Mission: Urban

Posts fromThe Elledges

Here’s the newest member of the team. She was born Friday afternoon, weighing 8 lbs. 11 oz.

“Wow!!!” That’s a rather nice thing to hear as someone comes into your house for the first time, right?  Jil and I have always made something of a conscience effort to try and make our house warm and inviting to our guests. We love having people over, and want everyone to feel as [...]

A couple weeks ago I was talking with a guy that owns and runs a store down the street. I’ve been in there quite a few times to talk with him, even having mate with him a couple of times. This particular day, he seemed sort of down (at least to the extent [...]

Welcome to our home.  I really can’t believe how spacious and nice it is.  It’s got plenty of quirks, but we’re so happy to have a home again.
This is the dining room.  It’s where the entrance to the house is.

There was this odd, empty cut-out in the dining room.  So we had some shelves [...]

Rich took Em on a long walk this morning so I could nap (I’m fighting a cold).  On their walk, they heard a tiny meow.  They looked towards this ditch they were walking past.  Rich said there was a little, maybe 2 month old kitty coming towards them.  It jumped over a dead kitten to [...]

So we’ve been here for close to a month now. And there are still moments where it all seems completely surreal to actually be here, living in Argentina (like the other night when I for some inexplicable reason felt this sudden urge to watch the water drain “backwards”, like it was a completely new [...]

This week was a bit of a hard one for the Elledge family - emotionally, physically, and spanish-ly.  All of it directly related to this …

On Tuesday morning, as we were getting ready to head out for school, Emerson fell in our driveway and fractured her tibia.  She has to wear this cast for 2 [...]

It’s been almost a month since the last post.   I don’t even know how long it’s been since my last post.  Longer than a month, for sure.  So I’m jumping back in here.
There’s really only one ice cream chain here in Costa Rica.  Pops.  Some ticos pronounce like you would in English and some pronounce [...]

Next week we start our final trimester of language school. We’ll sort of be like the seniors on campus, or something like that. The ones that all of the new students look at and (oh so utterly mistakenly) think “If I could just speak Spanish like THEY do, then I’d be set.” [...]

This trimester our grammar class has been covering something called the “subjunctive mood”. Sounds pretty scary, huh, like the type of thing that would give your average student nightmares. Our school has an infamous 15 RULES TO UNDERSTANDING SUBJUNCTIVE (I was really tempted to record an MP3 and insert here (like I even [...]