Lyle builds a bonfire!

We’ve been in La Manzanilla for 3 years now and last week was the first time we’ve been to a bonfire at the beach! Lyle has been bugging us for months to go to the beach and have a fire; basically because he wants to roast these HUGE marshmallows we bought in Patzcuaro (to roast in the fireplace at the hotel we stayed!) It doesn’t get dark here until 7:30, the only nights we could do a fire at the beach would be Friday or Saturday (school and all) and something always comes up.

Last week my friend Alex, chef at La Manzanilla’s Café de Flores, invited us to a bonfire to celebrate a friend’s birthday. Well, it was a Thursday night and lo and behold no school on Friday so we accepted.

I can’t believe we waited this long to have a bonfire. It was a blast! At sunset we light the fire and the hot dogs and marshmallows came out accompanied by the sounds of guitar and drums. Lyle was the only kid there but that didn’t seem to bother him. He usually goes to bed at 9:00, but this night he was dancing by the fire and roasting mellows until 11:00 pm.

The next morning it was all he could talk about!

FM3 – get it right the first time.

We live in La Manzanilla Mexico, 10 months out of the year. We have FM3 status and we need to get to Manzanillo to renew our papers. Only problem is we’ve moved and we moved last year while immigration had our paperwork so we just “neglected” to mention it when we received our FM3’s. We figured, “why gunk up the process, we’ll take care of next year.” Well, it’s next year and we finally got around to taking care of it….sort of.

We thought we’d just go to Telemex in Manzanillo, change our address and then have them print out a new bill with our current address. But drat, it’s tough to get to Telemex during the day without having Lyle miss school. So we kept putting it off.

Today I called the office. Guess what? You can change your address over the phone, easy, yeah! After it was changed I asked in my best Spanish if we could stop at the office next week and have them print out a new bill with the new address that we could take to immigration. NO, the address isn’t updated in THAT computer system, we’ll have to wait for our March 8th bill…but our immigration papers expire March 7th!

Let’s make cookies!

It’s raining in La Manzanilla; the locals say it’s been at least 10 years since we’ve had rain in December. A couple of nights ago is poured so hard the streets were flooded up to the sidewalk.

Yesterday, Sunday, we decided since it was such an overcast and winter like day we should make cookies! I was all about sugar cookies, but Rick and Lyle turned up their noses and voted for chocolate chip. Ok, so we need 1 more stick of butter and some chocolate chips. Rick heads into town. He returns about 15 mins later with the news that there are no chocolate chips to be found in town. They still say, “no thanks” when I chime in about sugar cookies.

Not completely deterred the boys decide it would be fun to bake a cake, a cake from a box. Ok, so Rick and head down to our nearest corner store while Lyle is playing with the neighbor kids. No cake mixes. It’s now about 4:30 on Sunday afternoon and Rick is determined. He goes back into town. He returns 15 min later empty handed and bearing news that everything in the 3 block town is closed!

Guess baking wasn’t in the cards.

Yes, but we don’t have a key

On Friday all the children (147) left the primary school in La Manzanilla with a note stating that today, Monday, parents needed to come to the school at 5:00 pm to clean.

Lyle had received this same note 3 weeks ago, I showed up at 5:00 and waited with 2 other mothers until 5:45 before we decided to leave. No one ever showed up to open the gate so we were locked out.

Rick and I get there at 5:00 to find one man with a machete and one other woman at the school. The man with the machete goes to the edge of the school and starts hacking down the grass. The other woman has a list of all the parents, she checks off our name from the list and tells us we need to clean the garden area. So Rick and I look around and ask if there are any tools and she tells us, "No, but you can put the grass, that you pull by hand, in the trash dumpster by the gate."

We brought gloves.

We started pulling grass and after about 5 minutes I say to the woman, “this would be a lot easier with a lawn mower.” To which she replies, “yes, the school has one, a push mower, but it’s locked in the bodega and I don’t have a key.” I'm thinking, "geez they can produce 147 slips of paper with the note to come to clean but no one can think to come and unlock the door of the bodega..."

We pull grass, by hand, for another hour and leave. No other parents show up, but at least our name is check-off as doing our cleaning duty.

A-E-I-O-U

First day of first grade for Lyle was Tuesday. We arrived back in La Manzanilla about 3 weeks into the school year so Lyle is having to catch up just a little.

His teacher Adele handed me a sheet of paper with the vowels both capital and lower case and in various groupings of two… A-E-I-O-U Ae-Ei-aU you get the idea.

Each child must stand at her desk, while the other children look on, and respond appropriately when she points of one of the vowels. Talk about pressure.

I watched as several children took there turn, some laughed and giggled when it was their turn. Some needed to be reassured and have their back’s rubbed by maestra Adele before they could speak. Today as class is ending Lyle will have to take his turn. He’s great at the kitchen table but I’m not sure how he will be at the front of the class. Here’s wishing him success!

Heading back to La Manzanilla!

Having two homes has some challenges. Now I realize this is the first year we've done this but I have to say, one month prior to leaving La Manzanilla we spent a fair amount of time getting the house "ready for summer." Now that we are leaving Denver we've spent the last month obsessing about what we “need” to take back with us. By my estimates we’ve spent 2 months out of this year in one place but thinking about getting to the other.

We are driving our 2004 Toyota truck- no extended cab and there are 3 of us, but that will be another blog post.

So we have the truck with a topper on it and we’ve availed ourselves of the opportunity to go crazy filling it up! Grill, rugs, cookware, blender, knives, printer, toiletries all this stuff! I was trying to get to a point where I could say, “if you have to store it, you don’t need it.” Boy have I fallen off that wagon!

Goals for next year- don’t spend so much time thinking about what’s coming next and let go of this ridiculous idea that life in Mexico is made better by bringing my life (stuff) from Denver with me.

Tropical Storm Andres

Well, the first named storm of the season is heading towards La Manzanilla. I’ve been in contact with a few people in La Man but the fact remains we are here in Denver and our house in Mexico is all alone and very likely getting wet. That lovely 12 x 12 opening that is the back of our house is probably seeing lots of rain and water rushing in as I type.


After the storm passes we’ll just have to rely on the kindness of others to go over and check on the house and report back to us. I’ve received emails telling me the electricity is currently out….old time year-rounder’s have generators for these types of occasions.

Next year we need to stay through at least part of a rainy season.

Signed, Nervously awaiting news….

Blogging and Playdates.

American Mommy and her family have decided to brave the swine flu come to La Manzanilla. I have really enjoyed meeting her family and, as luck would have it fellow blogger Steve has recently arrived in Mexico and was able to meet us for dinner.

Because we all blog about our lives and families and felt like these were old friends. Such a strange thing to have happen over the internet….although now that I think about it isn’t that how it works for Match.com?

American Mommy’s youngest son and Lyle are really two peas in a pod and they hit it off immediately, when I saw the box of army figurines and the Star Wars Clones Wars movie belonging to AM’s youngest I knew they would be fast friends.

Yesterday, in the afternoon we went over to have a playdate. The boys headed off to watch a movie, I pulled out a book and sat down on the couch, American Mommy’s hubby offered me a glass wine, American Mommy had a conference call after which we chatted about travel adventures with kids in Mexico. Pretty darn similar to our playdates in Denver with parents I’ve know for years.

Tonight we are going a jungle tour together….If you don’t hear from me again it’s because I fell overboard and have been devoured by a Croc!

Our new house in La Manzanilla

After 7 months of living in a one-bedroom apartment we finally found and moved into a house!

It's perfect for us, 2 bedrooms/2 baths and 3 blocks from beach.

We've been here about 3 weeks and have already hosted friends from Denver. We have a plastic table and 4 chairs but hey if it's good enough for the locals it's good enough for us!

We just bought one of everything from the vivero (garden store) in town and are now busy planting the backyard, which was several large trees and otherwise dirt when we moved in.

A few pictures of the back- including our resident rooster and a photo of the Primavera tree in front of the house.