Domino, frozen

There are many mysteries here, why there is a domino in the freezer… Why there is a spoon in the trash…Why there is mud in my windowsill?- I guess I can answer that one. Ya’ll have dust. Made out of skin particles and the like. We have dust. Made out of clay, sand, and anything else the wind whips up. I used a wet cloth to clean out the window, and it literally clumped up like a big glob that I’d just pushed out of the tread of my galosh. It was almost as thick as play-dough.

Another mystery I had was whether one of my girls was misbehaving at school. Her and another one go together, and M—was always coming home with these elaborate stories about C—not behaving at school. I sent the teacher a detailed note, and she signed it and sent it back, but didn’t write anything, like “don’t worry, everything’s fine.” So since we sometimes go grocery shopping near their school (40 minutes away) I decided to stop by after grocery shopping. I wasn’t quite sure how it’d go. Her teacher was really nice, and explained that M—is exaggerating things, and that C—and M—are her two best helpers in the classroom. The thing that surprised me the most about the visit was how stinking EXCITED M—was that I was coming. As I waited in the car for her teacher to arrive, M—played in the yard. M—pointed out to all her friends, that I was waiting outside the school, and told them my name, and waved CRAZILY at me. When I was a teenager, I would have been mortified. Granted she turns 20 in July, so maybe she’s past that, but she does get embarrassed of me sometimes in the grocery store. After I chatted with her teacher, she tried to directly introduce me to her classmates. It was cute!! They start their school day doing a military style thing. They march in place with two or three different steps/rhythms, and then they go to their classes. They also march in place after breaks while they wait to be dismissed to their classes.

Are you smarter?

J--, who struggles in Math, did her long division page ALL BY HERSELF last week! Except that she didn’t. We were checking it over, and I noticed that when there was a remainder, she wrote R (to symbolize remainder). In Mexico the kids do S (to symbolize sobra, “too much, surplus, excess”), so I taught her to use S. I did not teach her to do R, but some reason it was all over her paper! So I asked her, “who helped you?” -Nobody. “Who helped you???” -Nobody helped me. “The person who helped you speaks English, I know.” And she looked at me guilty, and shocked.

D and I were playing music the other weekend practicing for worship, and I had some music theory epiphanies while answering one of her questions, and then I realized- If I went back to school now, I could totally pass some of my class sooooo much more easily. I could whip all those Spanish classes, I’d do better in Music Theory, and she was like, yeah, You learn so much after college. If only...

Grocery Shopping

So this weekend we had a party for Pastor Rance’s 65th birthday, and his change of ministry position. When we were planning, our conversations went like this.
“Well, where can you buy Ginger Ale?”
-“Sometimes they have it at that one store, but also you could check Alfer-mart.”
“Could we get gold balloons?”
-“They don’t sell gold balloons at the party store. Do we want yellow?”

Going to the store here is often a guessing game. One of the ladies used to regularly buy jello, sour cream, and pudding at a certain store, and they don’t stock ANY of it any more. We found sugar free fat free yogurt at a store, and were buying it once a week, when it disappeared again. In the states, if you go to a certain store, you know the same products will be there week after week, and if there is a change, they put up signage “item will be discontinued.” It’s taken some getting used to. It's totally normal for people to come home from the grocery store without getting to buy everything on their list, b/c it's just not there. They also only sell products IN season. For example, when no one was harvesting Cucumbers there were no Cucumbers to buy. Sadness. We also don’t have coupons here, but do talk about which place sales a product at a better price.


(Happy Cinco de Mayo, but I think more people celebrate it in the States, than here in Mexico, except for maybe in Puebla- where the battle that is commemorated happened, and MAYBE in D.F. (Mexico City) )

Wive Catalogue

ok, so this is an old story, but it needs to be told.
So on Valentines Day, some of the single ladies got together and had breakfast. It was decadent, my friend Danielle stewed strawberries, and we had different kinds of melted chocolate and French toast and pudding. Well, we all cleaned up together. Everybody washing/drying and putting away dishes at once. Not one of us had idle hands, some of us even had aprons on.
Well, as we’re doing that there was a knock at the door. We continued cleaning while D let the people in. It was one of the Mormon women from town, who is part of a polygamist family, with her son, who is single (who I’ve seen at parent meetings at the school, I always thought he was a parent! Opps!). She was dropping off a Vday gift for D, as she has gotten to know their family. After they left, we were so embarrassed. It felt like a scene out of a movie. We joked about how his mom might have said, “look at all the women available to you, and didn’t I tell you they are hard workers and good home makers?” I can imagine that we looked like an interactive/live Wive Catalogue. We asked each other if we would still be friends if we were sister-wives (That’s what you call yourself if you share a husband), and concluded that we’d all be jealous of each other and have lots of inter-personal conflict. Luckily, nothing awkward ever came of it.

We're burrowers.

There are other tricks to living in a big family. Hiding food! If it’s in the kitchen, it can get eaten. I’ve saved cupcakes for kids that weren’t home in decorative display bowls that are up on the highest shelve. The top of the fridge is a good place too. We have two shallow drawers that are low and store things like plastic bags and table cloths, a great place to hide apples or oranges! Sometimes, if you hide food, it still gets discovered and eaten. We go through a box of bananas in a day, maybe a day and a half. The size box your grocery store uses to stock the shelves. The motto is, if you don’t eat it, someone else will! Maybe we live like squirrels??

It may be spring here, but it's not like Spring where you are.
The flowers are dying, trees are turning brown. The wheat is now big fields of creamy yellow (which I think is pretty, but it probably doesn't make the farmers very happy that it died.) I noticed lying in the hammock at my friends house that the tree's leaves were thinner. During the winter, you wouldn't notice the hammock from the road, but now it's a very clear shot. Our winter is when everything is in bloom and beautiful. Our spring is so much more like fall.

Steph's Bday.

In a big family, we have to share everything. We have 5 bathrooms for 25 people. So you can imagine how it is in the morning. Only about 2 people can be showering at a time anyways or there isn’t enough water. One of the tricks the kids do is turn the bathroom light on and close the door, with no one in it. They do this so that they can do other things, like eat breakfast, or find their clothes and towel, and the bathroom will still be free when they come back. Many people will walk by the bathroom and not even knock, thinking that someone is in it. Sometimes they lock the door, but you can undo it with your thumbnail. Even I have fallen victim to this.

Today is Stephanie's 12th? bday. She is sooo sweet. This week, it was the birthday of one of the children of a lady who does our laundry three days a week. They weren't going to throw a party for the 6 year old girl because they don't have extra money. So Stephanie took it upon herself to make her a cake and decorate it (it was BEAUTIFUL.) She got two little gifts for her and then we went and dropped them off! I hope my children turn out thoughtful of others and kind.

Hey Tootz!

I have this memory in 2nd or 3rd grade of a little boy calling the art teacher, “Tootsie”, and then getting kicked out of class for it.
Well, yesterday one of the little boys who lives with us called his sister “Tootsie”. I was thinking, where does he learn this American slang. I was about to ask him where he’d heard the word “Tootsie” when I heard him say, “and I’m a hutu.” Then I realized he was saying “Tutsi” instead of “Tootsie.”
Of the few movies our family owns, one is Hotel Rwanda. Which is about the Hutu-Tutsi conflict. It sort of makes sense calling her a “Tutsi” b/c she is taller than him. But that’s about all the sense there is.

Yesterday was "Day of the Child." One of my kids insisted that there was a party at her school even though they've cancelled school until May 6th. Plus we were supposed to have a Beach Party today (and no school) to celebrate "Day of the Child" but that's been rescheduled because of the swine flu. This weekend is also "Labor Day- Mexico" So the kids weren't supposed to have school Monday anyways. Mexico has a ton more holidays than the U.S. I'm sure of it.

One of my girls asked how the Swine flu started. In spanish it's "influenza porcina", (can you see the word pork in there?), so when I explained that it comes from the pigs, she was all, "Oh! so that's why it's called Swine Flu." :) I can't believe she hadn't figured that out with all the media attention, and household chatting.