CONGRATULATIONS MOM!

I didnt blog on Saturday to make this announcement. I probably shouldn't be up this late tonight either... but I had to blog on this.
Last Saturday, Mom graduated ~WITH HONORS, may I say~ from the Universidad Pedagogica Nacional. First place in her generation ~A+ all the way, not even an A-. That's how smart my mother is. She also gave a killer speech during the graduation ceremony... We are all bursting with pride.
Mom, I know this is neither the first nor the last of the many great accomplishments God has for you. I'm so happy for you... I LOVE YOU!

Can't Sleep

Writing a post for my blog will forever remind me of the first week I spent with my husband to be… back in Dallas, when I would write in the wee hours of the night simply because it was the only time I could do it. And I HAD to do it, of course, because I knew he’d be reading it soon. Just knowing that he would was enough of a booster to keep me up for hours, writing away, making sure to include the most interesting things in my crazy busy life to entertain and impress him.

Well, it’s sort of like that still… except this time around he is somewhere in the US and Im down here in Mexico. It’s past midnight for me, and I haven’t been able to go to sleep yet, because I have way too many things in my head. The anticipation doesn’t let me sleep. Forgive me if for a moment I write like no one else will read this… Q, Ry bear… I miss you.

Home will always be home. There’s the expected and familiar.. and I’m grateful for that. I am grateful to be here. But there are a lot of things I just didn’t expect.. the busy-ness and messiness of it all, for one thing, disorients me once in a while (and don’t get me wrong, it was busy and messy enough with just me, but now it’s 9 of us!) I expected this time to be a bit more laid back.. a time to enjoy my family leisurely. Strange that I expected that, knowing how crazy my parents’ schedule is –and I want to be of as much help as I can be. This is my very last year at home, and at home we all eat from the same pot. All for one, and one for all! I’m learning to re-embrace it.

So I am once again a “teenager,” a Sunday-school teacher, a school secretary, an active member of a youth group.. and of course a sister/daughter, a wedding planner and an ESL teacher, which were the three main goals for the year.

It’s been a busy month for me… emotionally and otherwise. Busy, busy. It’s been a strangely overwhelming AND fun month. Both hectic and exciting, tiring and rewarding….

School is going amazingly well, despite the expected bumpy start. Office paperwork is as complicated as I knew it’d be… and teaching 1^st through 6^th grade ESL is no easy feat, especially while the classroom is under construction and still lacks a blackboard. But I do have plenty of space, seats, and a computer (my laptop) and a projector. And Dad bought me a Disney interactive program, which the kids LOVED. I also have a whole lot of Power Points, flashcards, and other didactic materials. I think the kids and I are all having a lot of fun, and they are learning fairly quickly. In a month (2 classes a week) most of the grades have learned school vocabulary, the pronouns, the verb to be, this/these, that/those, the, my, a… the family, the house, the numbers, the calendar… my goodness.. I’m going fast. But that’s how smart they are. I’m very proud of them.

Hard things? Learning names, keeping the noise level down, and grading so much homework! But I refuse to lower the hw load.. they need it.

Fun things? Games and crafts with the kids. I had the 1^st grade kiddos make cubes with the names of the months, and they loved it. The cubes came out surprisingly well, given the age of the kids. They are all cute and colorful, and I intend on hanging them to the paper tree Im building in one of the corners of the classroom…Getting little notes and drawings is also a lot of fun too :)

So that’s been the start of the year for me.. I love teaching :) The kiddos make me happy .. jejejeje…

Alrights… Im going to sleep now.. Im finally starting to fade.

It's officially 16 de Septiembre

¡Feliz Cumpleaños a mi Patria!

Happy Birthday, my great Mexico. May God always bless you.

¡QUE VIVAN LOS HÉROES QUE NOS DIERON LIBERTAD!

Summer Update II

... The very next day after arriving from la Sierra I woke up very early to get Q from the airport. He was visiting to help with wedding plans and to be here for my birthday. Wedding planning went great.. and so did the birthday. Q has been super supportive with the wedding stuff… I keep changing my mind about things… and every once in a while I become a knot of emotions, and he helps me untangle them… He is SUCH an amazing fiancé…

We organized the wedding ceremony and got a photographer. We looked at invitations, but the ones I like are incredibly costly, so Im still looking for a better option.

My birthday (and my dad’s) was a lot of fun. My siblings got me little gifts, which according to tradition they gave to me as soon as the sun came up (yup.. woke me up early in the morning… I was half asleep) Dad got some great gifts too. I gave him a portable radio for when he and the kiddos go to the football games. Q supplemented the radio with some UTEP gear.. it was a fun gift, I thought. I didn’t do any cleaning the whole day (hehe). And then we had dinner together at night – cabrito, brought on a plane by a pastor friend of my dad’s .. all the way from Monterrey. Dad was raised in Monterrey, and he had been craving cabrito for a while… so we had it brought from the national center of cabrito breeding and roasting. Cabrito is a very difficult roast… the kid (as in goats, don’t start with the baby eating, Q) has to be a very specific weight AND age, and it has to be roasted with a specific wood, at a specific temperature… very delicately… any of this goes wrong, and the meat will either fall apart or become plastic-like or hard. Its very difficult to make, I hear.

Anyway… it was a good dinner… and we had fun getting a meal from so far away… and Dad and I felt special.

Q took me the very next day to a restaurant I had been wanting to go to for a while. We had traditional Mexican food… they had a good chef in the back and a very nice waiter who tried to act like he hadn’t seen my flip flops and let us in :P Q had a huge stake and I had salmon and corn soup. The soup had huitlacoche, a very rare fungus that grows on corn under conditions so specific that they are impossible to recreate –it only grows ‘wildly,’ so it’s considered a delicacy. I loved the soup it was a part of, but when I had a bit of huitlacoche on bread, I have to admit I didn’t like it. I suppose I have a ghetto sense of taste. But I enjoyed the whole thing… lunch was absolutely great, service was splendid, and the place is as gorgeous as I imagined it’d be. Q and I had some alone time, and we talked and talked and had a great time together… it was a good birthday indeed :D

It was great having Q at home this summer. He accompanied me in my daily routine and helped me out with everything… we took walks, and went to the movies, and even went shopping once.

After he left, it was all about Anapra. We got ready for school, did some major cleaning in the house, and pretty much just tried to tie any loose ends before September caught on to us :P

And all in all, it was a good start of the school year.

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, MY LOVE!

It's our last September apart!
You are the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me...
It only gets better each year.
Te amo!

SUMMER UPDATE part I

This is what Ive written so far... Im a little behind on my blogging, so I want to try and catch up.. let's see if I get it done :P

Life so far this school year is crazy! I want to sleeeep... lol. It's very hard work, teaching in Anapra, but very rewarding... I do love teaching. Im very excited to hear my kids at the end of the semester, speaking good English.. hehe...

Please pray for my uncle, who left to Torreon on Sunday to be checked by a heart specialist. We hope God will be with him and with us... and we hope this specialist will think differently. They wont perform surgery on him for fear he won't survive it, but he can't live much longer without it, so we hold on to hope! All is possible in Him.

Ok.. here goes the update.

SUMMER UPDATE part I

It’s been a while since I last wrote… it seems like summer just started and it is already over. It was a great summer. I came home after presenting my paper, after all the family graduations, and my own HDS graduation… and soon after Q visited us. This really nice boy, K, had been with us for a couple weeks when Q came, and suddenly we were a gang -my siblings, the kid, and Q and I. I thought it was a lot of fun. We went to the park together, went out to eat together, went to the movies together… Being with my siblings and K felt like Q and I were 15 again, only together this time around. I’ve always felt a little melancholic about the time of Q’s life I missed…

The family got really attached to K. The kid came to spend time with us, practice his already impressive Spanish skills, and work in Anapra. He is a sophomore at Vanderbilt this year -a musician and a poet. I kept trying to get him and my little sister together, but they wouldn’t hear anything about it. We gave him a really hard time, but he endured our schedule, our chaotic life style, and our constant noisiness – and he did it with a smile. Most importantly, he liked our food. I like to think that he’s almost as Mexicanized as my very own Q. I hope the school year is going well for him.

Soon after Q and K left, my family went on vacation… TO CANCUN! We had a blast. We rested enough, ate more than enough, and had even more than enough crazy adventures. We saw one of the “new” world’s wonders, the ruins of Chichen-Itza, and a few other awesome places like Tulum and Xcaret. Tulum is one of the most beautiful archeological sites I have ever seen. It is right by the sea… and it is surrounded by an expanse of jungle and its wild life… As soon as we entered through the ancient stone wall that protects the city, I felt like I’d stepped down from a time machine… It was absolutely amazing. Tulum made me miss Q a lot. I think he would have loved it… all that history!

Xcaret is an eco-tourism park. It is HUGE… like a mini-Disneyland, only Cancun-themed :P I don’t know how else to describe it. We went snorkeling in the sea and in an underground river and got to see all of the exotic fauna up close. There was an aquarium, a small zoo, a huge “mariposario,” (which I don’t know the English name for, but it is basically a humongous cage in which they “cultivate” --they don’t like the word “breed” for some reason-- butterflies), and a full size ball game stadium, among other things. We also saw a Folkloric show that included a re-enactment of the ancient ball game… it was beautiful.

Cancun itself is beautiful. The sand looks and feels like white, sifted flour, and the turquoise sea seems to never end. The water is so transparent one can see the small fish swimming around one’s feet… it is quite simply the paradise. We had a blast. We sure did.

We flew in a Thursday afternoon, packed our things that night, and at 4am Friday morning we were on our way again, this time to the youth camping trip. We went to a crazy beautiful area of the Sierra. It is another kind of natural beauty –the mountain. So fresh and green and wet. It rained a lot that weekend, but the youth managed to have a deep spiritual contact with the divine and with each other. At some point the kids were all praying and singing, and it started pouring outside. It felt so physical a representation of God’s presence –the rain, falling to the ground, bouncing on the glass windows all around us. I could physically see God’s response to their prayers… I could see His hand over them, soaking them, covering them. It was a moment I want to treasure for the rest of my life.