since we’ve left mexico brenda and i have been amazed at how much english nayou has picked up. about a month ago he was speaking about 90% in spanish, but now that he’s been around english speakers he has adapted at lightning speed. in general he does an amazing job at keeping the languages separate. for example, he only speaks spanish to brenda and i because he knows that we’re the only ones who understand him when he does. it goes both ways though – he’s definitely starting to get into spanglish now that he’s figured out we understand both. it would be sad if he forgot how to speak spanish, but i suppose that’s the nature of the game at this point! hopefully when we settle into our next home we can find some spanish speaking kids for him to practice with.
excuse the poor video quality. i have to edit the video in premiere because windows movie maker doesn’t understand quicktimes, and the export settings are too numerous and try my patience. i just went with the first one that worked 🙂
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!
the next town up from sayulita is a sleepy place called san francisco. to avoid confusion, everyone refers to it as san pancho. its a really cute bohemian sort of a place, complete with a montessori school, a polo field and a museum promoting recycling. nice beach too!
approximately once a month there is a lucha libre in the main plaza of san pancho. i have been chomping at the bit to go for many, many months now but for one reason or another it never worked out. so when i heard that there was another one happening last week i had to go.
omar, one of the neighbourhood gang, is also a big lucha libre fan and he was all psyched up for it the day before. he came over wearing his mask and even gave his old one to nayou!
we are getting a lot of mileage out of the mask. nayou likes to terrorise everyone with his fierceness.
we arrived early so nayou would have a chance to see some of it, but he was more interested in the guy selling time on his trampoline.
this guy also had what might be the world’s most precarious merry-go-round. would you put your child on this thing?
brenda took our little boy home early and i stayed on with a group of crazy québécois that we met in sayulita. this is vincent, who is one of the most energetic people i have ever met. he is, in both looks and behaviour, what i imagine a young anthony keidis was like back in the day.
the fights themselves were everything i imagined them to be, but better. there was a total of three fights, all fought by the same four guys (just different costumes). their level of fitness and agility was a true marvel, and even though they fake and/or exaggerate the pain they are feeling, you know that a lot of it is real. especially when they start wrestling out of the ring on the concrete. sometimes one will jump off the ropes onto another fighter outside the ring (usually for saying unspeakable things about his mother). watching them tumble onto the cold hard pavement was enough to make everyone wince.
in between fights it was a free-for-all, with all the kids getting up and emulating what they just saw.
these two very drunk masked girls from the audience jumped in as well and were subsequently forced into a real match by everyone.
all the wrestlers and emcees had the dirtiest mouths imaginable, much to the delight of all the ten year old boys in the audience (and me). none of the adults seemed to mind, so perhaps the wrestling matches are the one exception where you can run your mouth off without getting into trouble? there was also a lot of slapstick humour, usually involving genitalia in the face. of course we all thought it was hilarious.
the costumes were pretty special too.
the lucha libre did not let me down. i am so glad i went and am bummed that i’m probably not going to get a chance to go again before we leave!
we knew that we needed to move out of our old house by the end of february. our landlord had already rented the house out for march and april, so we had no choice. brenda and i started looking for a new place to live quite early on, but were disappointed with what was out there. houses were too expensive, too far away, too shabby and sometimes all of the above. we got disheartened and kind of gave up the search. there was also the possibility that we might end up living for free in this huge new mansion that our friends built, and having that glimmer of hope took even more of our motivation away.
about ten days before the end of february (i.e. coming down to the wire), our friend will called with a house he wanted to show us. will is a real estate agent in sayulita and has his ear to the ground for all kinds of deals. we saw the house and immediately loved it. its big – 4 bedrooms big – and has a nice open living space with a huge yard to boot. plus the main bedroom has a king size bed. i was worried that the rent was going to be too high, but they offered it to us for less than what we were paying in our old studio apartment!
it almost seemed too good to be true, and it kind of was. what we didn’t know at the time was that there was this guy andy who had been living in the house for free for some time. andy is a friend of the landlord’s and needed a place to stay after he broke up with his girlfriend. andy liked living there and was a bit… reluctant… to move. on the day we took possession of the house he still had all of his stuff in the house and was digging in his heels, despite having heard from the landlord and will that he had to be out. we ended up postponing our move by one more day to give andy one last chance to move out.
the next day i arrived with a carload of stuff and found andy in the house. luckily he was in the process of moving all of his gear out. it was my first time meeting him, and despite all of the drama that was unfolding between him, will and the landlord, he was pretty cool. he took a while to get all of his belongings, but after that he was gone and we moved in without any incident. its been smooth living since then – having more space is just so awesome. nayou gets to spread all his toys out and run around, rocky gets his own hang out area and i get lots of room to do yoga. win win win.
here is a tour of the new place:
and just for comparison’s sake, here is what our old place was like:
its been a long time since we posted any sort of video. compared to photos, video is so much more of a pain to sort and edit. however, now that nayou is starting to speak, we thought it was high time to share his mad spanish skillz with you all. subtitled for your viewing pleasure 🙂
nayou’s first birthday, for me at least, was accompanied by a huge sense of accomplishment. brenda and i spent those first twelve months in the murky haze of chronic sleep deprivation raising an amazing little baby that demanded lots of attention. i’m not saying that it was horrible – in fact, it was quite the opposite – but i would be lying if i said it was easy. so when he turned one, it felt like we had just completed a huge milestone.
our second year with nayou was very different from the first. he got his sleeping (almost) in order, learned to walk and communicate, all of which contributed hugely to everyone’s happiness. its like someone flipped a switch one his first birthday. now he’s this cheeky, adorable toddler who i just love to bits. he still drives me crazy sometimes but he is so much fun to hang around with!
nayou’s special day started off with the opening of some presents. we figured that if we gave all of his presents to him at once he would just get overloaded, so we spaced them out throughout the day. many of our sayulita friends were really sweet and hooked nayou up with all kinds of new buses, cars, trucks and trains.
i think nayou now has the most impressive collection of vehicles in sayulita!
we spent the morning at the beach (where else?) playing in the sand. there were some more surprises from some of our friends who work at our usual cafe.
in the afternoon a couple of nayou’s friends came over for a party. i came down with a cold so brenda was stuck with all the prep while i tried to stop the waterfalls gushing from my nose. she did an amazing job making food, a cake and decorating the whole house!
no mexican birthday would be complete without a pinata. our friend brisa was kind enough to bring a splendid one over for nayou. it would be putting it mildly to say that nayou loves pinatas. he’s not so into the toys and sweets in them, but he can’t get enough of hitting them with sticks. we left the pinata carcass in our driveway and nayou goes out to smack it with his stick many times a day.
all the pinatas i’ve seen in mexico are made out of terracotta, which make them satisfying to break but kind of dangerous as well. when we finally got the thing open a shard fell onto nayou’s head! oops. there were some tears but it was all ok. you can’t stay too sad when you’re surrounded with friends and new toys.
and no birthday anywhere would be complete without a cake. mama-b made an amazing banana cake from scratch that was sooo good! maple frosting and everything. i was hoping for some leftovers but no such luck.
our video taking was kind of sporadic the whole day because we were too busy playing/party prepping, but here is a collection of the footage we did take:
the birthday spilled over into the next day with an extra gift from perla’s parents – a train with a phone on top of it! someone in china somehow knew the perfect combination of things for nayou because this thing hasn’t left his grip since he opened it.
i was skeptical about the claim on the package, but after seeing how taken nayou is with the toy i’m beginning to revise my opinion:
thanks to everyone who sent their kind words for nayou. its so nice to know he’s loved by so many people around the world. i can’t wait to see what kind of wonderful things year three has in store for us!
