so, i have been avoiding this post for a long time now, but i need to get everything posted before i forget all the details (therefore, these costa rican posts may be long and boring and you're given permission to skip over if you desire).
our humanitarian trip technically started the friday before we left. we all got together at the com-d building and organized all of our materials and supplies. we had to take absolutely everything we would need to use over the next 8 days with us so we had quite the party packing up suitcases full of equipment, audiometers, screeners, hearing aids, batteries, toys, and plenty of other things.
there were 16 of us that were going on this trip and we all flew on different flights. my group had our first flight leaving monday, may 4 at 6am. that made for an extremely early morning for all of us. we were supposed to fly from slc to dallas to orlando to miami to costa rica (ridiculous, i know). however, our first airplane had mechanical problems, our flight got cancelled, and we had to book another flight on a different airline. lucky for us, we took a delta flight straight to orlando skipping the dallas layover. 
we all finally made it to san jose about 9pm that night (longest traveling day ever) and surprisingly enough, all 3 groups arrived within 30 minutes of each other. talk about great timing. we were taken to our hotel in san jose (which was surprisingly nice) and crashed. dr sebastian mellick (an ear-nose-throat doctor in costa rica) helped us organize our entire trip. he found places who needed audiological services and set up the times/dates for each of the locations. we got up super early the next morning (5:30) and headed off to our different locations. we had 3 different places to go to so we split into different groups each day. my group for the first day went to cencinai which was a preschool filled with children. here, we performed otoscopy (looked in their ears at their eardrums to make sure the canal was clear and the eardrum looked good), tympanometry (a test making sure the ear drum is working properly and there is equal pressure between the outer and middle ear), and then we did a hearing screening on all of the children. costa rica has socialized health care, so the children we identified with hearing loss at this school were referred to an audiologist that worked in that area. 
after cencinai, we drove to kinder papillon. this was a school run by a fabulous lady named carla. a few of her students had hearing aids, a couple even had cochlear implants, but many of her students needed to be tested. so, we did the same tests on these children that we did at the preschool earlier. however, at this school, any child that was identified with a hearing loss was fit with hearing aids that we had donated by hearing aid companies here in the us. here, we met adriana, a costa rica native and a graduate student studying audiology. she is currently working as an audiologist but had some equipment donated to her that she didn't know how to use. this equipment is excellent for verifiying that the way you program a hearing aid is what that child's hearing loss would require. we spent a great deal of time teaching and training adriana on how to use her equipment and we were able to make sure that these children had appropriately programmed hearing aids. 
these kids were absolutely adorable
after a very long day, we had just enough time to snap a group photo.
after putting in 11 hours at the schools, we all headed to dinner at a nice, authentic restaurant. we got our first real taste of costa rican food- rice, beans, homemade corn tortillas, chicken, and fanta :)
when we got back to the hotel, we were all so exhausted that we crashed early. we also knew that the next morning would be another 6am morning.
i will try to post more of the trip tomorrow!
my dad is a big utes fan and i bought all the stuff to make him this "u" back in november for his birthday. but i never got around to it... until now. i think he'll love it. 
on sunday night, i got all my crafting supplies out and made these flower and ribbon bows for little baby headbands for some of my cute, pregnant friends. i spent about 5 hours on them and ended up making about 50 of them. this is only a small sample. 
my name is liz, and i am a craft-a-holic
the top row were mine- "dino egg", "green blob with sparkles", "blue blob with sparkles", and "pretty in pink". 
josh's are the bottom row: "watermelon", "eliza" (josh named it that after me because it was his prettiest egg and he wishes eliza was my nickname. strange, yes), "fingerprint", and "balu."
i asked josh what he wanted for his special easter dinner and he said chicken and steak. so i marinated some meat and we grilled up some kabobs. we also made rosemary potatoes, a summer salad, and rolls. it was such a delicious meal josh decided to take a picture. this is proof that i don't make mac and cheese for every meal. 
