E = 5

The kids are showing me how old they are. I know. You thought you had accidentally clicked over to Martha Stewart's website for a minute there. She has asked for many consultations on cake decorating. I'm a busy woman, but I managed to put 9 types of sugary ingredients into my cake-making extravaganza.You will notice the cake does not say "Elijah," but "Elias" since he insists that is his name now that we live in Mexico. He also doesn't like me to speak to him in English in front if his friends for fear they will know the truth: We are not really Mexicans.

E opening presents:
Claire was not happy that E was opening all the presents:
So, generous E shared his presents:
His birthday celebrations included:
Wednesday: Cake to school, met David at Carl's Jr for lunch, soccer practice (he gave up karate and loves the new sport).
Saturday: A 10 hour party. Kidzania and then craziness at our place including 2 alien piñatas, pizza, and lots more sugar.
After the cake, a friend asked about E’s day of birth since it was the day we were celebrating. David said, “Let’s talk about something more import than E’s bday—his conception.” After knowing David for so long, not much phases me, but I found it difficult to talk for a little while after that one. And yet I admitted to the crowd that I had secretly given up on E's nose-picking/booger-eating habit, but that I still felt compelled to put up a front and chastise him in public.
While E was at soccer, Claire and I went to this church to see a play put on by our downstairs neighbor who teaches catechism there. I figure I need to get on the good side of anyone living right below us since they put up with a whole lot of strange sounds. In fact, the first day I met her she told me, "Children are blessings from God. The screaming, the jumping, the noises, are all blessings from God." I almost said, "No, you are a blessing from God."
We visited the crypts under the church while we were waiting for it to start.
The girls.
Why does it seem like my kids always have dirty faces? I swear I hose them off every week.
C has always had a hard time with her negatives: "do not" is not part of her vocabulary. I never know whether she meant to put a "do not" before her "want" until the ensuing tantrum.
E loves his sisters so much that he shares their sense of fashion.
When he was a baby, I took a lot of sleeping pictures of him. It amazed me how calm he could be albeit during slumber.

PSYCH!

David's asking for another post, so let me thrill you with my life.
Elijah the artist/scientist.
E has lost interest in his toys. He is usually in the junk closet discovering and creating.


Another funny tidbit about Elijah. On Saturday he got the Stealing Lecture. He took a candy from a store. The kid might be turning into a klepto. I used to think he was an exemplary student. Every day after school he would show me a treat and say it had been given to him because he had behaved well. Then, I started watching more carefully and realized he was pulling the treats out of other kids’ lunchboxes from their cubbies.
kleptomaniac + mythomaniac = my son.
Poor kid wants me to believe he is well behaved. Clever little one.

Speaking of well-behaved, Elijah's teachers specifically asked David to stop this:

and this:

And I'm pretty sure the "figgy 4" would have been on the list too:
Friday we will have our 3rd parent/teacher conference in 3 months to assess D & E's progress.

More on David. Yesterday I was in the kitchen and I heard David screaming at the top of his lungs from our bathroom shower (at opposite ends of our apartment). My first reaction was to check and make sure Iris was alive. She was. My second thought was that the poor man must have slipped and broken something…No, just wanted me to get the soap that was 3 feet away from him b/c I wasn’t already busy enough getting the other 4 members of our family ready for church. What goes through men's heads? The good news is that I have learned to laugh instead of fume in these situations.

The kids and I went to the Bodies Discovered exhibit today. They loved seeing the cadavers and body parts. Of course their favorite parts were the private parts. When we got out, E explained to me the condensed plan of salvation (we get old, we die, we live with God, we get better bodies) and asked to return to the museum.

And one last thing. Remember how I threatened to go private and then I didn't go private?
PSYCH!!!!! (did you think you were in the 80s for a minute there?)
Reasons:
1) I live in Mexico. Is having a blog really going to add more risk to my life?
2) No offense private bloggers, but I don't read your blogs often. There's love, but also simple laziness.
3) Simple laziness. I can spend an hour putting a post together, but taking a few minutes to learn how to go private is beyond the scope of my Natural Man lazy tendencies.

Reading!

Elijah read his first book today.

Bob Books: highly recommend them. We got them in the mail yesterday and I wish I would have started sooner.

But that wasn't his first book. It was the Encyclopedia Britannica. He specifically enjoyed the section about the flux capacitor. He started his time machine tonight and plans to be the first man on the moon.

romantic ramblings

Eight years ago today, I got engaged. I really, really didn’t want to get engaged on Valentine’s Day, because that’s about the cheesiest thing you can do besides getting married at Disney World, wearing a golden plastic crown, and being escorted by a man in a mouse costume in a horse-drawn pumpkin buggy (we’ll save that for our 25th anniversary). But alas, the timing worked out so that we needed to get engaged that night. The Ortiz family gave us tickets to NOLA from Utah so David could ask my father for my hand in person. And the engagement pictures were scheduled soon after, so we only had a small window. I bought David a bow tie so he could impress my father (instead he wore florescent yellow leggings which I believe impressed my father in a different fashion).
We ate at Mona’s middle-eastern food. He was timid in using a half-off coupon his dad gave him, since he was used to impressing women with the money he didn’t have. But I was proud of the one time he tried to save money. He took at least a dozen phone calls that night. I was quite aggravated with his phone etiquette—It was a little taste of my future. After dinner, we went for a romantic stroll along the levee. All of the sudden, I heard a melody floating through the oaks. What could that be, but David’s posse reciting love sonnets and playing guitars over an amplifier. I was supposed to be wooed, but I couldn’t stop laughing. David was nervous and I took advantage of the poor man. He got down on one knee; when he asked me I told him the answer was no unless he said my complete name, Elizabeth and all, just so he knew who was in the driver's seat.
My patriarchal blessing tells me I’d marry a “young man.” In my younger years (my liberal bra-burning years) I always interpreted that as meaning I’d be 60 and marry a 20 year old “young man” because dag-nabbit, I had a life to live and no man would hold me back until I had conquered the world. Never, never, never did I think I’d date for 2 months, get engaged, and then marry my first kiss (unless you count spin-the-bottle at the age of 9) within 10 months of returning from my mission. David was quite a persuasive “young man.” So, I guess my new interpretation of my blessing is that I only needed 23 years to conquer the world. I like to think David stands on top of the world and I stand on top of him. And I can still be a bra-burning liberal (my political leanings are fuzzy; I mean this in a theoretical sense)...as long as David allows it [insert evil chuckle].

Happy Valentines Day my MAN!

My kids profess a different kind of love:

Puente

We just finished a 3-day weekend, aka puente. On Saturday we went to Xochimilco where we took a boat ride down ancient Aztec canals. Xochimilco means "some place with flowers," although I think we went the wrong time of year to see the floating flower gardens.Emotions at Xochimilco:

And hair at Xochimilco:
Then we went to the Ceremonial Center of Otomi on Monday. Although the site is new, the construction is meant to reflect Otomi culture before the 9th century.

The group in front of "The Sun."

There were 52 (# of years in the Aztec calendar) of these sculptures or "guards":
Playing at the park nearby. Who is the mother of these dirty little kids? There was dirt galore!

January

Back to the real world.
What we have been up to the past month besides sorting through Cuba pictures:
Me: After almost 3 years of Spanish, I’m speaking to my children in English inside the home (pressure from the Frenchies) and I don’t mean to honk my own horn, but I’m much funnier and more funner (Isn't that awesomely ugly!) in English. Parenting has become slightly easier, yet I’m still in the stage where I forget to speak in English half of the time, so it’s a mangled Spanglish.
I had my first soccer game in over a decade and it was U-G-L-Y. I ran 7 miles last Saturday, but it doesn’t hold a light to frenzied sprinting.
Elijah: If potty humor were an art, he’d be Picasso. Yet sometimes I wonder whether I’m the Picasso and he’s my understudy.
If talking to people were a sickness, I would say Elijah’s terminal. We usually get home 1.5-2 hours after school ends, in a large part b/c that kid talks to every person he passes. He usually starts with one of the following:
1. “How much does that cost?” Then he looks at me and says with a surprised look on his face, “Mom, it’s only XX pesos!” And I reply, “Show me da money!”
2. “Do you have any food?” Last week he and Claire crawled uninvited into a man’s car and started eating from his huge jar of candy. Don’t worry, it was not Chester, I could spot that dude from a mile.
Claire: is growing up. Her big accomplishment lately (besides cutting her own hair) is that she learned to walk—she went through a stage of forgetfulness where as soon as we stepped out of the house (and even sometimes inside), her legs would stop functioning. Now, not only can she walk, she asks to run on the way home from E’s school, that is, when she’s not mastering the scooter. I will never forget (in the next 30 minutes) the moment the scooter clicked for her. A tear almost came to my eye when I told her how proud I was of her conquest.
Iris’ arms are no longer the enemy, but a source of entertainment. Although they will still attack her face in moments of exhaustion, for the most part, she looks at them and thinks, “What are those silly appendages going to do next?”
David: He made a goal last week to change at least a diaper a day. He averaged about 1.02! His average for this week has dropped significantly.
Outings in the month of January:
For my birthday, the women in my ward took me out for tacos on the street. I sampled a few delicacies: eyeball, tripe, the fat behind cows' ears. I heard the tongue was good to, but couldn't make accommodations for it in my stomach.
What I really wanted for my birthday, what I feel I need most these days is an extra arm. Preferably with a hand on the end, but really I would have settled for a stump. Oh well, maybe next year. Instead I got a day full of fun and car-sickness. On the actual day of my birthday, we took a trip to Malinalco. This is the group on top of the Cerro de los Idolos, where we hiked to see the Aztec ruins.

In the town
Does this food remind you of a movie?
"I only believe in science."

A neighboring city was celebrating the day of the black Christ. Many people were wearing and selling these flower crowns.

Another trip we took this month was to a huge petting zoo. I came to the conclusion that the bottom lips of camels are one of the uglier creations in existence.
Fun fact: The majority of us have had buffalo milk. Every time we eat pizza. Mozzarella cheese is made from it.

Claire sporting her new pout.
She temporarily overcame her fear of horses.
At the dog show.
Dear Cow,
I know exactly how you feel.
I sympathize with you from 1am-5am every morning.
Don't worry, they tell me it might get better.
Much love
Also, a new development in our lives: supporting and engaging in illegal activities.
We were on our way to the temple yesterday and accidentally turned into a “bus only” lane right in front of a corrupt cop. He threatened to impound our car for 3 days, plus give us a fine of 40-days of wage (we found out later he couldn’t really do this even though he showed this “law” to David in his little rule book). The alternative was to give him “a few pesos to buy lunch.” We gave him about $4 in coins because it was all we had on us. It turned out that this cop doesn’t want to buy street food, he wants a nice lunch. He escorted David to the nearest ATM and ended up with about $18. Oh man, I was ready to leave Mexico right then—you’re supposed to be able to trust police, they defend your rights, uphold the law, etc. etc. I arrived to the temple slightly distraught (understatement) by the situation. But as I watched faithful, good people filing out of at least 10 buses to enter the House of the Lord, I concluded that Mexico might not be located in the depths of a fiery inferno as I had previously supposed. I guess I can live here a few more days.

Cuba Part 4: The beach

We spent a few days at the beach. Of course they were the few days that were the coldest and most overcast, but it was still beautiful.
Cuban sandwiches in Cuba. They are better in NOLA.








Tried taking some portraits:



This may be the last Cuban post. Are you happy? I am.
But, I may do one more post with some of the cool ancestor pictures I got...we'll see how good I am.