Happy New Year´s

A little New Year´s day surfing

Isaac´s siblings, aunts and cousins at the beach house

Ari and cousin Elyn - yeah, she was getting jealous

Mark, Heidi and Elyn at the temple

From left to right: Heidi (holding Elyn), Mark, Daniel, Harmony, DeAnna, Casey
on December 30th - the water is bathwater warm

From the pool to the piñata, life jacket and all

We had such a great New Year. Most of my family, 17 of them, came to Panama on the 26th and stayed a week. It was so great to see them, and it was a first for many of them to meet Ariana. We rented a house on the beach and pretty much just relaxed.

On the 30th, Heidi, Mark and Elyn were sealed as an eternal family in the Panama temple. We are so proud of them!

On the 31st we made a "muneco" a life sized "doll" stuffed with palm leaves, paper and firecrackers. We used some old clothes and and the head from the Santa piñata we used the day before to make the doll. That night we had a big bonfire, blew up the doll (which represents destroying the old you to bring a new, resolved you into the new year) and had a personal fireworks show on the beach. I´ll take that over snow anyday!

My family left on the first but we rented the house for another two days and a few hours later Isaac´s family started trickling in and by the end of the day we were celebrating the 1st with at little more than 40 Yanguez family members. What a great way to bring in the new year.

Merry Christmas and Happy Birthday Ariana

Helping mom wrap gifts

Happy Birthday Ariana!!

Ariana turned one on the 25th of December. It was so fun to be able to celebrate the amazing year we´ve had with her this year. She is such a wonderful blessing to our lives! I love that we can celebrate her birth simultaneously with the birth of Christ.

We celebrated Christmas Eve in Panama Viejo with Isaac´s family having the traditional midnight dinner and gift opening. Ariana, surprisingly, kept up with us and stayed up opening presents and playing with the wrapping paper (and discarding the presents of course) until 1:30am when we decided to call it a night and take her home.

The next day, the 25th, friends and family came to our house to celebrate her birthday. We had a Christmas dinner, Panamanian style, with ham, arroz con guandu, potato salad, and a bunch of desserts. We had about 25+ that came but plenty of food left over. Ari made a haul between Christmas and birthday gifts. We have such great friends and family here.

Happy T-Day!!

The TWENTY missionaries we had over for Thanksgiving dinner

Leftovers AFTER seconds and thirds

As Thanksgiving was approaching, Isaac began to feel bad for all of the North American missionaries that would miss out on T-day dinner, so he was nice enough to invite them all over to have dinner with us (without talking to me about it first...).

The zone leaders eat dinner at our house once a week so they decided to work out the details the week before. Isaac asked them if they could each bring a dish so it wouldn´t be so much work for me. The Elder said, "so I should bring like a box of instant potatoes?". I jumped in and told them not to worry about cooking, I would take care of it. They were nice enough to have everyone in the zone pitch in a couple of bucks each, which helped, and then when Janna heard what we were doing she offered to buy since we were putting in the work. Thanks Janna! The missionaries thank you too!

It turned out well. It was alot of work, but worth it. The missionaries were very thankful for it. We had to take all of the food over to the chapel to serve it since there was no way we could fit 22 people in our house to eat. We made a 25 lb turkey, a 10 lb ham, green bean casserole, TONS of potatoes, stuffing, gravy, green salad, rolls (store bought), 4 pumpkin pies, 2 cheese cakes and an apple pie. It was a hit, thankfully.