up the papaya and mash it up. Leave it chunky if you like chunks of fruit in your jam or throw it in the food processor to make it smoother. Heat the papaya, orange juice and pectin. When it begins to boil stir in the sugar. When it begins to boil again, let it boil for 1 minute (be careful to not let it boil for longer as you risk over-cooking the pectin which can cause your jam to not set correctly). Ladle the jam while it is still hot into sterilized canning jars and let the jam cool.

Wasn’t that easy?! The original recipe called for 5 cups of sugar, but even cutting it down to 2 cups left the jam very sweet (so sweet, in fact that I am going to try it with 1 cup next time). The only hard part to this papaya jam recipe is finding pectin in Puerto Rico. I ended up ordering it on eBay. You can also find it on Amazon.com, but you have to buy it in bulk.

Here is another recipe for papaya jam, that I have not tried yet, but it looks good (and you don’t need pectin):

1 cup papaya
2 cups sugar
2 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon lemon juice

Mash the papaya, mix with sugar and heat to a boil. Reduce heat and continue cooking while stirring constantly. When the mixture becomes sticky, add butter and lemon juice. Stir for 1 minute. Let cool.

Anyone have other suggestions on good uses for papaya?

I am sitting here, drinking coffee, listening to Sydney wake up in her room (next to the kitchen). She is talking to her stuffed animals, stretching and rolling around. In about 5 minutes she is going to start asking for apple sauce and for her friend Eli, who has been awake downstairs for at least an hour. Sydney absolutely loves the mornings, just like daddy.

Here is a picture of Summer and Sydney from last week with Sydney sporting her new hairdo. Hello everyone!

That’s right, we have chickens!! I posted a gallery at the bottom of the page to see all of our chicken coop building pictures and ultimately, I will upload pictures of our chickens once they start producing eggs and anything chicken related. Cluck cluck!

I am not going to just post about chicken coop plans, I am going to post all the pictures of the construction of our chicken coop from start to finish. I even have some pictures of the temporary chicken coop that we built, with a light, for the baby chickens to live in until they got big enough to move to the full size coop.

If you want to build your own coop, you don’t have to build one like ours. This coop is pretty much the Taj Mahal of chicken coops. I doubt chickens in Puerto Rico need such an extravagant coop, but it was fun to build and it looks great in the yard. I also wanted it to survive hurricanes and not blow over. I firmly believe that a happy chicken will produce us more eggs once they start producing. This brings me full circle to one of the reasons why we bought chickens and decided to build a coop in the first place.

Organic eggs in Puerto Rico are expensive! They run $5.99 a dozen and we are going through 12-20 eggs a day between the kids, adults and baking. That’s just plain expensive!

Building the coop was fun. I picked up all the supplies at Home Depot because they were cheaper than the local hardware store “Do It Best”. When all was said and done the cost of building a chicken coop was around $400. The first round at Home Depot didn’t quite cover what we needed so I made another run to buy more supplies.

The coop has 4 doors (8 hinges) to help clean, get eggs and let the chickens run around in the back yard. The roof is built out of a material that is relatively soft so if mangos drop from our tree, they won’t bang on the hot tin roof like a gunshot in mango season.

We aren’t planning on getting any roosters because they are just too loud to have this close to our house. Some roosters in our neighborhood start crowing at 3:00am, not at sunrise. If we had one of those, he would end up in the freezer inside 7 days.

We bought special feed for the baby chickens, but 1 month later they are practically full grown and are eating regular chicken food which seems to consist of mostly yellow corn.

Once these guys get bigger, we’ll be scooping the chicken poop and adding it to our compost to make the perfect batch of black gold for our trees and garden. A full grown chicken will produce one egg a day, unless there is a rooster present and then they may produce up to two eggs a day. A chicken does NOT need a rooster around to produce eggs. They ovulate and drop eggs daily regardless, but if a rooster is around them they want to impress him and produce more to show how great of a hen she is. When the hens start producing eggs, the climb up into the hen house, choose a nesting box, lay an egg and sit on it. If the nesting boxes are not separated, the hens may peck at each others eggs and your egg production will go down…and we don’t want that…do we? NO!

Sydney loves the chickens and Monkey and Cheech are learning NOT to kill and eat them.

If you want some help learning how to build a chicken coop, check out Ricky’s blog Born Activist. He has plans there and will be happy to help you out if you email him any questions!

I had an idea the other day, so I decided to whip something together to help better our community. Introducing…ClasificadosRincon.com!

Clasificados Rincon is a free classified ad website for Rincon, Puerto Rico. After living here for so long, I’ve noticed that it is really hard (impossible even?) to buy/sell used stuff around here. Clasificados Online is okay, but it seems like most items that I’ve been looking for are all listed in San Juan (which is way too far away for me to go check out someones $50 treadmill). So, I put together this site for the residents of Rincon to use in order to buy/sell stuff around our little town. Check it out and let me know what you think!

It’s free to post an ad, so if you’re in Rincon, list some stuff and let’s get the ball rolling!