I’ve been in denial for a while. Our daughter graduated high school four days ago. When our son graduated, I processed through writing and blogging. He was our first to leave. With our daughter, I’ve talked about it with people I love, and how wonderful and freaky it is for our children to not be children anymore, and how empty our house is going to feel when they’re both gone in August. Our son will start his third year at the University of Virginia; our daughter will start her first at the University of Florida.

I didn’t blog about it because writing about it would make me process my thoughts and feelings in a way I’m still not quite ready for. I think I’m still in a talk-about-it-with-loved-ones place. So for now, I’ll just write about how we’re celebrating our daughter’s graduation and her acceptance into her first choice for colleges. We’re on a family trip to the place of her choosing: Costa Rica. And on our first night here, we saw monkeys!

We’re staying at an airbnb in Playa Potrero on the northern Pacific coast of Costa Rica, about 30 minutes from Tamarindo. We’d walked out to the beach to watch the sunset, and when we arrived back at the house, we heard rustling in the canopy above us. Seed pods thunked to the ground as the treetops shook, and we looked up to see monkeys climbing and jumping from branch to branch like squirrels do at home. We saw baby monkeys carried on mothers’ backs, and I watched a parade of monkeys march across a long limb in front of the near full moon. The kids’ trip was made in just the first day.

We’re staying at the beach the first three days of the trip before we’ll go to the interior for another three days. The monkeys were fun, and I also love listening to the birds, which sound much different from ours at home: the bird calls here are deep-throated and emerge from the depths of broad-leafed, lush vegetation. The beaches are pretty gorgeous too. They curve in wide inlets protected on each end by rocky protrusions dripping with green.

And I love the coconuts. I can’t get enough of them. The kids loved monkeys on the first day. I loved that the cocktail I ordered — a Coco Bolo, with coconut water, lime juice, thyme, honey, and rum — was served in a coconut.