Another day of contrasts and chayote

Nature trail nature

Although it was a beautiful sunny day today, there was no grand adventure with huge views.  Such is the difference in living abroad instead of having a shorter trip with little work and all fun.  We are trying to get some things accomplished.  The post-breakfast early morning time was filled with more math work and game making.  Madeleine wrote and illustrated another first reader book for Sullivan, this time entitled "Peter the Pizote".  

Hard at work

We trekked into town to the school yet again.  We did meet with the very friendly English teacher, Ron but alas, the school head was again not present.  Ron did tell us that there are two other “extranjero” or foreign students in the school who are maybe just a bit older than our crew.  He was encouraging and made us feel quite welcome.  Each time we visit there is a little less anxiety for us all walking in the door.  We’ll try again tomorrow and one of these days we’ll get our kids into school.  

Amazingly I don’t feel any frustration towards trying to enroll the kids into the local school but the opposite is definitely true for the wire transfer situation so that we can buy a car.  Forgive my small rant.  DHL sent me an email this morning stating they delivered our six pieces of paper at 11:16 am.  I spoke with E*Trade bank and was informed that once the wire is processed that it’d be 2-7 business days for it to go through, which is 2-7 days longer than I thought it would be.  I honestly can’t remember the last time I’ve been so frustrated from beating my head against the wall.  How difficult can this be?  Early afternoon beer, lunch and a nap were sufficiently therapeutic.

For me, the kids and Erica really made the day better.  Sullivan has been asking me specifically to do so many things with him and has been wanting to hang out a lot.  I’m not sure we’ve ever been closer and I love it.  Having the opportunity to spend this amount of time with the kids every day has been superb.  We took our daily stroll down to the nature trail/”fishing” pond and had plenty of time to look for animals and play in the dirt together.

Good thing we can buy food, too

The new food for dinner tonight was a chayote, which has been described as similar to summer squash.  Indigenous to Central America, it is actually a fruit.  To me it tasted like a mix between broccoli stem, apple and butter.  Pleasant, but nobody seems eager to run out tonight to buy more.

Chayote

After dinner we enjoyed two games of Clue, one with each of the elaborately homemade and complete Clue games.  Not exactly sure what got this kick started, but it's safe to say they wanted to play Clue.  Henry’s game accommodates up to 12 players, has a dragon theme from a book he's recently finished and includes weapons such as wing claw, fire and breath.  Madeleine chose the traditional Clue characters and weapons.  Both were “laminated” with packing tape. Good times were had by all and nobody cried!  

One third of Henry's illustrated and "laminated" Clue cards

Madeleine's companion homemade board

Tomorrow, we’ve already decided to go and visit a nearby “termales” hot springs after our daily visit to the school.  I’ll continue to hope for a miracle wire transfer.

Mini-me and me