circadian circus

Friday I had a nice day wandering down Camino Antiguo – the old dirt road that the kids’ camp is on – and I brought my binoculars and zoom lens. Here’s a few of the birds I saw, some of which I can’t easily find online to ID and my passerine skills honestly suck (so please correct me if you can....Forans??):

vermillion flycatcher

rufous-backed robin?

is this another violet crowned with pollen on its throat? 

no clue - probably an easy/common one i don't know...

bronzed cowbird - male all ruffled trying to get some action!

black phoebe

 

ok, you got me - these aren't birds! but there were about six baby squirrels zipping around and I couldn't help it. I'm not a squirrel-lover, and the adults here are huge, kind of scary really, but these little ones were kinda cute.

I’ve also seen (what I think are) gold-fronted woodpeckers, ladder-backed woodpeckers, great kiskadees, house finches, some kind of flycatcher with a yellowish belly/flanks and very distinct black and white bands across the outer tail feathers, and lots of LBJs with yellowish bellies/flanks that I’m far from IDing! There have been a few flashy red and yellow birds along the road to the casita, but I haven’t gotten a look at them enough to even guess. Great-tailed grackles are everywhere – the crow of the region. This has inspired to me get a little more into backyard birding with the kids once we're home....

Did I mention that we encountered a butcher making deliveries on our way home Friday? Zeiva wanted to know why the pigs had eyes. I didn't get a shot of it, but the butcher climbed in there, cut handholds into a side of beef, crouched under it, took a deep breath, hoisted it onto his back and ran off to deliver it across the street. His wife and ~2 year old kid were sitting in the cab of the truck.

I was looking forward to the weekend, especially just getting to sleep until we woke up on our own. I either have to wake the kids around 7:15 am to get going for camp during the week, or Lucas sometimes wakes up a little earlier because he knows he can play until Zeiva wakes up, but then I still have to battle him to put down the legos or whatever to get going. So, I was just hoping to sleep in and have a relaxing morning…

6:40 am Saturday

Zeiva in a loud, expectant voice: MAMA?!

Mama: Si, Zeiva, I’m right here.

Zeiva in an excited whisper: It’s a home day (what we call the weekends), so we can sleep until we want and we are going to have pancakes!

Mama: That’s right, and it’s very early, so let’s keep sleeping…

Lucas: How many people died in WWI?

Zeiva: I know! I know that Moby died!

Lucas: Moby wasn’t in WWI. Did more people die in WWI or WWII? What was WWI about?

Zeiva: I’m hungry. Mama, will you please make pancakes?

Hmmm….so we’re up by 6:45 am.

At breakfast, we were talking about life back home, and I mentioned that I thought it would be really fun to have the entire family (including Django) speak only Spanish maybe twice a week.

Lucas: NO!

Mama: Why not? It would be fun!

Lucas: I won’t be able to tell all the ideas I think of because I don’t know how to say them in Spanish!

Zeiva: Can we stay here, please? I don’t want to go back to Seattle. (??!!!)

Sunday same thing, believe it or not. They both woke up around 6:45 am and I kicked them out, telling them they couldn’t bother me until the clock said 7:30 am. They only came in about seven times, to have me read cards from a Monopoly-style travel game they are playing, to put medicine on their bug bites, etc. I finally gave up, got up and made pancakes.

Later in the morning, we had a video chat with Django, who was enjoying some cherries from the farmer’s market.

Zeiva: What are you eating?

Papa: Cherries.

Zeiva: When you come on the plane can you please bring us some cherries? :)

Zeiva and Lucas were out in the garden with Martín and I guess Zeiva spied a scorpion scuttling across the rocks towards her toes. Apparently it’s very unusual to see them cruising around in the open in daylight. Martín taught them that they had to find a rock big enough that the scorpion couldn’t wrap its tail around when they tried to squish it. I had wandered out to let them know it was dinnertime. I heard Lucas elaborately telling his tale (in Spanish, of course – yay!) of having the scorpion run out from behind the toilet past his bare feet on one of our first days here. I thought it was strange to be telling that story at this point, but then they showed me the other scorpion that Zeiva had spied. It was another half again bigger than the first one, and despite being well-squished, its tail and little stinger were twitching away, still trying to sting something before expiring. At this rate maybe we’ll see three in the two months we’re here, which is plenty for me.

Sunday we went back down to the park where they rent bikes. The kids rode for about an hour, and Zeiva even did a short stint on a bike without training wheels. I gave her one good push on her own and she actually rode for about 6-8 feet! I couldn’t believe it. I was really hesitant, since it’s concrete, but she kept telling me she wanted to do it on her own and frankly, my back was killing me after just a few minutes of maneuvering her myself. So, she did it! And then she promptly said she wanted the training wheels bike back. We then walked to a nearby plaza where there is a 10-day-long festival celebrating Oaxacan culture. We perused all the tents and stands, I salivated over the smells of all the moles cooking, and the kids and I got nieves – “snows”, or basically slushies. The stand had about 30 giant metal barrels with all different fruit-based flavors. The kids got limón (lime) and I got maracuyá (passion fruit). Zeiva had briefly wanted mango, but I noticed on the sign of all the flavors that it said “mango c/chile”. I told her it had chiles in it, thinking it was mixed in, but one of the guys said a little just goes on top. So I told her mango was a go, but she still opted to copy big brother. So, knowing that the chile could be added on, I asked for my maracuyá with chile. I imagined a dusting of chile powder, like they throw on cucumber appetizers or the cups of fresh fruit they sell on the street. But no, they smeared on a huge spatula-full of chile paste over the top of my nieve. It was picante!! I had to get through some of it to be able to get to the fruit slushy part so I could start mixing it a bit more. It was yummy, but I definitely broke a sweat eating spicy frozen dessert in the hot sun.

Next we wandered farther down the road to a large open grassy area where there is an irregular track around the perimeter, play structures for kids, and really strange red metal exercise structures for adults. This is right across from our in-between-buses bus stop to and from the club, and in the morning there are adults here working out, running the track, doing group training, etc. The red things are like ergonomic mechanical structures – for example, there’s one where you’re sitting on a chair and as you push two metal bars out in front of you like a press, you move your chair up. So you have to be able to leverage your body weight, basically. There are all kinds of inventive things. Two swinging bars with little platforms at the bottom for your feet that work like a very low tech cross-country ski machine. In the afternoon while we wait for our bus, there are always kids playing on the exercise things, and Zeiva always wants to go over there. She says, “Just for a minute, pleeeeaaaaase. We’ll be really quick and we’ll run back for our bus!”, not realizing that if we miss one of our buses we may be there a loooong time (or not, it seems to be completely variable). So we’d never gone and she was so excited to go and play on all the equipment.

Zeiva doing some reps

Some more of the funky exercise equipment at the park. This area is by far the largest green spot on the map of Guanajuato.

While we were there, Lucas noticed that across the street, way up on a hill so you could only see the very edge when players came close, that there was a basketball game going on. So we ended our outing with a trek up to watch the last 20 minutes or so of an organized league game. It was fun, we got talking to a family there, and afterward the mom got one of the boys to invite Lucas out onto the court to play around with all the kids. Very fun for him. Zeiva is not a huge fan of basketball yet, but there were babies and puppies in the crowd, so she just milled around, sat right down next to people she didn’t know, and admired them all.

I thought I lost Lucas at the end of this day out. As usual, I had trouble extracting Lucas from (insert sport here) and when we were finally leaving the basketball court I guess he really meant business, so he bee-lined it way down the hill and down the sidewalk about a block to our regular bus stop. He did this all before Zeiva and I made it over the crest of the hill, so once we did, he was nowhere to be seen. I didn’t even really look as far down as the bus stop because it seemed inconceivable to me that he could have made it down there already. So I grabbed Zeiva and we started zig-zagging the hill. I couldn’t find him anywhere….I started yelling his name. I asked Zeiva where she last saw him (she was ahead of me), she said back on the hill. That made me nervous, because he wasn’t there. At the bottom of the hill is a very busy, 4-lane road with lots of auto and bus traffic (though today one direction was completely blocked up by two cows on the road). He wouldn’t have tried to cross to go back to the park, would he? It didn’t seem like him, but he’d asked to go back before catching the bus home. I stopped Zeiva again and made her look in my eyes and asked her again where she’d last seen him, and she pointed towards the bus stop. We looked that direction and saw him heading back our way. We met in the middle and he immediately burst into tears, because he also hadn’t been able to see us while we were searching on the hill. Ugh – such an awful feeling. But it was all because he was so comfortable heading to the bus stop, knew exactly where he was going and what he was doing, so other than the temporary fright on both ends, it was kind of impressive. Though not nearly as funny as almost having the bus drive off with Zeiva!

We’ve had a little break-through in Spanish speaking over the weekend as well. I was getting really annoyed that they kept leaving the front door of the casita open. It’s wonderful to have the fresh air and cool breeze, but it’s just not worth the flies and mosquitoes. So, I am constantly asking them to shut the door behind them and they pretty much never do it. I know I’m supposed to try to avoid punitive measures when we could “work out a solution together” that I’m sure they’d then abide by (yeah, right) and I’m at least supposed to find a consequence that’s directly linked to the crime. But I just got fed up and told them that they lose a quarter of their allowance that they continue to accumulate back home every time they leave the door open. Amazingly, they were both suddenly able to remember to shut the door nearly every time. Presto! This is true even though Zeiva doesn’t really have any concept of money and has never touched her piggy bank. Anyway, I was telling Django over the computer about how effective this was, and between us (I don’t remember who actually crystallized the thought), we came up with the idea of paying them for speaking Spanish! Now if that isn’t the worst incentive ever for doing something that should just be inherently rewarding! But what the hell – I told them they could earn back the money they were losing on the door by getting a penny for every time they spoke a complete sentence in Spanish. Lucas spent all of Saturday saying everything and anything he could think of in Spanish and immediately racked up dozens of pennies. It’s all for the wrong reasons, but I like this system!! A little window into why the world works the way it does…

They’d been up early both weekend mornings, so we tried hard to get to bed early Sunday evening. Despite being fairly successful, come Monday morning, of course, they are both in comatose sleep at 7:20 when I’ve already drawn the drapes and I am loudly unpacking terracotta dishes from the dish rack. They didn’t even stir. So I had to wake them up, which meant a grouchy morning. But we got back into the swing of our weekday routine. They sorted out whose turn it was to lock the doors, pay the bus drivers, be in front, etc. We’d bought a tennis racket over the weekend, so Lucas was eager to play tennis at camp, and he reported today that he did, although apparently he spent a bit of his tennis time loaning the racket to a few friends. His heart’s in the right place, that kid. It’s Zeiva’s turn tomorrow, though I’m not sure she’ll want to try tennis. She might opt for Zumba instead, which is a pretty funny sight. She mostly stands right in the middle and looks around at the other girls as if she’s wondering what on earth they are doing. Then every once in a while she decides she likes hands on the hips or whatever it is, and she’ll briefly join in. She claims she likes it, and every time I call it Zumba (what the camp calls it), she corrects me by telling me it’s “baile” (dance).

We’ve got this week to go and then Django shows up mid-week next week during their last week of camp – yahoo! And my brother and his girlfriend just bought tickets to come down August 20-30^th. So I think we’re going to do some fun, vacation-type stuff and we’ll have just one week in between the two visits on our own. That week coincides with a couple of other classes I’ve found – one art class and another class at the natural history museum – so I think we might be set. We’re only almost halfway through our two months, but because the rest of the trip will be punctuated by the excitement of everyone visiting (and help!), I feel like I’m in the home stretch already! Andale!