Lisa n Tom (n James n Joseph)

It's Sunday and I am proud of announce that not only did we KNOW it was Stake Conference, we actually FOUND it this time.  After church, we went to Santiago's birthday party. There's a group chat for each of the grades at the boys' school and an invite went out to the whole class. Yesterday and the boys and I hit up the Lego store at the mall with the indoor skating rink and bought a gift. Today, they showed up at the party center with the suits on, nervous about hanging out with strangers they can't communicate with yet but game to slide from the bounce house into the pool. The boys in the class can running up to Joseph, eager to say hello. It took a minute, but he warmed up. James was a little more reticent because he was older than the rest of the kids, but he got into it eventually too. At kid's parties in Mexico, the whole family is invited and the whole family, included dads, generally sticks around for the whole thing. We sat with some parents and got the...

The Palacio Cantón, also known as the Museo de Antropología, is one of many, many really big old houses in Mérida that have been restored and converted into something else. The fortunes they were all built upon were based on rope. Henequen rope, or sisal fiber rope. Just this stuff: Between the 1800s and mid 1900s Yucatán produced 90% of all the henequen rope and burlap bags in the world. Fortunes were made. Italian marble was shipped in and big old houses were built.  I think this was our favorite little thing we found at this museum a tiny gold froggie. There are no metal deposits of any kind in this area, so any Mayan gold stuff must have been traded from far away areas like Peru. That makes this an especially special little frog.

Cinco de Mayo is not Mexican Independence Day. I'm not sure how we all got that so wrong. (Apparently it was marketed by American beer companies in the 80s as a drinking holiday.) Actual Independence Day is September 16th. The swag has already started to appear.

There's a fancy restaurant around the corner from our house. We finally got dressed up and walked over there. The hot chocolate was pretty on point and the service was splendid, but the boys turned into kids when the familiar food they'd ordered -- pancakes and a roast beef sandwich -- didn't taste exactly like what they expected. Everybody from Joseph's 3rd grade class has been invited to a kid named Santiago's birthday party on Sunday, so we needed a gift. We went to the Lego store at the mall. The mall with an indoor ice skating rink with a zamboni.

 Today's museum march was to the Train Museum in Parque la Plancha. The two year old park is on the site of the old wheelhouse. It has a fantastic series of playgrounds, an amphitheater, and a manmade lake. A couple of trains are scattered around the grounds, two more are in the mall-style food court, and the rest are in the museum. It's very cook and digital and wraps up with an inexplicably psychedelic 360 degree movie of a train flying through dinosaurs in space. That was the boys' favorite part. Spot the tiny James at the base of the flagpole

We've got a week until school starts, so I've been frog marching the dogs through a museum every day. Today we hit the Regional Anthropological Museum. It's an old mansion that was used for a school and military offices and finally converted into a museum in 1985. It hasn't really been renovated since, so now it's kind of a meta-museum: a historical museum of what a natural history museum looked like in 1985. For school, the boys have to bring a grade level book in English and Spanish. James is going to attempt the first Harry Potter book. Joseph is going for the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. The pictures are funny in either language.

 On Sunday, we left the house at 4:30 a.m. to drive about an hour to Sisal, a small fishing village with some beachfront hotels and restaurants and one main pier reaching into the Gulf of Mexico. Once a year, they take the dark wood statue of Christ out of the local church and cruise him around the Gulf for a couple of hours to bless the waters. We found a guide and joined the 100 or so other launchas following behind Jesus and his entourage of musicians and guys lighting off firecrackers. Here's more of the story:  " Sisal  is Yucatán’s only coastal  Magical Town , where everyone goes by nicknames rather than their actual names, and which once was the most important port in the state. This port still hosts an event that truly left me in awe: the maritime pilgrimage of the Black Christ of Sisal. For locals, el Señor de Sisal (the Lord of Sisal), as he is known, watches over the lives of fishermen and blesses the sea that sustains the community. This year, the celebra...

On Saturday after the race we did or discovered five things: 1. The boys were invited over to swim with the next door neighbor kid. The dads arranged it. The boys were all kind of shy and reserved and the language barrier didn't help. Baby steps, hopefully? But, more important, we solved the mystery of the screaming "kid" next door! Lolo and his buddy Lulu live in the neighbor's patio. Lulu didn't say much, but Lolo is a talker and a squawker. He makes really convincing kid noises and says a bunch of words in Spanish. 2. James loves the quava and cheese versions of these breads. Today we learned what they're called. Gotta love some death bread for breakfast. 3. This palm tree is cool. 4. And so is this ant-shaped playground climb-y thing. They went all-out when they were building Parque la Plancha. 5. How much do you need to use the restroom? Better hope you've got a cinco peso piece in your pocket.  

 It's Saturday. We got up with Tom at 6 p.m. to go to his CrossFit gym for their fun run. Here's the gang warming up. (It's 7 a.m. and already 80 degrees.) The nice thing about CrossFit in Mexico is that the sport's design aesthetic perfectly matches a lot of pre-existing Mexican buildings. "Crumbling industrial, you say? We got you, compañero." Resident cat is curious but unimpressed.

Museo de Mérida. Museo de la Luz. (Background music playlist was absolute fire.) And this delightful store right across the street. (It’s a gourmet dog food shop.)  

I am, if I may say so, a Costco connoisseur. Here are a couple of things I have seen nowhere else: May I interest you in cornbread with a side of ice cream? The Costco cenote. I found this description online:  “The grounds on which that Costco was built were formerly a part of some big state owned warehouses. Seems that the cenote was covered during the construction of those and it kept hidden for decades. Eventually the warehouses got abandoned and nobody knew the cenote was still there. “Meanwhile, a few years ago our local Costco looked outdated and too Y2K, so they needed a new store. They bought part of those old warehouses land and proceeded to demolish in order for the new Costco to be built, that's when the old hidden cenote was re-discovered and promptly named "Ka Kuxtal" in the local Mayan language, meaning something like ‘The one that got back to life’ and yes, it's a pretty place in the most unusual place.“  

The boys are all looking sharp after a trip to the barber.  I’ve been the one cutting their hair 99% of the time. https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/3a4fb4c0-c596-4767-a541-c23e0dc58a4d It was a revelation to see how the barber approached James’s thick, mostly vertical hair. Instead of wetting it, combing it down, and carefully cutting straight lines, it tackled it like a topiary . Genius.

Day One of the new alarm clock looked like this: After church and church, we went to a very cool city park that was recently built on the site of the old train terminus, Parque la Plancha, where we met another VERY SMALL dog. Her name is Chicky.   And her owner, Emma. Emma is nine years old and knows about four words of English but she was absolutely determined to use all of them and, by the end of the night, she and Joseph were exchanging Roblox usernames. Once the sun goes down, the temperature gets tolerable about here. We thought we were done and headed home, but then we passed the park Ampitheater where they were playing "Return of the Jedi," and, well, you know you never just walk away from "Return of the Jedi." ("Te amo." "Lo sé.")

Saturday, we went to the Merida English Library which, I realize, sounds a little counterproductive to our Spanish-language learning project. But it has produced surprising benefits in the form of two little boys who are so desperate for English media that they're spontaneously reading. Like, for the first time ever! Yay, Diary of a Wimpy Kid series! They ASK if they can bring their books with them when we go someplace in the car as though they were Gameboys. [Play it cool, Lisa. Play it cool...] "Yes, but only one each."  Then we went through this cemetery on our way to buy a used electric piano keyboard from a lady named Maria who ran a very packed little tienda out of the front of her house. Then we went to OfficeMax to find Joseph an alarm clock. He's been obsessed with the idea of waking up on time for school. They briefly reverted to their devolved state. And we saw the tiniest little dog in the world, I think.