try something fresher, something pleasant!

On a whim John and I decided we'd take our family to Mexico for our fall vacation.  Thanks to Voice Male we get a week of vacation in a time share every other year, and one of the places is in a town just south of Tijuana called Rosarito.  It's been really wonderful.  Anytime I go on vacation I start feeling like I want to move to that place, and Rosarito is no different.  I could do it.  It would take me a minute to remember how to speak Spanish, but even now I can get by all right.  I know how to buy food anyway, and that's supposedly one of the important things. 

A briefish recap for record-keeping purposes: 

Last Friday we picked the kids up from school and started on our way.  When we got to Willard I remembered that our passports were at home on my nightstand, so we got to backtrack for that.  Then Willa was carsick and we had to pull over for her to throw up three or four times.  We got to our hotel in Las Vegas after midnight.  Breakfast Saturday morning was pretty good for a free hotel breakfast buffet.  We considered for a moment going to M&M World or Coke World, but then we remembered that that was a dumb idea.  Then we saddled up and drove the rest of the way to Rosarito, with a stop in Tijuana for fish tacos.  We grabbed some groceries for Sunday at the Comercial Mexicana, and I was in heaven because foreign grocery shopping is my favorite thing. 

On Sunday we went beachcombing in the morning.  There are so many sand dollars around here; they are just scattered around the beach like cookies--big, nice ones that haven't been smashed to pieces yet.  It's amazing how quickly you acclimate, because the first one we found that had only a small hole was like a miracle, and a half hour later, when we had a stack of six or seven, only the most perfect, unblemished specimens could even capture our attention.  Later we went to church in the Spanish branch in Rosarito.  We pulled a Nate and only went to Sacrament meeting because:  Espanol.  I got the main gist of the testimonies, but going to class would have been a total mare's nest.  We had omelets for dinner. 

Monday we took some food to an orphanage that John's friends had told him about.  They were all jazzed about it and said to mention their name, since they go there all the time, but the people we talked to were a little bit like "Who?"  They seem like they are so strapped, and they have so many charities coming in and out all the time, and so many kids to take care of--fifty in one house and forty-five in the other--that they don't really have the deep connection to any particular benefactor that the benefactor might hope for.  It's a great big mess, pretty much, but the kids were all smiling and friendly and seemed as happy as could be expected.  We ate some carne asada and tacos al pastor at Tacos la Gloria, and then we went and got two cocos.  I was hoping my children would have the same magical experience I did, watching the guy chop off the top of the coconut with a machete and then be able to drink the coconut water, but they all seemed kind of underwhelmed.  Oh well, more for me. 

We spent Tuesday and Wednesday at the beach and the pool.  I was not present while the meth-heads were scraping all the sea stars off the rocks and trying to sell them, but all the same it's a good thing I didn't have my smiting powers that day. 

Thursday we drove down to Ensenada to see La Bufadora (The Blowhole, a geological marvel, not to be confused with Blowhole the whale from that one episode of The Tick).  We were hounded by vendors and bought some marvelous things:  Willa one of those faux peasant outfits, Ike a luchador mask, John a wide-brimmed cowboy hat for irrigating, and me a painted terra cotta skull and a skull necklace.  I'm into skulls I guess.  I'm pretty goth. 

Friday we bought candies and food from our favorite vendors and took one last look at the tide pools during low tide.  All of the days we watched a lot of futbol with occasional Jeopardy and Price is Right and movies. 

Saturday we got up and out of there as quickly as we could and spent two hours in the line to cross the border back into the U.S.  Let's just make Canada, America and Mexico into one big country, shall we?  We ate lunch at a gas station where we were mistaken for Europeans, I guess because none of us were wearing white socks or sneakers and two of my kids were wearing soccer jerseys.  Then we surprised the kids by taking them to LEGOLAND, which we will not be going back to ever again if I have anything to say about it.  The models are amazing, and the kids liked the Mindstorm robot thing, but other than that it's a turd convention.  We only made it as far as Henderson that night. 

Sunday we got up and ate and left and were able to make it to Washington for church in what turned out to be a singles ward, and the lady who sat in front of us turned around and scolded my kids for kicking her bench.  She told us afterward that we had nice voices, probably because she felt bad and is trying to buy her way back into heaven.  We ate at the Mired Ox (Café Rio) with all the other Mormons on their way home from California.  Willa barfed I think three times on the way home.  I read Harry Potter OotP for seven hours.  We got home and had a beautiful reunion with the cats. 

I loved this vacation so much.  I want to go back to Mexico.  I want to move there!  I hope my kids remember it as fondly as I remember the trips I took with my family. 

when I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide

A couple of kids in our ward are in the Mandarin immersion program at a nearby school, and I thought for a while about putting Willa in it, but then I despaired at the thought of having to run her back and forth every day for the next five years.  I am a lazy mom.  But also one of the moms is a giant drag and I don't want to have the forced intimacy of a carpool schedule with her.  Besides, I think that Spanish is as much the Language of the Future as Mandarin, and I can actually converse haltingly in elementary Spanish, so I think I'll just buy some textbooks and teach the kids a Spanish class once a week or something. 

Grant got on the basketball team he wanted, he is surviving middle school and getting excellent grades despite some of the teachers doing all they can to squash his love of learning, he is sometimes a jerk to his siblings, he doesn't practice his trumpet, he has been doing slightly better at getting up on time and feeding and watering the goats.  So, a mixed bag.  We take what we can get. 

Emmett loves school and life and is almost always happy except when I am making him eat cream of mushroom soup.  He does a slapdash job on his chores and incurs frequent fines for letting the chickens run out of water.  But because money actually matters to him, when we showed him the hole the fines had dug into his savings he got very wide-eyed and repentant. 

Ike is a child of contrasts.  Monday he was a turd and getting him to practice his piano was infuriating.  He sulked the entire afternoon.  Tuesday he came home and did his chores and practiced his piano right away without any nagging.  This morning he took 45 minutes to put on a shirt and barely caught the bus.  His two settings are happy and angry.  Hey--he must be my son! 

Willa is getting her claws out this afternoon.  I think we've finally succeeded with her.  It took a long time of wearing the mitten at night, but I think she's cured.  It helps that she's busy at school all day--it's when she gets bored that things get ugly.  I wonder how she'll do on our long drive to Mexico, since the car is like the most boring place you can be, and that's always been her hardest fight. 

John interviewed for and was offered a job at a different company but ended up not taking it.  It would have been fun, but there really are some very nice work/life balance benefits to working for the church.  Plus I like him working downtown--who wants to go out to lunch in West Jordan or whatever?  Not me. 

I love not being the PTA president.  It's nice to have only YW to worry about, because that is plenty of worry by itself.  Thankfully my Laurels are bright and inquisitive and happily engage in discussions during the lessons.  A couple of them are planning on serving missions, which is an exciting prospect.  I'm interested to see how the role of women in the institutional dealings of the church is going to evolve over the next little while.  My advisor Wendy and I do our best to disabuse them of incorrect notions regarding doctrine vs. custom, and hopefully it will help them find a space in the church that they can be comfortable and faithful in.