After some crazy weather the last week of January...
...we were lucky enough to be able to fly to Texas for a day to spend with
Marisa's childhood best friend Anna and her college best friend Andrea.
They both live in the same ward in Houston and it was great to see
them. From there we flew to Cancun for a week in a sweet house on the
beach my brother Cody hooked us up with. We were there also with my parents
and Cody's wife Lisa's parents. The following picture is me on the beach in front of our house where there was a coral reef 2 feet into the water.
Marisa laying out in front of the house
Stairs up to our bedroom
View from our bedroom
After a chill Sunday at the house, we headed out Monday to the Mayan ruins at Tulum. These are especially awesome because they're right on the crystal clear water. We hired a guide named Abinadi and learned all kinds of "history" (speculation?) and all skepticism aside, it was very interesting!
We went on to the ruins at Coba, the only temple that tourists are still allowed to climb. It's out in the middle of the jungle and only the front of the temple is cleared off - the back still has trees growing out of the limestone right up to the top! The stairs were steep and weathered and admittedly it was a little scary! Marisa and I climbed until our muscles were burning and then glanced back to see how my dad was doing and were impressed to see that he was right there with us! And my mom made it all the way up (and down!) with no complaint, even though she's terribly afraid of heights!
On top of Coba Temple with the flat expanse of jungle extending 360 degrees around us
Coba is a large site so they have bike rentals and it was well worth the $3 each to ride around those jungle trails, it was really fun and a highlight of the trip.
Eating out like a bunch of drunk tourists in Cozumel
Enjoying the beach with the most beautiful and amazing woman in the world!
Snorkeling pictures at the reef in front of our house and at Cozumel:
We saw tons of zebra fish and those yellow ones, and several different types of coral
Baracuda
Dory (sort of)
My mom chillin' in the water at Cozumel
Our favorite little neon spotted fish
Cody with some kind of camouflage fish
Bubbles!
Needlefish or mini marlin?
This one is more like Dory, the blue on the edges of these was so brilliant!
Taking a walk through the jungle
This eel would NOT show us anything but his tail!
We also saw a ray, brittle stars, brain coral, urchins and anemones, little purple and yellow fish, schools of silver fish, and more varieties of tropical fish than we could count... we snorkeled almost every day, it was so fun to just walk into the ocean and swim with the fish!
Despite being major blogging and photography slackers lately, we do have a couple from Christmas and Caeden's bday.
Aspen really enjoyed Christmas this year and was excited about her little kitchen, her purse from Trey ("backpack"), her little scarves like Mommy's, and her pink legos. Here's Caeden with a handful of gold gogos, along with his legos and a Nintendo DS. The boys all got airsoft guns, DS games and various other little pieces of plastic :)
Aspen & Caeden love to play together while Trey & Bex are at school
Her hair is really coming in and Marisa is now making doubles of all the hairclips to go in pigtails
For Caeden's birthday treat at preschool Marisa made ice cream cone cake pops since the letter of the week was "I"
The next day he had his friend party at home with his playgroup. He wanted a dragon theme and we couldn't find much but we did get a dragon pinata!
Aspen lasted about 10 minutes in the snow each of the snow days and then spent the rest of the day inside trying on everyone's snow gear
What happened to our fat bald baby? (and we thought she was cute then!)
