Learning To Let Go

So much of this trip has already been a learning adventure – for me. The biggest of all lessons is how to let go.

Like our kitchen. We don’t have a dishwasher and there is only one temperature in the kitchen facet – cold. Washing dishes is an adventure. Keeping up with the dishes when you are feeding a family of five at least five times a day is almost impossible. Add to this that the kitchen, as well stocked as it is, still has a family of five running through the dishes and utensils pretty fast. No dishwasher, hardly any spices (too expensive), only a little convection oven and glorified hot plate – it does makes you long for the conveniences of the states.

But being able to eat each of those five meals together, outside, on a hand-made, wooden tree trunk table (which is five feet long) is amazing. Walking to the grocery store “Super Mercado David” to get everything you need. Amazing. Running into strangers and being able to talk to them like friends. Amazing. Having a mini-adventure every day … well you get the point.

I’ve let go and opened up to the possibility that I don’t need everything that I thought I needed. It’s not fancy, but it’s comfortable and it works.

Today we went to the Montezuma Waterfalls. Just a short 15 minute drive from El Secret Garden. It was as if “Jack’s River” in Georgia and a playground for kids complete with a swimming pool were combined together. We had to scramble over rocks and through pools of running water for another 15 minutes to get to the actual swimming hole by the waterfall.

Once at the waterfall, there was a beautiful swimming hole and places to jump off the cliff … er rocks, I mean.

So here’s my struggle the entire trip. We scrambled over sharp, slippery rocks in our (wet and slippery) Keens. At one point we had to hold onto a rope high above screwed into rock, whilst our feet where sliding down the face of said rock.

My little ones had to do this all by themselves. Sometimes they ran ahead and I couldn’t hold their arm (okay, squeeze their arm) to make sure they didn’t slip on a sharp rock sticking out of the running water and fall. Or they were jumping into a pool of water that I didn’t know if there were sharp, pointy rocks below them. Or what really was under all those leaves …

I had to stifle each one of those fears only because they were much faster than me, and let’s face it – I don’t have enough arms to hold onto each of them at the same time. Sometimes I am envious of a mama octopus.

But, I knew deep down they were safe. Courtney or I wouldn’t let them run amok in an area that wasn’t. Still … each time Chayton jumped or Nazeriah slipped or Kaija swam ahead, my heart flew and my stomach dropped.

I had to let go of my babies and let them be.

Sitting by the falls.

Courtney’s jump.

Nazeriah’s jump

Kaija’s jump