Yesterday was Halloween. We went to the mall. We bought a Christmas tree. Since the Halloween party at school was moved to the 6th, I am still finishing Ju's snail costume. Halloween here is only about scary characters and none of his friends can understand how a snail is scary and tell him so. I am feeling distinctly unHalloweeny, which is very unlike me as it was always my most favorite holiday ever. I hope it kicks in for Friday. I am working on a sort of costume for the night party - something involving this top hat and vampire teeth. For the day I think I will be an owl at school. That is, if I can finish the costume on time. At least I have the hat as back up.

Conversations with Ju -

Ju enters the bedroom, completely soaked in his clothes.
"Ju, why are you all wet?"
"I have to fix my hair. We are going to two festas!"


Reading a Halloween book, and seeing that the main character just went into the "witch's house" in the story and decide to predict what will happen next in the story.
"What do you think will happen?"
"I think she's gonna get him and put him in her panela" (pot)
"Oh, you mean her cauldron? Yeah, maybe. And then what will happen?"
"She's gonna make him be a.. a.. a sandwich!"


In other news, our Halloween comes late this year - due to the long holiday weekend coming up, the school decided to move our party to the 6th of November. This is good because I have more time to finish Ju's snail costume. But it's pretty funky already with all the Xmas decorations up, only to get worse the farther into November we go.

Haha, I always wondered what the words to that song were...

Over the summer, Ju learned a song at Quaker meeting. It is a song I sang as a kid, written by a local folk singer called Carol Johnson. What they did in first day school that got him to learn it when I had sang it to him for years before hand, I will never know. This song is called "Love Grows." His first version went like this -

"Love grows, one by one, two by two, three by three and four by four...."

After a month of this, he had corrected it and would sing it at random in the car whenever he felt things were getting too quiet.

Then the other night, as I was putting him to bed and staying with him "just for five minutes, please please because I love you" (and then he bats those long eyelashes at you and gives you a silly smile), he began to sing it, whispering, in Portuguese. He sang the entire chorus, it seems, completely translated by himself.

"Amor crecer, um by um, dois by dois e quatro by quatro"
"Amor crecer, faz um ciculo e vai bater na sua porta na frente"

When I asked him later in the week if he had sang this song at school, thinking maybe his Portuguese teacher translated it (I shared the song with the whole school a couple of years ago and now everyone from grade 2 - 7 knows the lyrics and sang it for a school wide presentation), but he insists he figured it out himself. I will have to verify this, of course, before I get too excited about how cool this is.

Queimadas, for those wondering where it was. I loved it.


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Hi all, I swear I'm not dead or lost or anything. I spent my usual month in the USA in June/July and just have not gotten back into the swing of blogging quite yet. I promise more stories soon though. Lots more. Just let me get through my current MA course and the start up of DI and I swear I'll get back into it.

Sometimes in the afternoons, Ju and I will do sort of research projects to figure out how things work, mostly focusing on science. We spent some days looking at videos of tornadoes and hurricanes and discussing them because of the recent weather patterns.


He has always be very fascinated by the elevators in the mall, watching them go up and down, so we made our own elevator on the stairs one day to learn about pulleys. It was a good time for Ju and for Duse who thought that we had hung string that moved just for him to play with.

Ju got annoyed several times as Duse would quickly knock our string off the pulley with his constant pawing, but I think all in all the activity was a success.

Ju generally wakes me up early on any given day when I'd rather not be up early. It begins with him running into our room, getting on me in bed, usually asking for me to look at this thing he made with leggos or playdough or grabbing a cat who was pleasantly sleeping on my legs or my hair. He will run in and out of the room for about 20 minutes, and then begin telling me to get up because he wants breakfast. Usually I can waylay him a bit if I don't want to get up quite yet and he finds something else to do until I go downstairs. This morning was much the same story, except when I rolled over and told him to give me a few more minutes, he took it upon himself to get what he wanted. I could hear him moving things around downstairs, and eventually I heard the sound of granola being poured in a bowl. As the granola is kept on a shelf above the sink, I decided I had better get up in case he was doing something even more dangerous than climbing up on the kitchen counter. He must have been really hungry and unwilling to wait for me, got his stool from the bathroom, used it to climb up on the counter, got down the granola and the cashew nuts, climbed back down, got his own bowl out, served himself half the container of granola (about 2 cups) into the bowl, and was just about to put milk on it which he had gotten out of the fridge on his own as well. Although it's nice to see him so independent and it may mean I get to sleep in in the future, it may end up being an awful waste of food. Maybe it's time to put a scoop in the granola, and perhaps take it out of the glass container and put it in plastic instead.

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As I was typing this, we had this conversation.


"mommy, look, the car is on the pedga."

"it's on a what?"

"it's a pegda."

"a playdough?"

"no, a pegda!"

"a peda?"

"no, a pega!"

"a what? a prega" (nail)

"no! a peda!"

"a playdough?"

"no! something else, hard!" (hits his fist on the floor beside the car)

"oh! you mean a pebble?"

"yeah, a peddle."