Dia de los Padres

We visited the Tortugario at Cuyutlan and saw three different species of sea turtles, some iguanas, and some crocodiles. In August, they will let us help to release baby sea turtles into the ocean that are incubating and hatching right now.


The beach that the Tortugario sits on.

Being sung to by the Mariachis in Comala

The kids by a really pretty maguey field next to the cemetery. They also have a lot of sugar cane fields and agave fields around here.

A family gathered at their family gravesite. And the contrast between the graves there at the cemetery. One almost looks like a house, the other is just a wooden cross, with the name scratched in the cement.

Grandpa and the kids wandering through the cemetery.

Cecily went with Lety and me to deliver some books to some kids in Chiapa. Not the dangerous Chiapas, just a little town in the mountains here.

Elliot telling Cecily not to touch the Cane Toad that's against the wall in our alleyway.

Dear Family,

Happy Fathers' Day! We've discovered that the way that the people around here say "cool" is to call something "padre". So we hope that all of you padres had a very padre day.

The kids are still working hard in school. Every day they recognize more and more words that their classmates are saying. They only have a couple of weeks left of school and everyone’s starting to feel very lax. School is very different here. They only go to school for four hours, and there is a much higher importance placed on learning to stand and march in formation and also to doing much of the janitorial work at the schools. Every day the kids line up in a formation and say the pledge and sing two different patriotic songs while one of the other grades presents the colors. And the kids had duties that include mopping the floors and wiping down windows. In one school, the principal even had four of the 6th grade boys cleaning her car when we got there….

Cecily’s either getting easier to take care of, or we’ve adapted and learned new tricks. Her favorite things to do now are to watch the Dora the Explorer DVD that grandma brought down, or to fill her playpen with pillows and jump into it.

On Tuesday we went to Comala and had lunch. A mariachi band serenaded us and they were very very loud. We finally found the post office and the postman was very sweet to Cecily- he gave her a stamp (one of those March of Dimes stamps), and told her that he’d give her another one next time she came back to mail a letter.

Grandma left to go back to Utah on Thursday. She’s planning to get together with her surgeon to figure out what is really wrong with her leg. She wouldn’t let us get her an appointment with a curandera…

Audrey and Elliot went to a birthday party of Jose’s little brother Angel today. We had to drive even further into the mountains to get to their grandparents’ house where it was being held.

On Friday we drove down to the Tortugario in Cuyutlan to see the sea turtles. They have about ten swimming pools with different sizes and types of turtles. You can’t feed them or pet them, though, because they bite. They also had some crocodiles, including two baby ones. They won’t let you pet them either… And they had iguanas and birds. There’s a boat trip that you can take out into the marshes, but the idea of Cecily on a boat was too much for me. The Tortugario is right on the beach so that they can collect the eggs of the sea turtles to save them from predators and then release them in the fall. We wandered out on the beach and it was completely deserted for miles. The waves were breaking about 50 feet out and rolling in so you could tell that it wouldn’t be good to swim in, but it was sure pretty to look at. The sand is black, because it is from volcanic rock. It was muggy and so hot that we all were flushed and red by the time we made it back to the car. You could taste the salt in the air.

We’ve decided that we need to start making a list of the top ten dumbest things that Audrey and Elliot get into arguments over. Right now, top on the list is the argument that they had when we drove past the library and there were chickens scratching in the parking lot. The kids started speculating over whether the chickens had library cards and, if they did, how they would sign their names. One was sure that if the chicken had to sign its name, it could pull that back claw around to the front to make a mark similar to our handprints. The other contended that is wasn’t possible, and that a chicken’s signature would look just like its footprint, with one claw sticking out the back. Now THAT is something important enough to come to blows over.

Grandpa bought us a little black and white TV set. We can get 3-5 channels, depending on where we put it. We watching “While You Were Sleeping” and the USA vs. Panama soccer game today. Tomorrow they’re supposed to show High School Musical in Spanish! The kids pipe up every once in a while and say, “He said ‘nosotros’!” when they understand something. So when people ask my kids how they learned their Spanish, they can say “Mexican soap operas”. They’ll pick up vocabulary like “amnesia”, and “the babies were switched at birth”.

Audrey tried making cookies here but there is no such thing as a cookie sheet, so we poured the whole thing into a round cake pan and put it into the oven. But the oven doesn’t have temperatures, it just has minimo and maximo. We guessed on the temperature. The cookies were good, but they were more like cake than cookies.

We’re all getting plenty of mosquito bites, and other bites we don’t recognize. And we found a Cane Toad on our driveway one night. He was a big toad, about the size of a cantaloupe. One of our old neighbors told us to be careful because they’re poisonous. That’s okay. None of us were craving frog legs that night.

Church was good. Nobody threw up. The kids went to Primary and YW. Audrey was the only Beehive, so she and her teacher had an abbreviated lesson, since she didn’t understand much Spanish and her teacher didn’t understand much English. Elliot was very nervous about Primary. There’s a boy in his class who speaks some English because he’s going to a bilingual school. Maybe next week he’ll go to class by himself. Cecily didn’t last long in nursery. She’d had it with change and new things.

It’s Father’s Day and apparently that means that people go and decorate the graves of their fathers and grandfathers. They were selling flowers and wreaths in all of the streets in Colima and when we wandered out to the cemetery, there were families out there visiting and having dinner. The cemetery was really interesting. There were graves that were very elaborate and almost looked like little houses and then there were humble ones with nothing more than a wooden cross and a name scratched into the cement on the ground.