The orange kids

School's out for summer, finally. By the end of the school year, I cannot wait for summer break. And by the end of summer break, I will be staring at the calendar all day every day desperately counting seconds until school starts again, which it will do just in the nick of time. These things are perfectly timed for my mental and emotional limits on either end.

Lucien has completed 7th Grade. It wasn't his easiest year but I don't think 7th Grade is ever the easiest year. It actually may be the year that sucks the most so taking that into consideration, he rocked it.

The Loosh was enrolled in a phys ed class this year called "Urban Hiking" led by an intense teacher who is big, intimidating and, as Lucien said, "somehow has a nose in the shape of an 's.'" The teacher declared they were going to try a heart rate experiment and gave the kids heart rate monitors and iPads for their urban hike that day. Everyone's heart rates were there on the iPads in a list for everyone else to see. A box next to their names turned green, orange, or red depending on how hard their heart was working. The kids were instructed to keep their heart rates in the green range, the acceptable range for the activity at hand, at all times.

It was a pressured situation. And Lucien is not the most physically active person in the world, ahem. His primary passions are video games and ants, both of which involve focus and intense staring, occasionally with a magnifying glass, but neither involves much movement.

He caught this queen ant during her nuptial flight last month.

It's a long story.

He is now growing his second colony.

He is so happy with the ant situation.

So... nearly immediately upon beginning the urban hike, Lucien's heart rate spiked into the orange range and his classmates yelled, "Oh no, Lucien's dying already!" (He told me later, "Mom, I swear, it only took like five steps for my heart to be like 'nope.'") By the time they got up to the park, Lucien and a handful of other kids were in the high orange range and their teacher was hopping around in front of them demanding they get back into the green, which only pushed their heart rates closer to the red. It is apparently difficult to lower your heart rate when someone is in your face insisting you do so immediately.

The teacher told the red-orange kids to stop walking and get on the ground but to keep moving in some way until their heart rates were green. The orange kids dropped into the grass and began squirming on their bellies like army cadets at basic training. This did nothing to lower their heart rates, in fact increased them by quite a bit because now passersby were staring. The orange kids then laid in the grass and attempted movement with even less movement. Lucien said he laid on his stomach, reached his arms out to the sides and wiggled his fingers. One boy gave up and laid in the grass whistling and staring at clouds with his legs crossed. One girl log rolled side to side halfheartedly.

As their classmates walked green-zoned circles around them, the orange kids bonded in the grass over their mutual agreement that 7th Grade is pretty much the worst.

(My takeway: Lucien needs to jog around the block more often.)

I have two new foster dogs. Rasta is an 8-year-old poodle mix rescued from the streets of Mexico and Ralf is a 6-month-old Formosan rescued from a mountain in Taiwan where he'd been abandoned with his littermates.

Rasta the mini poodle is a small feisty dog who thinks he's a big scary dog. He regularly attempts to attack Natani even though we tell him it's a bad decision every time. She could kill him, of course, but thankfully Natani doesn't have murder in her heart. She just kinda looks down at the little growling thing hopping around spoiling for a fight then looks back up at me with question marks in her eyes.

Can I kill the big doggie, foster mom?

Most of my day is about trying to keep Rasta quiet. He is a vocal one. My neighbor walked past the house the other day while I was out in the yard and asked how my foster dog, Bob, was doing. I responded a bit confused, "Huh? Bob?" and the neighbor laughed and said, "Yeah, we call him Bob Barker." Yikes. (My takeaway: I should send all my neighbors fruit baskets.)

Exhibit A


Alex usually comes for dinner once a week. The day he was scheduled to come here was also the evening Ralf the Formosan puppy was due to arrive at the airport from Taiwan. We decided to go to the airport for dinner and pick up Ralf together as a fun family activity.

Ralf

Ralf and his littermates were wheeled out from the oversized baggage area in big crates on carts. There were six of them in total, all of them shaking, exhausted, confused from their long journey. The director of the dog rescue organization warned they would be distressed when we wheeled them away in opposite directions since it would be the first time they'd ever been separated. And sure enough, as soon as the first dog began rolling, the high pitched, frantic dog shriek screaming began. It was ear splitting, heartbreaking, and awful.

We fosters just looked stunned at each other and said, "Uh-oh, this is gonna be ugly. Like a band-aid, people, GO GO GO." and took off jogging with our dog carts. The noise got louder then, so shrill and frantic as we all bounded away trying to get them into cars as soon as possible. People waiting for their luggage at the carousels stared incredulously as the gang of us sprinted past. Many plugged their ears.

I wonder what those people saw, what it looked like from their perspective. I imagine it looked something like a little dog crate race, with all of us pushing our carts and taking corners too hard at high speed as we slid sideways.

We dove into an open elevator only to realize there was already another shrieking Formosan inside of it. The dogs, sensing proximity to a sibling, went absolutely insane. It was a sound I'm not sure I can accurately describe but I will try -- "hellish cacophony exploding shriekbomb." I exchanged desperate looks with the other foster mom, whose bangs had fallen into her eyes from her dog running efforts so she was trying to blow them out of her face, and immediately yelled at my family to "reverse! reverse! reverse!" I'm fairly certain we all would have suffered permanent hearing loss on that elevator ride.

Ralf gave up after that but the other dogs shrieked all the way to cars. We could hear them from different corners of the parking lot. By the time we got to the car, we were sweaty and tired and pretty damn stressed out. Alex said, as we climbed into the car, "This was fun, Min, I'm so glad you're fostering dogs now." I sense he was being sarcastic but let's believe he was serious for a minute and truly appreciates my dog-saving efforts.

Happy news, Ralf was reunited with his siblings at an adoption event a week later and they all piled together in a sweet little Formosan heap.

Beautiful brothers staring at a bag of treats
and wanting the treats very much.

Ralf goes on trial adoption later this week. I'll miss the shy guy. Rasta may never go on trial adoption because he is a very loud little dog.  Rasta is also a passive aggressive poodle. He does not like sharing my attention with Ralf, and lets his displeasure be known by peeing on Ralf whenever Ralf is sleeping.

I require assistance from the kids when walking three dogs.
Especially these three.

Here's to the orange kids and foster dogs.
Struggle brings strength, y'all,
MJ

Storing fat for Alaska

This good girl doesn't know

we're fixin' to leave her for three-and-a-half weeks.

I'm eating, sleeping and breathing Alaska to plan our upcoming road trip. So much to know to plot the route and plan the itinerary, so many internet searches like, "Is such-and-such a road safe to drive in an RV or is it another Tiller Trail?" There are also novels to read to get into the spirit of the place, tour companies to contact, and purchases to make such as bear spray and warm lined rain boots and mosquito nets that cover your whole head. Do you know how many ways there are to die up there?? Hundreds!

The kids are using my intense road trip focus against me. I found Lucien eating a secret bag of potato chips in the TV room this past week. He looked guilty for a second but thought fast and said, "I'm storing fat for Alaska." I took the chips away and said, "You know there is plenty of food in Alaska..." but he followed me out of the room saying, "No! We're gonna have to craft our own bows and arrows to shoot deer, and do you know how to cut down a tree yet? We're also gonna have to fish, lay traps, and forage for berries!"

He was on a roll then. He entertains himself thoroughly when he thinks he's onto a juicy joke. (apple, meet tree...)

".... but we'll have Coco taste the berries first, obviously, to make sure they're not poisonous!" I gave him a severe "Mom look" after that comment and he said, "She's the youngest, Mom, if anyone's gotta die out there in the nothingness of our summer vacation, it's gotta be her. And if anyone's gonna live, it's going to be me, because of the chips!"

Lucien is now, at this very moment, musing aloud we may have to resort to cannibalism. I guess anything less than that will be considered a smashing success of a trip.

I took the Winnie B into the RV shop to fix everything that needs fixing. There's always a lot on such a complicated vehicle but as of now, all seems to be in good working order. I pretty much told the guy, "We're driving to Alaska, just replace everything with new things." I'm being extra cautious because I can't imagine much worse of a disappointment than suffering RV failure in the middle of the Yukon.

Good luck, us.

(Good girl still doesn't know...)

In these few weeks remaining before we drive off towards the Arctic Circle, we are caught up in the whirlwind of end-of-school-year chaos. The performances, presentation nights, carnivals, etc. are really stacking up but we're knocking them down one by one with rapidly fatiguing fists.

Lucien's big end-of-year Humanities project involved an in-depth report on biodiversity's role in healthy ecosystems, a subject for which he organically feels much passion so it was a natural choice. As part of his project, he had to take an "action step." For his action step, he decided to print up flyers and educate the public by handing them out and starting conversations one-on-one and in small groups. His original plan was to do that at the beach on a sunny day but we're a little tired here at the end of the school year so instead it took place at a friend's party the day before the project was due. Our closest friends were all there, and had been drinking beer and eating tacos for hours.

I had to document the action step to include in his PowerPoint presentation. I told this group of friends to look natural, as if Lucien was educating them about the alarming rate of loss of species at that very second and it was the first they'd heard of it.

Nailed it. 

Totally natural.

(I love this photo, and you bet we used it.)

I volunteered to work a couple booths at Coco's school carnival this past weekend. First shift was at the Fish Pond game, where Coco acted as assistant by sitting hidden behind the screen and attaching toys to the end of the fishing pole whenever some little tyke tossed his line over the side. The prizes were mostly very small so came grouped together in Ziploc grab bags. Coco didn't understand the entire bag was the prize and instead opened all the bags and began attaching teeny tiny toys one at a time.

You should have seen that four-year-old carnival enthusiast's face when he handed me his ticket, threw his line over the booth, and received a mini doll shoe the size of his pinkie nail. His eyes were big sad adorable question marks when he looked up at me and I said, "Oh hell no, not on my watch," threw his line back over the side and whispered around the corner to Coco, "Give him the whole bag, give him the whole bag, for the love of God!!" The volunteer working next door at the "Dig in the Hay" game had a good laugh about that one.

Not sure what she's laughing at, that volunteer had her own questionable game going on. The "Dig in the Hay" game is usually a big pile of hay kids dig through until they find a prize. But this year, to the confusion of many, there was no hay, only a small inflatable pool filled with plastic balls. The "Dig in the Hay" sign still stood boldly behind the pool, which left many scratching their heads. I guess carnival organizers didn't feel compelled to rename "Dig in the Hay" to "Dig in the Balls" and who can blame them for that.

I worked the ticket booth second shift with two of my favorite friends. We thought it would be fun to do it together because we could chat and catch up during lulls. That's a laugh of an idea; there are no lulls at school carnival ticket booths. The ticket booth is mayhem with people swarming you constantly waving fistfuls of money and asking questions like, "why can't I use this food ticket to play games?" As you tried to explain the intricacy of the school's ticketing system, some errant wanderer would inevitably walk up and order a cotton candy. I'd be like, "Does it look like I got cotton candy back here, buddy?" while punching furiously at iPad buttons because I was three reported ticket sales behind.

I'm still around for a bit but for the record, I'm hoping to post some short blog updates during our weeks of driving through the mountainous abyss of the great North. Not surprisingly, I hear there's not a whole lot of WiFi nor cell phone service in Northern British Columbia and the Yukon. We may have better luck once in Alaska, but by then we may have eaten each other so there may not be much to post about.

If the grizzlies don't get ya, the other grizzlies will.
MJ

Awesome or scary

Lucien just walked up to me and said, "Hey Mom, I think "Ukraine" sounds like a do-it-yourself crane company, kind of like U-Haul, only no hauling and with cranes....." and then he walked off to continue thinking deep thoughts. I'll be damned if he isn't right. Why did I never think of that before.

The Loosh has also become interested in horror movies recently, a development that could possibly be genetic. I grew up on horror movies. It wasn't exactly my choice, my family just likes them, my brother especially. It may not be normal to grow up with The Shining and The Amityville Horror playing on the regular in your TV room but I must say, it's raised me to anticipate many of life's terrifying calamities, like serial killers and vengeful demons and zombies and killer clowns.

I am just now considering that watching many horror movies as a young person may be a root cause of my terrible adult anxiety. Sorry in advance, son.

I started Lucien on the classics, primarily Hitchcock films. Our first foray into mother-son horror movie nights (while Alex dangled shiny objects in front of Coco in another room because she was pissed off not to be invited to scary movie night) began with The Birds. An hour into the film, Lucien turned to me and yelled, "Mom, WHERE ARE THE GODDAMN BIRDS?" He's got a real potty mouth these days, that one, but I have to agree classic horror movies move agonizingly slow by today's jump scare standards. There were no birds for a long, long time. Then there were lots of birds. Then it was over.

I also took The Loosh to see A Quiet Place in the theater that weekend (as Alex grew increasingly frazzled trying to entertain an increasingly pissed off younger sibling who doesn't like to be left out of anything, ever) and we both agreed that movie is pretty perfect. We've also watched Get Out. Lucien quickly picked up on the racial themes of that movie but I wasn't surprised. He's pretty socially aware, is the kid who said about his sister's Barbie TV show, "You shouldn't be watching this, it's pretty much the complete dismantling of feminism" and Coco responded, "It's not up to boys to decide what is and isn't OK for girls to watch" and I like them both so, so much.

The Fremont troll clutches a VW Bug in one hand and a child in the other.

In keeping with our current family horror theme, we did a "murder mystery dinner" at a friend's house recently. We were all assigned characters beforehand and had to come dressed as our character. My character was a jazz singer/contract killer in 1930s Chicago. Alex was a golfer who wore argyle socks pulled up to his knees. We arrived to many other festively dressed friends and immediately got down to business determining which of us was a cold blooded killer.

I am not an auditory learner so all the information sprung on us in the beginning of the evening did not seep into my consciousness even a little bit. It just went in one ear and out the other, no way I'm keeping all those dates and train schedules and relationship triangles straight. I spent most of the evening whispering to "Silky," the mysterious brothel owner and bootlegger to my right, "What the hell is going on?"

During the course of murder mystery evenings, you have to ask many questions of other players to uncover the killer. You also must ad-lib when people ask you information about yourself you do not want to reveal. I am not great at thinking on the fly, which is why, when asked where I went all those nights I left my jazz singing job early (I was out killing people with my Tommy Gun) I replied, "My mom has been very sick. With leprosy. She has only two toes left" and when asked how I made all my extra money to afford my extravagant evening gowns, I said I sang at birthday parties and bar mitzvahs, picked up the odd babysitting job, and mowed lawns.

As the night went on and I lost the plot more and more, I would usually answer, "I dunno" and occupy myself with errant threads on my dress. I now know I am not good at these kinds of games and bow in respect to friends who were able to weave believable responses on the fly. Though I now suspect they are always lying to me in our daily lives.


In big summer news, this year I will cross an item off my bucket list. To anyone who's met me or read much of this blog, they know I'm a roadtrip enthusiast. I love crafting roadtrip itineraries, the bigger the better. We've done many through the Western United States, one through Costa Rica, and our most recent was through Mexico.

Those were easy trips compared to the most recent endeavor. This year we're doing the granddaddy of them all, the Holy Grail roadtrip for RV owners, the one that makes people hesitate slightly before responding "I don't know if that's awesome or scary" upon hearing our plans. (The answer is "both.")

We are driving to ALASKA.

(the real Alaska, not Roslyn, WA)

This will be my finest success if everything goes well, and my worst failure if we get a flat tire in the middle of the Yukon with nobody around for a hundred miles.

Alex and I have been busy prepping the Winnie B for the trip and unfortunately discovered we have a water leak behind one of the walls. It's likely a cracked pipe, a vexing result of our disastrous frozen winter camping attempt at Sun Peaks back in February. We're scrambling to get it fixed before our planned departure date at the end of June but RV service places are jam packed with people itching to ready their rigs for summer trips. If we can't get it fixed in time... well I'm going to need to process it at length if this trip has to be cancelled.

We are crossing our fingers and moving ahead with plans. I've prepped the children for the Alaskan wilderness adventure by showing them Into The Wild and Grizzly Man. They are now very scared to get anywhere near a car with me at the steering wheel.

And Coco has been dressed as a hot dog for two days.

Yukon. U-kon.
U-con.
It's a do-it-yourself company for murder mystery dinner parties.
MJ

Small Shiny Witch

I'm here giving the "short-n-sweet" blog post a try. This likely means I'll still be working on it two weeks from now and it will be the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica A-Z upon completion. I am what I am.

Lucien is nearing the end of an intense two week tiny home building seminar at school. The kids are building a tiny home and examining whether or not tiny homes are an effective part of the solution for homelessness. When they're not actively working on the tiny home, they're meeting with homeless shelter directors and handing out warm socks to the homeless on downtown streets. I love that he's engaged, interested, and thinking about big complex issues for which there are no easy answers. That's daily life as an adult, kid, might as well practice now.

What I haven't loved about these tiny home building weeks is Lucien's refusal to wear a jacket. Even on the coldest, rainiest days, The Loosh slips into his Converse sneakers, pulls on a thin-ish hoodie over his favorite jeans with giant holes in the knees and calls it good. It offends every shred of maternal instinct I possess. When I attempt to tackle him in the front hallway with a jacket -- "at least wear this, it's raining and you're building a tiny home outside, you fool!" -- he ducks and weaves away from that jacket as if it was made of vegetables.

It seemed a losing battle. Then I received an emailed picture of the tiny home building team from Lucien's teacher. I couldn't find Lucien at first but soon enough deduced he was the one wearing a garbage bag. His teacher, fed up with a cold and sopping wet Lucien day after day, cut arm holes in a garbage bag, made another hole for his head to poke through, and cut a second garbage bag into the shape of a pointy hat. The Loosh looked like a small shiny witch, or perhaps a glossy black Crayola crayon. All I could see of his person were his little eyes peeking out between the layers of garbage bag. His eyes did not appear to be smiling.

The very next morning, Lucien put on a jacket without being asked. And that's why we pay the big bucks for private school.

Moving on from kids to rats. We've got a rat problem in the basement. It's starting to feel like we will always have a rat problem in the basement because it's an issue that has followed us from house to house for years. Those rats can't get enough of us.

I've worked with a few teams of rodent specialists over the years and they all seem to share a few things in common. They sometimes trail off mid sentence to suddenly dive under your house. They often enthusiastically show you their old raccoon bites. And they get really excited about things not usually considered exciting, like rat poop.

The man I had here last week jumped around and clapped his hands and said, "I'm so excited, I found a bunch of poop!" I think he meant it in the context that he may have discovered a potential entry point into our basement but I don't know.... he seemed awfully happy about just the poop itself.

While I'm talking about being a little different... there's another collective group of folks that are also a little different: the audience at a George Clinton concert. A group of us went to see G.C. perform Saturday night because when presented with the opportunity, one should always go see George Clinton. He's a living legend, innovator of funk music with the P-Funk, always decked out in outlandish outfits and technicolor dreadlocks. He is so much cooler than I will ever be.

I see a lot of live music. It is one of my favorite things to do. I've seen all kinds of shows with all kinds of artists, so trust me as a source when I say no audience compares to the variety found in a George Clinton audience. The people are black and white and the entire rainbow of colors; they are very old and very young and every age in between. Some are drag queens, some are not. Some are dressed like Janis Joplin and some look more like Animal from the Muppets. Many seem lucid but many, many others are possibly still enjoying the hallucinogenics from the early 1970s P-Funk heyday.

The few common denominators between attendees resulted in a fascinating yet distracting experience. I think I spent more time looking around at all the different kinds of people standing around me than I did looking at George Clinton -- and he came out wearing some type of rams head headdress so was quite eye-catching. I didn't see George emerge onto the stage because I was too busy looking at the guy next to me thinking, "Damn, that dude is really rocking the Black Panther meets Willy Wonka look."

There is, however, one commonality between a George Clinton audience and any other audience -- and that is the large number of people being dicks and shoving past you to get closer to the stage. It's the similarity that unifies us all -- losing a touch of our humanity for a chance to get marginally closer to a famous person.

We're off for Spring Break next week. Spring Break isn't as crazy as adults as it was back when we were in college, but it is still highly likely Alex will do a keg stand and enter a wet t-shirt contest. The fact that we are skiing and not on a beach will not deter him in the slightest. Go, Al, go.

May we all get as excited about something this week,
as excited as that guy was about finding rat poop,
MJ

ROLLLL CREDITS!

Our departure date looms large. We are ignoring it, instead focusing our energies on planning the BEST MEXICO ROAD TRIP EVER. It's our last hurrah, our last chance to celebrate all we've come to love about Mexico and see a bunch of stuff we've been wanting to see. It's also our last chance to gross out our driver, Mario, by vomiting into many motion sickness bags.

Mario has agreed to drive us on our 18-day quest, a generosity that will likely come back to haunt him because Mexican roads often wind up and down through hills and damn it gets twisty up in there.

Lucien and I found crepes in a Mexican mall

Alex and Coco spent two busy and happy weeks with our people in Seattle and Lucien and I spent two calm and quiet weeks here without them. It soon became evident Coco and Alex bring most of the noise and nearly all of the mess around here. Lucien and I are tidy, the other two not so much. I've always kind of basked in the absence of "Alex piles" when he travels but was not prepared for how sad I would feel when "Coco piles" also disappeared. I was not emotionally prepared for no Coco piles.

Paulina had very little cleaning to do those two weeks. She went home early nearly every day and I gave her a couple days off entirely when Lucien and I decided to hit our favorite restaurants instead of eating dinner at home. Even with all that bored Paulina proof in his face, Alex still refuses to acknowledge he is a messy, messy human.

He also refuses to admit he is the one who uses all the glassware. When Al is here, every glass we own is somehow dirty by the end of the day. When he is not here, there are two maybe three little glasses sitting in the sink instead of an entire glass army. I don't understand why he requires so many glasses.

The Loosh and I watched a lot of movies while we were here solo. Lucien has a running gag regarding movies. If any character within the movie says the actual title of the movie, he yells, "ROLLLL CREDITS!" and heads out of the room to live his life. It has been hilarious in movies such as A Dog's Purpose because that movie's title is spoken many, many times throughout the film. Lucien kept jumping up, "ROLLLL CREDITS!" then laughing in the hallway for a bit before coming back in and plopping back down on the couch, only to jump up again a few minutes later.

(Stop hitting us over the head with "a dog's purpose," seriously. We all know a dog's purpose, at least our dog's purpose, and that is to destroy our valuables and fart loudly when we feed her table food.)

One inspired evening, I shared my favorite John Hughes film with my rapidly growing son on the verge of cliques and tough social dynamics. We had a lot to talk about during that movie. But at the end, as Anthony Michael Hall's voice says, "Sincerely yours, The Breakfast Club," Lucien jumped up, yelled, "ROLLLL CREDITS!" and you should have seen his face when the credits actually started to roll.

We had a rollicking good laugh after that one. We re-enacted the moment many times, including Judd Nelson's fist pump and the stunned look on Lucien's face. It got funnier every time.

Speaking of my growing son, the boy some of you have been reading about since he was two years old in Paris, which is pretty nuts, he graduated from primary school and is now officially a middle schooler. A related thought: I'm not always an emotional wreck but when I am, I really go for it.

The couple in front of us walking across campus towards the gym, 

carrying flowers for their daughter with tears streaming down their faces.

It's bittersweet to be a parent during the milestones.

Either that or they're fighting and contemplating divorce, hard to say.

Much like that couple above, I could not get my sh*t together during the 5th grade graduation ceremony. Tears welled blindingly in my eyes and my hands shook during the filming of an agonizingly long iPhone video where nothing really happens; it's just me frantically panning up and down the long line of smiling children while they sing Bruno Mars.

Lucien's huge international school in this huge international city was a gem of an experience. He had exposure to kids from all over the globe and can now count amongst his friends a Syrian, an Indian Sikh, a little punk from Denmark (that kid is gonna be something, let me tell you) and a boy recently moved from Japan who does not speak much English nor Spanish but tries hard and smiles all the time. He also met a few Americans, of course, a few Mexicans, a few Brits, and one adorable Canadian who thinks Lucien is going to come back and visit him every month. Ahem. We'll try, cute little Canadian.

I continued with my emotional breakdown as the kids sang "I'm Still Standing" by Elton John (could this school get any more British?) and as Lucien walked across the stage to receive his certificate from his very kind and very tall and very English teacher, Mr. John. I could tell even from a distance The Loosh was emotional, too. It had been a hard morning for him as he got ready for his last school day ever in Mexico. He was processing the near inevitable fact he'll never see any of these kids again (except for the Canadian, every month, of course) and it's been hard on him to build these solid friendships only to turn around and leave them behind so quickly.

Lucien and Max hang in the gym one last time

Is it better to have loved and lost Mexico than never to have loved Mexico at all? As hard as it will be for all of us to leave, damn straight it is.

Remember that one time when he was two?

Coco had a rough time at Lucien's class graduation party/carnival a couple weekends ago. It was a large affair full of tents and fountains and caterers and games. Coco wanted to play the game that involves moving a metal ring over an electrified coil. If the ring touches the coil, it makes a loud sound and you lose. If you make it all the way to the end of the coil with no noise, you win and get to choose a cheap prize out of a bag. It's somewhat similar to the board game Operation, only with more danger of getting electrocuted.

And get electrocuted she did -- well at least strongly shocked -- thanks to the unstable device tipping over in the middle of her turn and an apparent short in the system. The man running the game then yelled at Coco for tipping the thing over as she stood with tears in her eyes shaking out the pain in her right arm. Then she started crying for real, both from the shock of the shock and the getting yelled at by the towering large man.

I leapt to her like a gazelle when I heard the bellowing and grabbed her up. I gave the tall tower guy my best glass-shattering glare (trust Alex, it's a real doozy) and yelled right back, "Stop yelling at her! She's hurt, stupid man!" My insults in Spanish are basic at best but it worked. He felt bad then, stopped yelling and offered her a consolation prize from the bag. When she wouldn't take one and instead continued to bury her face in my body, he dug one out himself and handed it to me with an apology. I know he meant to make peace but.... what in the hell is this terrifying thing --

I tried to cheer Coco with the weird mirrored compact thing as we walked away but she glanced at it, stopped short, and said slowly, "So let me get this straight. I got electrocuted, hurt, yelled at and scared by that man and then he gave me the creepiest toy I've ever seen to make it all better?" I agreed it was an accurate summation of recent events.

At least Lucien had fun! He is the red pair of legs disappearing over the side of the bouncy house --

Our friends threw a goodbye party for us two weekends ago. We're still in Mexico through mid-ish August but since it's summer and everyone has already left or will soon leave for vacations including us, it was the last chance to get everybody together.

There was a mariachi band involved, thankfully, because mariachi always brings me much joy. There was also a caterer who made the best al pastor tacos and a bartender who made me a few delicious cubanas, my favorite drink made of beer mixed with spicy sauce and a salted rim.

There was also karaoke. Karaoke is not my thing but I must say, the way our friends and hosts Seattle Mom and Dad look at each other when they do karaoke is definitely #relationshipgoals --

I soon approached Alex and asked if he wanted to do a cute duet, too, but he suggested 2 Live Crew's "Me So Horny" so there went that idea.

Our driver, Mario, invited us to his wife's uncle's house the morning after our going away party. His wife's uncle makes delicious barbacoa in his backyard every Sunday, which brings out all the neighbors to feast together. Barbacoa is incredible stuff, a slow-cooked meat wrapped in banana leaves and usually served with a spicy tomato sauce in a tortilla.

Barbacoa is also a popular cure for a hangover, which is perhaps why Mario suggested we go to the uncle's house the morning after our going away party. Goddamn cubanas. I regret nothing!

We were given a tour by the uncle and told in order to pull off the barbacoa feasts on Sundays, the process must begin on Wednesdays with the slaughtering of the animals on the very spot upon which we were standing. And with that sentence, my appetite was more or less ruined.

Mexico has both introduced me to delicious meat things I cannot get enough of and also nearly turned me vegetarian forever (Costa Rica didn't help much there, either). I have developed some very complicated feelings around food in Mexico, made worse by the words "sheep's stomach" and "organ meat" being used distressingly often.

To be honest, I felt much the same way in France when I would order something and it would arrive on a plate with eyeballs intact and a giant bone sticking out the top. It's probably best Seattle is my hometown, where a plate of kale and chia seeds with coconut oil dressing can be served to you as dinner when you're overwhelmed by "organ meat" and "bone" revulsion.

Internal food conflicts aside, we were treated at the barbacoa event as warmly as people can be treated anywhere, ever. We were an oddity showing up in that backyard; an English-speaking ex-pat family is not exactly commonplace in the backyards of Nicolas Romero, a mid-sized city about an hour outside Mexico City. We soon reached celebrity status with everyone wanting to pose for pictures with us and many parents running back to their homes to drag their kids out to play with Lucien and Coco on the swingset.

Not sure what's happening here but it looks pretty dramatic

Many of those Mexican kids were shy, hiding behind their mothers and peeking out at us with big dark round eyes. I declared long ago the people in this world that melt my heart the fastest are little old French men riding bicycles. Well it looks like your reign is over, Frenchies; you've been replaced by tiny blinky dark-eyed Mexican kids hiding behind their mothers' skirts. No one can resist those little peanuts.

Barbacoa aunt and uncle

The last memory I'd like to preserve in amber, much as they did with dinosaur DNA in Jurassic Park (another movie The Loosh and I watched during our solo weeks and one where the title is spoken pretty darn early in the movie by grandpa so... ROLLLL CREDITS and goodbye, Lucien) is the night we spent with our friends at Lucha Libre.

Lucha Libre is batshit crazy, which is my favorite thing, and involves fake wrestling by men dressed in spandex while wearing masks, which is my second favorite thing. What are the chances of one event hitting all the right notes.




Many in the audience seemed to take it seriously and cheer their favorite luchadore with great passion. We were way less serious but still certainly appreciated the spectacle. The luchadores are an acrobatic crew and can really fly through the air. Whenever they did, we all yelled, "Wheeeeeeee!" with our hands up in the air. Then we laughed until our sides hurt and ordered more beers and popcorn and cotton candy.

Of course we bought masks, too. We looked amazing.

Those R our dudes

And of course we wore them home

It was the best most ridiculous thing I've seen in a long time and introduced all sorts of new personal jokes to our Mexico City crew. BOOP BOOP BOOP BOOP BOOP. Yeah, you had to be there.

Alex and I recently celebrated 16 years of marriage. I told our driver, Mario, that 16 years of marriage feels like forever and he said, "We have an expression in Mexico; being married for 16 years feels like being married for 16 minutes..."

I was about to eyeroll and be all "yeah...sure...you guys are lying, that's stupid..." when he added "...but all of them underwater."

I was going to write about Costa Rica this time but it's cool, turns out this one was all for the DF.


Don't you forget about me, Mexico.
Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Club.
ROLLLLL CREDITS!
MJ

The top tortilla

I hate to break bad news but The Prices Go Down Party beat The Earth Party to win the fake 5th Grade election. Even worse, it got ugly at the end -- someone stole the Earth Party's seed packets so they had nothing to distribute to their potential voters. It was a real scandal.

So The Earth Party decided to arm themselves and go kick some Prices Go Down ass.

(not really, this is Lucien at a paintball birthday party)

Lucien came home red in the face and fuming when the seed packets disappeared the day before voting day. Then the pacing commenced at home because someone had also misplaced the Earth Party t-shirts, which the entire team was supposed to wear the next day. And then, insult to injury, Lucien yelled, "And Mom, the sleeping kid next to me kicked me in the nuts on the bus ride home!"

I could not wrap my mind around all the injustice my child had suffered in just one day. How to comfort him, I did not know.

The Earth Party came in a respectably close second place, way ahead of The Donut Party -- whose members were actually campaigning for fewer donuts on school campus and more health food, a platform that likely makes them the most deceptively named and least popular political party in elementary school history -- and The Flower Party, whose members wanted to plant trees in the middle of the soccer field for more shade on hot days.

We can all agree it was a two-party race from the get-go. Aren't they always.

In one of the stranger tales of my life, I had a panic attack at a hair salon. I decided at the very last minute, the day before we left, that I needed a haircut before our trip to Costa Rica. Costa Rica is hot and humid and I suspected the unruly mess atop my head was going to contribute to the discomfort.

Everything was great at the salon at first; my hair was getting hacked off and tamed by a lovely Australian woman and we were chatting and laughing when I felt a slight tremor. It was a real tremor, like the earth shook a little, and I briefly thought, "Oh no, is this the beginning of an earthquake?"

We all felt it. The ladies in the salon looked at each other with raised eyebrows but since it passed so quickly, we decided it had been a large truck rumbling past the salon instead of impending doom. Everything returned to normal except for my body. My body had taken right the hell off and was really committed to it. My heart began racing, I couldn't breathe very well and I suddenly felt trapped and suffocate-y.

The other ladies seated in the salon noticed the odd look on my face and asked if I was OK. I said I felt "really weird." The lady next to me said, "You're suddenly pale, it could be your blood sugar." That woman was a stranger to me and had foils sticking out all over her head like a dozen shiny antennae, people, but she still got up and ran to the adjacent corner store to buy me cookies.

People can be so good when you need them! And yay, cookies!

So what the hell was that all about? I'd never had a panic attack before and have a vague theory it was related to the plane we were scheduled to take to Costa Rica early the next morning. I don't like planes (funny understatement) but was determined not to let them ruin my anticipation of Costa Rica. It was a a new strategy I'd adopted; I'd been refusing to acknowledge airplanes for weeks. If airplane thoughts popped up, kinda like, "Hey there, girl, I was just wonderin' how you're getting to Costa Rica..." I would interrupt with a "YOU SHUT UP RIGHT NOW PUNK," shove that stupid thought right back to where it came from, and walk away whistling.

I thought it was working pretty well until I bolted out of my chair at the hair salon. Then I wasn't so sure.

Maybe planes are sneaky little bastards who will ruin your day if you refuse to acknowledge their existence. Maybe planes will not be ignored. There's probably a good lesson in there somewhere, something about dealing with your fears head-on instead of ignoring them or whatever, but my takeaway is I probably just need a prescription for Xanax.

I have much to say about Costa Rica, to be written at some vague future time. It was our favorite vacation thus far and I'm not sure it can ever be topped. Costa Rica is one of the prettiest places you could ever imagine and one of the friendliest, too. It sure isn't cheap, though.

I dream of it still and can't wait to return.

Thankfully, there are no planes involved in getting to Costa Rica.

*walking away whistling*

I took a day-long cooking class Saturday with two friends: another Seattle Mom (I am grateful for the proliferation of Seattle people in my Mexico life because my "adios" in a few months can be reduced to a much easier "hasta luego") and my very first Irish Mom.

The cooking class began at the Mercado Medellin in the Roma neighborhood. The Mercado Medellin is a market known for its products from many Latin American countries, all stacked high at stalls run by immigrants from those countries for decades. It's one of those markets where, if I entered by myself, I would wander for hours blinded by the bright colors and wondering "What the hell is any of this stuff and how do I make it into food?"

Our teachers were a feisty, funny, talented Mexican chef couple named Beto and Jorge. For Beto and Jorge, it's all about Mexican traditions and Mexican grandmas, as evidenced by how often they say things like, "My abuela used to do it like this" or "This was my abuela's mortar and pestle" or "My abuela would be so mad at you right now because you are definitely not doing that right and are crapping all over our family's traditions."

Look at all of those abuela-handed-down molcajetes.

We spent several hours at the Mercado Medellin browsing its aisles and trying its products. We met a Venezuelan man who makes his own hot sauces; we tried several and they set our mouths aflame in a painfully great way. We learned how flour tortillas are made. We learned what to do with all those bins of dried peppers, and what tamarind looks like, and the names of all of those odd looking fruits. It was all so perfectly delicious and interesting, you could (almost) ignore the men walking past with huge pieces of cow carcass balanced on their backs and the stands featuring nothing but whole pigs' heads.

take it away, Jorge

Our favorite booth was the one that sold mole paste because if you didn't know it was mole paste, you would think it was cow poop -- which frankly, wouldn't even be the strangest thing found at the mercado. Gobs of mole paste are slapped on top of each other until they resemble a stack of cow pies but Jorge told us if you buy half a kilo of those cow pies, then thin them with a little chicken stock at home, they turn into a delicious mole sauce you didn't have to spend all day making.

The three of us promptly got in line and bought half a kilo of cow poop apiece because any day now we are going to cook something incredible enough at home to be worthy of that mole sauce. We were so inspired, so convinced of it.

Beto smiles a lot

The actual cooking back at Beto and Jorge's house was not as hard as I thought it would be, though I did manage to overblister my jalapenos to the point of heavy black char. Jorge clucked at me briefly for that because he knew his abuela was mad at me. His abuela needs to get a hobby up in heaven and stop watching me screw up her favorite recipes.

But I did a very nice job grilling the tomatoes and garlic cloves and onion slices

for the red salsa we hand ground with a mortar and pestle.

Seattle Mom mixes the filling for the tamales

Beto shows how to wrap our cochinita pibil in banana leaves

perfect guacamole topped with a fried grasshopper.

Mexico, sometimes you are weird.

One of the most important food lessons we learned that day is "never take the top tortilla." Beto and Jorge would slap at our hands if we absentmindedly reached over and grabbed the first tortilla off the stack to assemble our tacos. The top tortilla gets cold and crunchy quickly, you see, and should be kept in place as a kind of lid to keep all the tortillas below it warm and soft. Also, since everyone ends up touching the top tortilla, it's considered germy and gross. 

(The top tortilla is so unsavory, it's even an insult, used like "your sister is the top tortilla." Get it? Everyone touches the top tortilla but nobody keeps it. Being called "the top tortilla" in Spanish is akin to being called "the town bicycle" in English. Good tidbit to know -- women are judged for their sexuality in all kinds of languages!) 

We ate our lunch on Beto and Jorge's rooftop deck

with perfectly crafted Paloma cocktails in our hands.

Not a bad Saturday.

On the way home from Casa Jacaranda, stuffed and happy, Irish Mom suddenly began to crack up. We stared at her mystified until she managed to get out between laughs, "I'm never gonna do a damn thing with that half kilo of mole paste!" We started laughing then, too, because it was true for all of us. It had been a brief, beautiful dream, though.

If you're ever in Mexico City and want to learn how to cook some traditional Mexican food, you can find Beto and Jorge's cooking classes at the Casa Jacaranda website here. You won't be disappointed but their abuelas probably will be. Don't let it get you down too much.

Gotta run, I've got family coming to town. My parents and my brother arrive in Mexico City in a couple days and I am putting together quite an itinerary. I cannot wait to show them the wonders of Mexico. Just wait 'til they see how expertly I can char the hell out of a jalapeno AND maybe reconstitute some cow poop! Finally gonna make 'em proud.

Keep being you, top tortilla,
keep owning your tortilla sexuality...
I agree, it's getting confusing now.
MJ

Idealism, harmonicas, electrocution

Lucien's 5th Grade class is holding a mock election. Groups of like-minded students have joined together to form parties based on changes they'd like to see implemented at the school. They are currently campaigning to woo supporters from the lower grades and come election day, one party will emerge triumphant.

I'm not sure what happens for the winners of the election but it must be a big deal because Lucien is taking this more seriously than he takes choosing an ice cream flavor. That's a hefty statement because my kids stand in front of the ice cream counter for an excruciating amount of time, discussing the negatives and comparing the virtues of each flavor, as the line behind them grows and grows and I lurch around the store pulling my hair out and screaming, "OH MY GOD, just get cookies-n-cream and be done with it!!"

Lucien's group has formed "The Earth Party" and is running on environmental issues such as using less plastic at the school and improving the recycling program. The Loosh sits at his computer after school putting together graphic PowerPoint presentations full of whales who've died because of the gigantic wads of plastic bags in their bellies and malformed turtles who've grown up with six-pack rings around their shells.

The Loosh spots a plastic bag floating in the water at Xochimilco.

An enemy of the environment in our midst.

I had to threaten him with bodily injury to keep him from jumping in to retrieve it.

Lucien is pumped about the election and often, while showing me his latest depressing PowerPoint presentation featuring gigantic "garbage islands" floating around in the ocean, says chirpy things like, "We are going to win because this is everybody's future! Everyone wants to be healthy, and everyone loves animals and doesn't want to hurt them! We're gonna get so many votes!"

I tell him yes, he's got an excellent shot at winning but I say it with a sinking feeling in my stomach because I know one of their rival parties is the "Prices Go Down Party" and they are running on a platform of cheaper snacks at the snack bar. The rumor is they are also bribing their young voters with fistfuls of candy at recess. The PGD is not running a clean campaign; it wouldn't surprise me if they have shadowy ties to Russia.

The Earth Party learned of the PGD candy handouts so decided to counter by handing out seed packets kids could take home to plant. That was one of the sweetest things I'd ever heard from my excited smiley-faced son and it made my heart explode but still -- bottom line is it's "less plastic in the oceans" vs. "cheaper snacks" to an electorate of 3rd and 4th graders.

I'm afraid Lucien is about to learn a very harsh lesson about idealism in politics. I hope it strengthens his resolve and doesn't break his little Earth-loving soul. Because we're gonna need him.

Alex's parents and cousin were here recently for a brief but action-packed long weekend visit. One of the first things we did was the mandatory visit to the Frida Kahlo Museum in Coyoacan. We met a man in line there from Portland, Oregon, who had not purchased his ticket in advance -- an unfortunate rookie mistake at the Frida Kahlo museum -- and was bummed to hear he was going to have to leave our short pre-ticketed line to wait in the two-hour non-ticketed line that snaked down the street, around the corner and out of sight. We felt sorry for him and wanted to help him, such a nice guy and our fellow Pacific Northwesterner.

So Alex concocted LIES.

Alex told the ticket taker at the museum entrance that not all of our tickets had printed when we purchased them online but we hadn't realized it until that very moment. We had in our hands only seven tickets, not the rightful eight! As Alex went on and on about his frustration with the unreliability of the online ticketing system, even waving his arms around convincingly for emphasis, the rest of us snuggled up to our new friend, Joe, and attempted to look very familiar with him. The entrance guy let us all in, likely just to stop Alex from talking.

Joe was grateful and stuck with us to chat. Joe is a cool guy, a professional harmonica musician on tour in Mexico City. I didn't know professional harmonica was a thing, either. His specialty is tango harmonica (!) so he travels the world playing tango festivals and doing guest appearances with symphonies. As thanks for saving him two precious hours of his life, Joe says he'll pop by our house someday when he's in Seattle for a gig and treat our friends to a harmonica concert. We exchanged emails and we will take you up on that, new friend Joe.

Frida Kahlo, bringing the people together

P.S. We made a donation to the museum in the amount of Joe's ticket. We would never cheat Frida.

Diego, maybe, but not Frida.

The next family weekend tourist stop was Xochimilco.

Xochimilco is rich, long ago Mexican history but it doesn't look like it. Mexico City was originally built in the middle of a lake back when the Aztecs ran the show -- easy to defend, yo --and was surrounded by canals but then the Spaniards took over and drained most of the water. The canals of Xochimilco are all that's left of the once huge and intricate Aztec canal system.

The grand history of the area is made slightly less epic, perhaps, by the fact Xochimilco is now a place people go to have loud raucous drunken floating parties. It is not a calm contemplative place where you reflect upon your minute and insignificant place in time; it is a boisterous, colorful, obnoxious place where you get a michelada for less than 20 pesos.

Music blares from speakers on most boats. Mariachis play from others. Vendors constantly pull up alongside you offering beer, or cheap trinkets, or roasted ears of corn. Boat collisions are common when the canals get crowded. You must keep a sharp eye out and yell, "Incoming!" so everyone in your boat can grab onto something stationary before they lose footing and get tossed over the side.

No, Xochimilco is not calm nor educational but it is a lot of fun and we love it --

Coco dancing at the back of our boat

 to the tunes of a mariachi band on a nearby boat
and swinging her brand new Slinky
(we are about to get rammed by those boats behind us so hang on, little girl)

Mexico, you are truly something special.

We asked Mario for a dinner recommendation on the way home from Xochimilco and he said he knew just the place, then picked up the phone and made us a reservation on the spot. We pulled up in front of the restaurant a few hours later and -- holy hell, Mario had perhaps misread our intentions. We wanted a hole-in-the-wall taco joint only locals know about but he instead dropped us off at the San Angel Inn, widely regarded as one of the nicest and fanciest restaurants in Mexico City.

Men in tuxedos, or at the very least crisply tailored suits, and women in gorgeous dresses and high heels dominated the scene. Our post-Xochimilco windblown and sun drenched selves stood out a bit. All of us were wearing shorts or jeans, t-shirts and tank tops, and one of us "may" have been wearing socks with sandals. One woman laughed blatantly in our faces after looking us up and down in wonderment. Screw you, lady, long live the San Angel Inn Rebels.

At least they didn't refuse us entry. You overshot that one, Mario, but you were right, the food was definitely tasty.

Coco is exhausted by the day, she does not care 

we are seated in one of the finest restaurants in the land,

and that we are doing so wearing shorts and sweatshirts.

The next day we took Alex's family to Valle de Bravo, a colonial town a couple hours away from Mexico City by car. We cautiously asked Mario for a breakfast recommendation on the way there, then pointed at ourselves over and over for dress code clarification. He got the second one right, stopped at a small string of restaurants along the highway and led us into a tiny, rough-around-the-edges place with three women at a gigantic stove in the corner of the dining room.

The food, frankly, was better than what we had at the fancy San Angel Inn. It was perfect, cheap, simple, pure homemade Mexican food. The chilaquiles with chorizo are still on my mind and may be forever. Best of all, nobody cared what we looked like.

And most random of all, there was a photo of Hugh Jackman hanging on the wall over my mother-in-law's shoulder. In the photo, he's standing at the very gigantic stove in the very dining room in which we were seated with the very women cooking our breakfast --

That's pretty random, Mexico.

How did Hugh Jackman find it? Does he know Mario, too?

Mario earned his pay that day because Valle de Bravo was a mess given the three-day holiday weekend. Traffic was more "stop" than "go" and more "infuriating" than "not infuriating" because colonial town streets were not meant to hold cars. They were meant to hold people and horses, and not many of them at that.

Valle de Bravo was crowded. And hot. The combo made me slightly mental. We ducked down side streets to avoid clogged main drags and stayed in the shade as much as possible. Also, for whatever reason, fireworks were being set off at random intervals somewhere near the main square, which did not help things. The fireworks were so loud and startling, we all jumped a mile every time one exploded over our heads. I soon became a very twitchy tourist indeed.

But it's true, Valle de Bravo is very pretty. 

We signed up for a private boat tour on the lake in an attempt to escape the chaos. The jostling crowd that formed as all of the waiting people tried to get onto their boats made Parisians look downright civil in their line-waiting capabilities. It was that bad. You often need to embrace the chaos and disorder of Mexico, just go with the flow, but sometimes I am not in the mood to do that. I am ashamed to admit I considered pushing many Mexicans into the water but thankfully I managed to resist the urge.

The kids think it's hilarious to pretend to be asleep.

Kids are weird.

The boat tour was very enjoyable and relaxing until Alex began to feel seasick. He was able to hang in there for the duration but it made the last half of our tour a little more tense; the lake we were on supplies water to Mexico City and we desperately did not want to do anything gross to it.

Before I go, I want to mention a game that is often played late at night in Mexican bars. Alex and I went out with a group of co-workers and assorted friends over the weekend to Plaza Garibaldi, a.k.a. the birthplace of mariachi music. It was a raucous evening involving tequila and mariachi and electrocution.

Shit gets real when you're up until the early morning hours

at the birthplace of mariachi

I don't know why electrocution is a fun thing to try in Mexico, but it is. You sit in a circle with your friends, hold hands, and a guy just electrocutes you all. He starts with a very low current but keeps jacking it up until one of you is in so much pain you let go and break the circuit. Then everybody laughs and howls and makes jokes like "hope nobody has a pacemaker!" and "What's my name again?" -- although that last one may not have been a joke, he seemed legitimately confused.

We are proud (?) to say we all made it until the end, 

the highest current safe to pump into humans for fun.

Weirdest stuff. I just don't even know. But it's true we bonded and had a good laugh over it, even if my right arm is still tingly days later and I can't grasp my toothbrush very well anymore.

Spring Break is coming up starting this weekend so we're heading to Costa Rica for 16 glorious days. I have been meticulously planning this vacation and am very excited. From what I hear, we are never going to want to leave Costa Rica even though we will be near eaten alive by bugs and likely sunburned beyond recognition. That's Costa Rica's inexplicable magic.

Until we meet again, here's our new friend Joe playing the famous "La Cumparsita" tango on his harmonica --



Pura Vida!
MJ