Mexico Firsts

Things I saw in Mexico that I’d never seen before:

– At the hotels, the maids folded the edge of the toilet paper into little fans, as rendered in this blurry image, which I took while tipsy:

– This was my first experience with calling hotels and finding they didn’t accept guests who had kids. I didn’t realize that was a thing.

– Roving candy shops — vendors package up bags of bright penny candies and hang them from a sandwich board, which they wear on their shoulders.

– A waiter swung the tab of my Coke can around so it hovered over the mouth of the can, and then stuck the straw through it and into the can. The top hole of the tab acts as a sort of straw-stabilizer.

-Tutti-frutti flavored marshmallows.

Change of Heart

Hank is on our bed, playing with his wooden double-decker bus. He shakes it back and forth as the little wooden people clatter inside. Suddenly, he dumps the passengers out, shakes every last one from its seat, and surveys the wooden bodies strewn across the bed sheets. Hank pauses, frowns, and says,

“You OK guys? … Need help?”

Mexico: The Upside

http://www.db798.com/pictobrowser.swf

All right, I’m feeling less murderous now. For those of you who mentioned that you’re never going to Mexico after hearing about our trip, consider that most of this could have happened anywhere. Mexico is gorgeous, and I don’t want you to skip it just because we had a run of bad luck. Plus, the water in Cabo produced no ill effects, despite many a blended drink. We only had problems when we were drinking spring/well water in a non-populous area. Seriously guys, they serve bowls of melted cheese in Mexico. You don’t want to miss that shit.

Though we didn’t have camera battery chargers, which meant I couldn’t use my fancy camera, my iPhone camera worked great. Also, the point-and-shoot battery kept chugging for almost the entire trip (nice!). The photos look like we had an entirely different vacation, which means that I can now begin to lie about our time in Mexico until I’ve effectively blocked out reality. Excellent.

More upsides:

Every place we stayed was amazing (water issues and double bookings notwithstanding). The hotel where we stayed for a single night due to the double booking was so good that I would consider going back.
What? I would!
Every single interaction we had was friendly. The woman at the Mexican Inn even called the airport and argued vehemently with them about our “lost” luggage.
Bryan and Libby are not complainers, so no one talked about the disaster unfolding until we were on the way home. This made everything oddly bearable.
The weather was balmy and perfect, and I got to wear sundresses and hunt for seashells in January. Dreamy.
Mexico did not run out of tequila while we were there.
Hank had a blast. He got to play in water every day, watched more movies than he’s usually allowed (due to the midnight wakeups), and had our undivided attention for a week, as he was the most entertaining thing for miles. Plus! There were roosters! Hank loves him some chickens.
We had guacamole every single day.
The night when we had to stay at a hotel because of the house booking issues, we had dinner by the water while Hank slept in his stroller. We woke to a sweeping view of the sea. Hank spent the next day floating his rubber duckie in the pool, while Libby and I gossiped over Margaritas with chips and salsa, and Bryan rented an ATV.
When Bryan collapsed in Cabo on New Year’s Eve, Libby and I abandoned him and hit the town. We eventually landed at a nearly empty Karaoke bar with a loyal clientele of serious singers. We drunkenly screeched our way through “Like a Virgin” as the other patrons studiously avoided eye contact. The DJ fell in lust with Libby (surprise), poured his drink into a plastic cup and tried to drag us back out on the town. When Libby demurred, he told us where the good “Mexican Parties” were, i.e., places where you didn’t have to pay a $60 cover. We took his advice and Salsa danced into the early morning hours wearing feathered party hats.
The next day we had a bowl of melted cheese for lunch.
See now? That wasn’t so bad after all.

Mexico: The Ungrateful Bitching Edition

So, Maggie! How was your awesome Mexico vacation?

Thanks for asking! There were some snags.

For example, someone removed most of the awesomeness from Mexico and put it somewhere else for a week. Was it with you? I hope so, because if so, it must have been raining glitter and cocaine where you live.

Mmm. Delicious glitter cocaine.

What happened, you ask? Well, have a seat.

Two days before our trip, Bryan left for Illinois to help our family bury his very sweet grandmother. We tried to postpone our trip so all of us could go, but tickets to Illinois were one jillion dollars each, and our cheapo tickets to Mexico were of the non-refundable, non-transferable variety. So Bryan flew out and arranged to meet us on our layover in Phoenix.

After this inauspicious start, the trip unfolded in such profuse layers of inconvenience and stress that I’m resorting to bullet points in the interest of time:

Two hours of sleep before leaving for the airport at 4 a.m. with our friend Libby and a sleepy baby.
Two hours of struggle when our US Air tickets somehow turn out to be with United, and United almost refuses to let us on the plane, because they are giant dicks.
Hank’s luggage is suspiciously absent from the conveyor belt.
Bryan and I go out for New Year’s Eve around 8 p.m. Bryan feels ill. Two hours later, he has trouble walking home.
Bryan sleeps for two days with a vicious flu/cold combo.
On New Year’s Day, Hank wakes at 4 a.m. He continues this charming habit for the duration of our trip.
Our friend Libby wakes with the non-alcohol-related urge to boot. Happy New Year!
Hank’s bag arrives at the hotel, sans both our camera battery chargers, which I’d groggily (read, stupidly) tucked into the suitcase in a 2 a.m. daze.
Hank gets Bryan’s vicious flu/cold. He is screamier about it.
Due to fruitless charger hunt, we leave too late for the house we’ve rented up North. We are driving in the dark, on isolated dirt roads, in the Mexican desert, with a toddler.
We arrive at the house to find another couple there. The house has been double-booked for the night. I briefly consider offing the nice couple from Rhode Island, as we are in the Mexican desert, and I’m not even sure that’s illegal here.
Instead we drive to a hotel in the dark, on isolated dirt roads, in the Mexican desert, with a toddler.
We return to the house the next day. After our first meal, we discover that the dishwasher runs but doesn’t clean the dishes no matter how thoroughly we rinse. This is irritating, as the water isn’t safe for dishwashing at tap temperatures. Hmm.
The bathtub tap doesn’t work.
I unwittingly take a swig of contaminated tap water. I immediately take two Immodiums.
Bryan rigs a bath by heating water on the stove. The next day the nice neighbor tells us it’s not safe to bathe in the water, because we have “other orifices” besides our mouths.
My intestines begin to roil.
When the nice neighbor showers, he keeps a dry towel nearby to wipe his eyes and mouth, in case any spray gets on his face. Do go on.
The nice neighbor says if you happen to drink the water, whatever you do, don’t take an Immodium. It blocks you up, and then the bacteria just breeds in your gut. Good to know.
Hank’s left eye begins to weep suspiciously. I first notice this when he wakes at 3 a.m.
I come down with Bryan’s vicious flu/cold.
Hank’s left eye becomes crusty, and his right eye begins to weep in a foreshadowing manner.
We head to the clinic in the closest town, about an hour away. Hank has a double bacterial eye infection and an upper respiratory infection. Hurrah!
Every two hours, we pin our child down as he screams and pry his eyes open so we can administer mystery medicine drops.
On our last night, the house runs out of propane, which means we can’t cook because the stove doesn’t work, and there’s no more hot water for showers. After all the neighbor’s advice, I suspect the lack of showers is a blessing in disguise.

Is that it? I think that’s it. Oh, wait. When I got home, I also contracted a mystery eye ailment. So that’s been fun.

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about the good parts, because there are always good parts, right? Right.

Let me sleep on it.

Too Much

In the States, I’m pretty sure you can get arrested for neglect if you’re holding a cocktail this large within 100 feet of your child.

Such was the upside of vacationing in Mexico. The downside? Let’s talk about that later.

But seriously? Let’s talk about it at length.

Solution! Cheese Plate Jar

Since Hank came along, we entertain at home a lot more because we’d rather buy groceries for the week than fund a sitter for an evening.

This is our cheese plate jar, it’s where we keep snacks for impromptu hosting. We used to eat all the yummy snacks ourselves, and then have sliced fudgesicles and dry pasta curls when people came over. Now, once something goes in the jar, it’s for guests only.

You can stock it with all kinds of shelf-friendly snacks, but our favorites include:

Bars of Dagoba or Scharffenberger dark chocolate
Raw almonds, pecans, filberts
Roasted pistachios or pumpkin seeds
Dried apricots, cranberries, or mangoes
Crystalized ginger

If you happen to have some cheese in the fridge and a little drizzle of honey, you can make a killer cheese plate with that stash. If not, take three little dishes (we use sushi plates), and put out almonds, dried apricots, and chopped chocolate. You can put it together in five minutes with no cooking and no stress.

Look at you, so fancy.

Baby Shower ABC Book: How To

I mentioned yesterday that I made this blank, DIY ABC book for my friend Alli’s shower.

Bryan and my friend Jaime really helped — I’d intended to use a store-bought journal, but couldn’t find anything that would work. If you’d like to make one too, here’s how we did it.

We took some white cardstock sheets, 8.5 x 11, and folded them in half to make all the pages. Then we stacked those sheets with the folded edges along what would become the spine of the book.

We used a red file folder as the book cover — it had multiple creases along the fold, so you could expand how many papers it would hold in the file. We folded to the widest creases, and the “bottom” of the file became the book’s spine. Once a ruler is involved, my temples start to throb from all the pressure, so my friend Jaime measured how big the cover needed to be, then marked it off with a ruler and trimmed to order.

Bryan printed up the letters, also on white cardstock. Jaime and I cut out little templates of squares that would fit over the letters, traced a square around each letter, cut them out, and glued them in the page corners. You could easily just write the letters in by hand if you liked too, but I wanted a more polished look.

The binding was the tricky part. We tried hot gluing the pages in, but they weren’t stable enough, so Bryan took an electric drill and drilled holes in the cover, which I then threaded with ribbon. I wish we’d had some little grommets to finish the holes, but it looked pretty good, notwithstanding.

At the shower, while Alli opened the gifts, everyone took turns drawing pictures and writing messages to the new mom and baby.

I like party activities that let you interact without having to make a pregnant woman cry by guessing at the exact girth of her enormous belly. This one is a champ.

Alphabet Baby Shower

My dear friend Alli is having a baby, so a few of us threw her an ABC baby shower. It was, of course, based on a theme I saw in Martha Stewart, whose empire has made it such that creative types need never again have an original idea.

If you have a shower to plan, here’s how it went:

I hung glittered letters over the dining room table. These are from the sign I got at the flea market a while back. If I were buying them especially for the party, I would have just gotten a bunch of As, Bs, and Cs.

We used blocks and vintage ABC books to decorate. These blocks are Hank’s and the book is a damaged version from a thrift store. I use it to “monogram” gifts and cards and such.

The door sign was a vintage baby sweater on a hanger. This would have been even cuter if I’d been able to track down a vintage baby hanger, but no luck, so I just bent a wire hanger in at the sides.

This is a detail of the sweater sign. Bryan hot glued the wooden blocks together with a piece of string glued between them. (Bryan hot glues things because it makes me hot and bothered. Note to entrepreneurial types: Hunks and Hot Glue site.) The string is looped over the neck of the hanger and hangs down through the sweater.

I used glass baby bottles as bud vases for the peonies. Cutesy genius, I tell you.

We had two relatively mellow games. This is one I saw and loved at another friend’s shower. It’s a handmade ABC book with blank pages. Guests drew in pictures for the letters to make an ABC book for the new baby. Putting it together was a little more complex than I expected (I’ll post a quick how-to soon), but you could easily buy a pretty book from a stationery store and draw the letters in by hand.

For the second game, we had everyone guess how many magnet letters were in the jar, and the winner got a little prize.

The embellishment on the prize package is from the old dictionary book pictured above, which I also used on the gift for the new baby:

I think it turned out pretty cute. And no one had to rub Vaseline on their nose, or sneak into the bathroom to dry heave after being made to sample a jar of pureed prunes. Bonus.

Wardrobe Remix

These are my pink superhero boots, which go with nothing. Nothing, I tell you! But do you see how they make me feel? They make me feel like copping a sexy attitude while posing alone in my living room. So imagine how good they’d be if I were dancing on a bar, my friends.

On a side note, this outfit was $32, if you don’t count the shoes. If you do count the shoes, it was $112. I am a shopping genius.

Anyway, what are you up to? Let’s go dance on a bar.

Feliz AÃ±o

We’re officially in Mexico by now, where I don’t have Internet access, and I anticipate it will be like losing a limb. Every once in awhile I’ll get a phantom itch where Post Secret used to be.

I’ve prepped a few posts that will publish while we’re away. In the meantime, the weather’s great, wish you were here, and so forth.