I’ve been a little homesick lately.  Actually, I’ve gone through on-and-off periods of homesickness ever since we arrived in Costa Rica in February. Some days it’s hard. Other days it’s not so hard. What I’m trying to do is put my homesickness in perspective.

You see, I think I’d be homesick for New York if we had moved pretty much anywhere far away, even in the U.S. Also, even if I am homesick for my familiar life in my home culture, that doesn’t change the rightness of our decision to move here.  Overall, our move still makes sense for our family.  This move gives us more flexibility with time, money, and career issues.  And it gives us year-round good weather.  It’s so easy to miss New York when I know it’s summer there.  After all, I love summer in new york.  But I pretty much hate it there for at least 6 months out of the year (winter and the cold parts of spring and fall). I’m pretty sure I’m going to feel very happy here once my relatives start calling and complaining about the snow, ice, and heating bills again.

There’s probably another cause of my homesickness – the new baby.  Right now, my life is pretty isolating, as it usually is when you have a new baby.  I sit around nursing the baby for most of the day.  Sometimes I don’t leave the house and yard for a week or two.  Having a baby can be hard, especially when you don’t have your family around to bring you an occasional frozen meal. I think my baby-induced isolation is intensifying my homesick feelings. Baby B doesn’t help things any because she has not been very happy in new surroundings lately.  When I took her to the video store the other day, she cried for most of the time and was upset by the sounds of loud trucks moving through the streets in town. Hopefully she’ll outgrow this!

What I’ve been recently thinking about is my ideal: 8 months in Costa Rica and 4 months in New York.  But financially, that ideal is not currently possible for us.  How many people can live part of the year in one country & part in another? But maybe that ideal could be possible someday. Maybe we can make it possible. Maybe we could someday buy an RV and live that part of the year in the RV traveling in the US. That would be awesome.  Then we could see all those other wonderful parts of the US that I haven’t had the chance to see yet.  And then the rest of the year I think I’d be very happy living in Costa Rica. I’ll have to do some more thinking to see if this might be a workable plan.

In the meantime, we are working on our plan to move to the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica.  Somewhere around Puerto Viejo.  This is the area of Costa Rica that we fell in love with when we first came here: jungle, monkeys, and the warm blue ocean. Atenas isn’t bad, but we are not in love with it.  We really only moved to the Central Valley initially because it was near midwifery services. Last night Arp asked me what we would want to remember about our time in Costa Rica if someday we were looking back on our time here.  I think I’d much rather look back on living in the Caribbean.

Not that we’re planning on leaving Costa Rica anytime soon. We are just not sure where we will be 5 or 10 years from now.  There are so many places in the world that we want to see – India, the Mediterranean, & other places.  I want to climb Kilimanjaro someday, when the kids are older. I don’t like making terribly long-term plans. But I doubt I’ll want to spend the next 20 years all in the same place. However, I’d like to keep our permanent resident status in Costa Rica and maybe build us a place here that we can always come back to. That’s another part of my ideal.