Tou-can but please don´t while the baby´s sleeping

You know you’re spoiled when you start throwing pieces of banana at the loud toucans outside your window to make them shut-up. Not that I don’t appreciate the beauty of these colorful creatures, but seriously…have you ever heard a toucan chirp? No, we can’t even call it chirping. More like techno-squawk from hell.

The first few days at our jungle home, we were confused as to why the tropical birds were so tame as the three of us pressed our faces to the window pane and watched the little creatures investigate the glass. “They really like us!” we thought, as the unabashed birds fearlessly investigated our faces. Then they started to fly full-speed into the window, only to hit their beaks at maximum velocity and retreat while shaking their little colorful heads in confusion. Then we started to hear relentless tapping on all sides of our wall-less room and found the birds determinedly pecking at the glass. I started to feel like I was in a Hitchcock film, and we decided that this occurrence needed further investigation.. When we went outside to inspect, we noticed our own reflection on the other side of the pane. Hmmm…So I guess we weren’t the bird-attracting family that we thought we were. The poor lil’ guys just thought they were gonna get some from the good-looking, eerily familiar birds staring at them longingly from the other side of the window. And now that we know this, hearing the loud thud of bird beaks ramming into our walls at 4am has lost its exotic charm…

Yesterday we took the “35 minute hike” (which turned out to be 50 minutes. Rivers usually makes rough estimates by converting running speed into walking speed, without taking into account that he’s basically superhuman in terms of fitness and I haven‘t worked out in almost a year) through the rainforest to an awesome natural hot spring. By the time we reached out destination, Harper was ready for a nap, so we rolled out the foam pad we had packed, and I lay beside her while Rivers soaked in the water. It was a little too rainy and cold for me to get in yet, so I decided to wait until Harper woke up to join him. Of course, on this day Harper decided to take a record time nap of over 2 hours, and by the time she woke up, I was over it. Poor Rivers sat in the water, waiting for us to join him, too cold to get out of the water to check to see what was the hold up. So, even though we spent 10$ to take a hot bath and read a book while Harper napped, it was totally worth it. As Paul Coelho said in his book The Pilgrimage: “It is the road that teaches us the best way to get there, and the road enriches us as we walk its length.” Kind of like the toucan´s route from the tree to our window...It´s a beautiful journey until your beak gets boom-roasted on the glass.