i was going to write a post about all of the changes that i went through during our time in sayulita before moving onto our adventures in maryland, but i’m having trouble putting my thoughts into words so i’ll save that for another day. in the meantime here is an update on the happenings in our lives as of late.

for the last ten days we’ve been basking in the love and luxury of epito and epita’s home. we had a bit of a rocky exit out of mexico – our flight reservations mysteriously cancelled (twice!) and visa issues – which resulted in us spending an extra night in a hotel, but eventually we made it safe and sound into america.

the ‘pitos live in a town called gaithersburg in maryland. its about an hour out of washington d.c., in a community with parks, a pool and trails to play in. we didn’t venture very far during our first week, opting to hang out at the pool and explore the playgrounds that dot the area. currently he has a thing for slides so its a good thing that there are plenty of them around!

nayou can be real temperamental when it comes to being friendly. most of the time he isn’t that nice with adults he’s not familiar with, although there are the rare few with whom he will cosy up to right away. it took him a couple of days to warm up to epito and epita, which was a bit sad for me to see, but now he is being sweeter with them. we still have to prod him to give them hugs and kisses, but their names come up often in conversation and he has found a very willing playmate in epito 🙂

we spent one day exploring “the mall”, which is what everyone calls the area in downtown washington d.c. where all the museums are. each of the museums are world class, and you need days to see each one properly. best of all, they are all free! brenda and i took nayou to the air and space museum followed by the museum of natural history. nayou must have thought he had died and gone to heaven seeing so many aircraft and dinosaurs in a few hours! plus we took the metro in which was another bonus.

the best view was from the floor looking up!

here is nayou in the natural history museum. at this point he is soooo tired but there is too much eye candy for him to be anywhere close to sleep.

oh yeah, and there was brenda’s birthday in there somewhere as well! one of brenda’s indulgences is to get a decaf soy latte, so we started her day off right by bringing one to her in bed. it turns out that nayou is a bit of a coffee fiend too, and i had to restrain him from trying to drink it all down before we could bring it to her.

at this point brenda is probably thinking about switching to non-decaf coffee though because she has been burning the midnight oil ever since she got her new birthday present, which was a shiny new ipod touch. she’s been hankering for one for quite a while now, which is evident from the expression on her face in this photo!

we have just spent the last two days in millville, a town three hours south of gaithersburg. epito and epita have just bought a townhouse down there and so we went down to check it out. it is close to some of the famous beaches on the east coast like bethany, rohobeth and ocean city. i read somewhere that you could surf at these beaches, and was really hoping for some sort of swell, but unfortunately the ocean was very flat. still, it was nice to be back at the beach. i didn’t realise quite how much i missed the ocean until i felt my feet touch the sand again.

three things that are really nice to have again: drinkable tap water, broadband internet and a postal service. we didn’t mind living without these things at all (we had adsl for internet), but i am not complaining about having them back! brenda and i were super excited to go to whole foods and get all kinds of yummy organic food as well, but were stopped dead in our tracks once we saw the price tags. food has become a whole lot pricier here since our last visit!