The Difference a Year Makes

Miles is at this funny age. I just love to hear him talk and the things he comes up with. He just makes me laugh all the time. Last week, I had a bad day and I was pretty emotional. Jared left me alone in our room to watch a movie and fold laundry while he kept the kids away from me for the evening. But then I hear little footsteps ascending the stairs, and Miles storms into my room. He reaches up for me and says "I'm going to make you feel better, I wanna give you a kiss." So he pats my cheeks and gives me a hug and a kiss. He is so sweet that way. He is a very affectionate kid. He loves to climb into our bed in the middle of the night and cuddle with us. He is always hugging Simone--fortunately Simone is pretty good at getting away. He'll say, "I love you Samoney Baloney!" and give her a hard squeeze. He is getting pretty patient with her as well. If she hits him, he just tells her, "No hitting Simone."

He is actually starting to feel remorse for destroying things--it has been a really nice development! He has been very careful with his new DVD's and even asks me to load them in for him so he won't scratch them. A year ago, he had just discovered the joys of television and figured out how to load in the DVD's. He wouldn't leave them alone. I think we went through a couple of DVD players. I put the DVD's on a shelf WAY up high near the ceiling in the laundry room. But Miles got to them of course. When he wanted something, he had a one track mind and seemed to just tune everything else out.

A few weeks I overheard him in his room. It was a funny little conversation. "Oh no! I broke me! I'm bleeding!" He pinched a finger in something. It was pretty cute though.

So he is growing up, and it is so fun. When I found out Simone was a girl, I was so excited to have another girl, but sad too for Miles to not get a brother. But after thinking about it a bit, I realized that I probably couldn't handle another boy anyway. Miles with all of his sweetness, was incredibly curious and persistent. Nothing I did seemed to influence him. He didn't really care about consequences, or he just didn't grasp them. It wasn't mischeif that drove him. He just knew what he wanted. That 15 months to 30 months was tough! But wow, the last few months have been a breeze!

I've noticed that lately Jared doesn't comment when I talk about how happy I am never to be pregnant again. He just stays quiet. I think he is biding his time until I forget about the nausea, the weight gain, the screaming baby in the car and all of those sleepless nights. I do love babies, but I also love the idea of having the freedom that comes with older school-age kids. I love four, and I think that is a good sized family. I look forward to being included in all our family activities, instead of staying home with the baby while everyone is off playing, sledding, at the movies, etc. And I can't wait to have a quiet house once in awhile. It is so rare that I get time alone.

So at this point, I just feel relief that four feels good to me. And someday maybe we'll both change our minds and we'll have a little caboose. But for now, I am enjoying the ones we've got.

My Mexican Adventures

Nothing really compares to the adventures I had on my family vacations. Both my parents were teachers, which allowed us about 3 months in the summer to cram in every scenic route or state monument we could find. Our trips were always cheap, because of not having any money living on teachers salaries, and having six kids. So, I managed to visit 38 states without ever having been on an airplane. Not only that, but we DROVE to Cancun, the Florida Keys, and Vermont. If you’re not familiar with Mexico, Cancun is approximately 3000 miles away. Actually, we drove our minivan to the border, then took buses and trains around the country for over a month.

We went to Mexico twice, once when I was 8, and again when I was 16. The first time we drove to Nogales then took unairconditioned trains mostly. We traveled to Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlan, Guadalajara, and Creel. Each of us six kids carried our backpacks with all our clothes and a little towel in it. We spent a lot of our time on the trains reading and exploring what we could. I think I read every Judy Blume book ever written that summer. Here I am curled up on my backpack as a pillow reading Blubber while waiting for the train.

Highlights from that trip were:

Little Rebekah and her famous diahrrea on the bus experience
Drinking lots of Coke products (for the lack of water, this was truly a novelty!)
Playing in the ocean in Puerto Vallarta
Riding the lazy mango eating horses on Yelapa
Visiting Guadalajara during a big soccer game (It seemed every little shop in the city had a tv in it all tuned to the game)
Beautiful cobblestone streets in Puerto Vallarta
The fancy restaurant that didn’t have any walls
Jellyfish clinging to mom, Bekah and Rachel in Mazatlan’s warm ocean
The trainride to Creel where I was so hungry V8 tasted like the best food I’d ever eaten
The Tarajamara Indians that still live in caves griding their corn, and making jewelry
Looking down on Copper Canyon, which is four times bigger than the Grand Canyon

Four years later, we went on a trip around the perimeter of the Southern and Eastern U.S. in a motor home. Four years after that, when I was in High School, we headed to Mexico again for a month long tour of Eastern Mexico and the Yucatan Peninsula. We again drove to the border at Nuevo Laredo, then down through Tampico, Villahermosa, Merida, Cancun, then ended our trip in Mexico City. One hotel in Villahermosa was a little shady, which made it all the more adventurous. I was almost 16, so Bekah, Rachel and I all had our own room. My parents armed us with combs that had removable heads with plastic daggers hidden inside, just in case. They looked like this:

(Perfect terrorist weapon, ours was pink and so innocent looking)

In the middle of the night, Bekah, Rachel and I awoke to the sound of crashing glass. It was a little frameless mirror that had been propped up against the wall and was leaning on the faucet. Someone had been in our room! We discovered that our bathroom window was open, and there was a little space in the middle of the building that made it so the people in the room below us could climb into the window if open. That was pretty scary! We met the guys that were beneath us the next day. Turns out they were transvestites and entertainers of some type? Oh well, at least we left that day and didn’t have to worry about it anymore.

During this trip, we saw all the major ruins in the Yucatan, and hundreds of little mounds of unexcavated old ruins. Chichen Itza, Palenque, etc. It was really neat to learn all about the Mayan and Aztecs.

We spent two weeks of our trip in Cancun eating all kinds of exotic fruit. We’d buy fruit from the market for breakfast, then starve until about 4 pm. Then we’d eat beans, rice, tortillas, guacamole, and pico de gallo. Nothing tastes as good as fresh tortillas made by the little old ladies. I also loved mangos with lime and chile and roasted corn on the cob.

I spent my 16th birthday on a bandit train. Yes, this little old rickety SLOW train that took 36 hours to take us from Merida to Mexico City. We jumped on the train because the next one didn’t come through for another day, and my dad wanted to get going. It was a snap decision, and as we read the guide book on the train after we had already left, it instructed not to take this particular train because there were frequently bandits. Well, too late. We were on it and in the middle of the jungle. We slept sitting upright. And we were lucky to just have a seat. I had boys sitting on my armrests and sitting all around me. People were PACKED in, and as Americans, we were a novelty. I heard that the bathroom had sludge sloshing around on the floor, so I held it for 36 hours. But I also got to read my all time favorite novel: To Kill a Mockingbird on that train, and I finished it on the steps of Teotihuacán. So, it was pretty cool in hindsight. And you can’t beat the $4 it cost per person to travel through the jungles. We saw all kinds of neat little villages, beautiful lakes, and interesting homes.

My favorite part of the trip was Mexico City. It was incredible to look out at the city and see these hills covered with dwellings just really tightly packed in. Chapultepec Park was so fun with the artists, good food, zoo, and boatrides. My dad wanted to spend lots of time at the Museum of Anthropology, so my little sisters and I spent the afternoon at the park then took the bus back to Zocalo—we felt so cool speaking Spanish and managing to find our way around. We ate lots of Chinese food in Mexico city. It was pretty funny to see Chinese people there. You just don’t expect it. But we were dying for some different flavors and this was really good Chinese food. We officially celebrated my 16th birthday at the floating gardens of Xochimilco. We bought this most delicious strawberry cake from the pastry shop. Here is the Aztec ruins of Teohtihuacan. I believe the pyramid of the sun here is four times as large at the base as the Egyptian pyramids. It is difficult to grasp the enormity of it in a picture:

At the end of these marathon trips, each of us was dying for some personal space. It was hard to be with your family for that long, but it was also really binding to have all those shared experiences. We all laugh about all the adventures we had. Sometimes we wonder what our parents were thinking! (comb daggers! Bandit trains!) Having four kids myself, I cannot imagine hauling them around on trips like that. But it was adventurous, that is for sure.

Just a funny picture I came across today

I was organizing my pictures today and came across this one I snapped with my phone last year. I am guessing Simone was crying and Miles was trying to suffocate, I mean "comfort" her.