30 at 30

I have no idea if the internet has created such a thing as this.  I suspect so.  If everything goes well, I'd like to read this again when I am 50.

Here are 30 thoughts/facts on my 30th birthday.

1.  I still don't feel like an "adult," but after yesterday's fantastic party, I definitely feel like it's actually my birthday.

2.  I have a pair of jeans that I bought when I was 17 and worked at Meijer that still fit and I still wear, even though they are risqué and lace up the sides.

3.  It's about 72 today here in Brasil and I am a bit cold.

4.  I love to eat sushi and would eat it everyday.  Salmon and tuna, mmmmmmm.  Seaweed, mmmmm.

5.  After living in Brasil for six years, I have reprioritized what I feel is a want and a need, just in time for things to arrive in Salvador that we have not had access to. 

6.  I still like to wear miniskirts because I think my legs look good, but I don't like how my butt touches where ever I sit down.

7.  I love doing waterbike.  It is the best exercise and I think everyone should try it.  I feel like it is what has gotten my asthma under control and helped me destress over the last two years.  Plus I have muscles in places I haven't ever seen them before.

8.  I used to only wear tall platform shoes and now I prefer flipflops.  It has been so long since I wore regular shoes that touch my heels that nearly every time I wear them, I end up with blisters no matter what the shoe.

9.  Someday I want to have a small house on a decent piece of land in Chapada, where I would have a garden, orchard, and some goats for milk.

10.  I love to sew and am determined to make all my own clothes from now on, either from fabric or adapting used things to my liking.  A friend said "you are all kinds of cool at 30, sewing up a storm" - I loved this statement.

11.  Yesterday we had the best party here, by far the most fun adult birthday party I have ever had.  I credit my wonderful friends and spectacular husband for making it happen.  I certainly didn't do much ;).

12.  Doing art with Ju is a great way to spend an afternoon.

13.  Three cats in one house is definitely enough cats.  Ducey, Pila and Lela have amazingly different felinalities and contribute to a well balanced household.

14.  Machines I cannot part with - my laptop, my camera, my sewing machine, my ipod.

15.  I have known and loved my husband for eight years and he is the best man I have ever been with.

16.  I absolutely must drink a cup of coffee in the morning or I just feel like I am coming down with something all day.

17.  My favorite thing to eat is a honey crisp apple, even though we don't have them in Brasil and I rarely find them in MI when we go.

18.  I love teaching little kids.  They are so interested in everything, everything is exciting...

19.  This year's world cup has ignited a real love for watching soccer that I never knew I had.  Brasil is infectious, yes, but there must be more to it.

20.  I believe in the Destination Imagination program.  It should be made part of every school curriculum in a major way.

21.  When I eat apples in Brasil, if they are really good, I eat the whole thing and leave only the stem. 

22.  I spend too much time reading craft/art/DIY blogs and such online, being inspired by what I see, but rarely getting up off my butt to do what I read about.  (But I'd really like to)

23.  My kid is bilingual.  Our whole house is bilingual.  We mix English and Portuguese in every sentence every day.  I still would love to study our language habits.  (and it has been hard to not write Portuguese words into many of these list items)

24.  Being a Quaker is a huge part of who I am, even though it seems like it's such an unknown fact in my life and where I am.

25.  I often fall asleep 8:30 at night, wake up at like 11 and stay up until 12:30, then go to bed again.  I am pretty sure this is not conducive to health.


26.  I only wear glasses because it feels like too much time to go have my eyes examined and get contacts here in Brasil.  I wish things weren't so far apart and complicated down here.

27.  I miss having pink hair, but feel like it wouldn't go over well down here.

28.  If I could do any job, it would be creating window layouts like those in Macy's in NYC.  So cool!  I would also enjoy making theater or movie sets.  Or maybe those big scenes behind glass you see in museums.

29.  A perfect lunch is a big salad of baby spinach and spring greens that has salmon, mandarin oranges, chopped walnuts and Gorgonzola cheese.  At least, that is what I feel like eating at the moment.

30.  I love my friends, even though we hardly see each other.  I have no idea where I would be without internet.

Are you paranoid about swine flu? We sure are. There are stories passing left and right about confirmed cases (there have been no confirmed cases in Brazil, as of yet), paranoid parents wanting me to tell them about every sniffle or cough that I witness in the class, people canceling their trips to Disney, you name it. At the moment I can feel myself getting a cold of some kind, nose feels like it's filling up with something, feeling a bit tired. Just watch, I'll go to school sick tomorrow and the parents will assume I caught swine flu just because I am American (yes, seriously, some of these parents think that way and I wouldn't put it past them to tell people they meet as much as well).

And lets not even worry about the rain (more on This Week in Bahia). It has been raining a lot lately, as it usually does at this time of year. The last week of April had more rain here than was predicted for the entire month. It's still the first week of May and we have already surpassed our expected rainfall for May as well. It has been raining pretty much nonstop since Saturday. Today the whole city was a giant traffic jam. I had kids who were supposed to go home at 12 still in my classroom at 2:40. Parents couldn't get to the school to get them, and the ones that were able to arrive where then stuck there with no way out with all the flooding. By 12 several people were out digging canals in the playground to try to direct the water around the building instead of into the preschool classrooms. I tried to make it an educational experience anyway and took the kids in small groups to look around at what was happening to the grounds. On the news they recommended that one not drive on the roads that usually flood during heavy rains - they listed every road that is a "main vein" to get to anywhere else in the city, except the Orla, which is two lanes in each direction. The mayor, or someone, advised everyone to just stay put at home for their personal saftey, lest they end up floating away in their cars. Mostly people were just stuck wherever they were at 10:30 when the major rain really began taking hold. Ceilings caved in, houses collapsed, lakes and rivers filled up, taking over roads flooding houses. And this isn't an unknown phenomenon - it happens nearly every year. Why nothing is done to improve drainage is beyond me. I don't want to think about it too much because there is nothing I can do to change it.

Ju's 4th birthday, by some miracle, was clear, cool and miraculously rainless. We got a bit more involved with games this year and sent the kids running all over to find the hidden 4s we had concealed all over the garden after a rousing game of pin the baby stegosaurus on the mommy stegosaurus. One of my favorite parts of Ju's birthday is to have my best friends here in one place for a day. Two of my girlfriends always stay till late (they are the LIXO as we say here, they go out with the garbage, when the party is over) with kids and husbands and everyone has a great time. I learned my lesson from last year and used only non-dye-running materials to decorate and therefore was able to actually enjoy the party. Ju was the only one to go in the pool, initially because he dropped a new car and it sank to the bottom (did I mention that he swims to the bottom of the pool by himself now?) and then I think just for the joy of trying to get the other kids wet. It wasn't exactly pool weather as I was cool enough to leave my hair down, but I think he is slowly turning into a fish, or perhaps a bobcat - don't they swim?

We have been reading The Missing Piece Meets the Big O. Ju has many parts of it memorized and likes to practice the exchanges with me at odd times during the day. He also can pick up the book and "read" some of it to us. He has learned several phrases and words just from watching things like Oswald and Sesame Street on DVD and now I see he is beginning to get more of them from books as well. The book fair is coming up at school, so I hope he will finally get to acquire a book of his choosing. I am curious to see what his tastes are and what they may be based on. He loves all the books I have chosen for him in the past.

I have been sewing a lot lately, creating things that come to my head during water bike. I don't have enough time to do them all justice. Eventually I will put some photos.

In other news, I see my Sandal boots have arrived in the States, finally. Come on USA, get with it - they came in and seem to have gone out of style almost a year ago!

Ju is now 3 years old. Time just flies by, doesn't it? We had our normal big hoorah on Thursday - a feiJUada. About 50 people came with kids of various ages. There was feijoada, salad, rice, kibe, pao delicia, brigadeiro, bonbons, etc. I spent some 3 hours putting up my home made train decorations (I spent an entire Sunday making engines and cars that had 3 and Ju all over them out of paper and colored puffy paint) all over the walls and by the pool, blowing up balloons and making the quebra-pot. Part of the simple beauty of the decorations included strips of crepe paper in purple and blue. They blew in the wind in a relaxing way and made the whole area look very festive. As an after thought, we added pieces of it to the backs of the chairs as well.

About an hour into the party, a sudden cloud passed over and it rained all over us for about 5 minutes. The kids were all playing train by crawling through several boxes taped together and they stayed inside the "tunnel" for protection for the duration. I didn't think much of it as it was happening, but as the minute passed, I noticed that the color from the crepe paper was running down freshly painted white walls all around us. At first I laughed until the possibility that the dye might STAY there was mentioned and then I promptly began worrying about the cost of having to repaint the entire outside walls of the condo. This basically dominated my thoughts for the remainder of the party as I followed Ju around, cleaning up trash as I found it and trying to keep Ju's toys from being lost in the condo as our living room was invaded by the party and the kids discovered them and consequently began wandering around outside with them. A kid I don't even know but who came with one of the kids we invited wandered around and had torn down almost all the decorations before I saw what was going on. No adults stepped in to stop him, of course. This made me incredibly sad.

At about sunset, I couldn't stand it any longer, found someone else to keep an eye on Ju and started looking for ways to remove the dye on the walls. I quickly discovered that there was no Veja or bleach or even Q-Boa in the house (how did that happen?), so I took out a bucket and dish soap and a dish scrubbing sponge and a bit of water and started scrubbing away. Surprisingly, the dye did actually begin to come off with a lot of effort, and I was quite relieved. Someone came by and said something to the effect of "good thing you're doing it now, if you left it longer it might not come off" - which unfortunately killed my plans to quit until the party was actually over, so I kept on scrubbing. I was soon joined by the nanny of one of Ju's friends and my nanny's sister and my friend the Lion who was nice enough to bring me a Guiness but I had not been able to stop and enjoy it with him. We continued to scrub our way across the wall for about 2 hours, and with the help of some borrowed Veja someone got from another household and some steal wool (which I think actually took a lot of the paint off the wall along with the dye), we managed to get most of the marks off the walls. At least it seemed that way in the dark, and I actually haven't had the heart to go out there and see if it's really gone in the daylight. After the walls were done, we had to do the chairs as well.

This entire process meant that I didn't socialize AT ALL, for the entire party. It seemed like every time I started talking to someone, Ju would wander off, or someone else would show up and need to be greeted, or someone else's kid would be trying to throw more of Ju's toys into the pool (where do these parents get off to when the kids are invading someone's house I wonder). At least Ju had a good time. The party only really got fun for me when most of the guests had left and the remaining few and their kids all crowded into our living room to watch Woody Woodpecker and play in a more controlled manner. Some of the people I love the most were those who stayed, so it was nice to have their company and relax at the end of the evening (the older kids even helped Ju finish opening his presents, which was fun for everyone).

Things I learned from this birthday -

NO crepe paper on the walls, no matter how pretty it looks - it has ALWAYS rained on Ju's birthday, every year.

Purple crepe paper dye is easier to scrub off than blue (which leaves behind a pinkish tinge) and black.

Do not leave the house open, as it is next to the pool, the party will inevitabley spill into it if I don't lock the door.

Hide all toys and objects that I don't want to wander around with kids.

Don't expect parents to keep an eye on their kids or ask them to not do things like tear down my sweat and tears hand made decorations. Or better yet, don't hang them low enough for kids to reach.

Since eventually the majority of the party goers were in or around the pool, concentrate things in that area next year to save time and clean up area.

Don't stress about not getting to talk to many people because I think I am just not meant to socialize until Ju is older. How much older, who knows.



The sad thing is, many of these things I should have learned last year. This year was supposed to be easier. About the only thing that was easier was the setting up the decorations.

Ju says "You don wanna eat a my bala!" Like a subliminal message - it's not that he doesn't want you to eat it, it's that YOU don't want to eat it. Not sure if it's a confusion based on English chunks or if he really means to say that.

Getting ready for the big number three here. I've been making trains out of poster board and puffy paint for the decorations, and have gotten small blisters on my fingers from stuffing balloons with candies and small toys for the balloon pop game. This year we opted to have a feijoada instead of a churrasco to save some money and feed more people, but since it's a four day weekend, a lot of them are traveling anyway and won't come. I am thinking for good karma, we will have to take some of the left overs and give them out on the street.

The big present this year comes from the grandparents - a real bed. Sure will beat sleeping on the crib mattress on the floor. At the moment, he wiggles around so much, he is usually on the floor by morning.