Everything these days is "mommy, papai, Juju" - three butterflies, three cups, three paint brushes, three rocks... Each set of three has a representative of each person in the family.

Ona is more and more decrepit by the day, not really walking so much as dragging her back legs along the floor to support her behind. The consequence of this is that she will often come in and poop on the tile floor somewhere rather than try to step into her litter box. Ju knows that coco is dirty and he can't touch it, so when he finds some, he usually comes to tell me and then watches as I clean it up.

This morning he found there was some on the veranda next to the litter box, and told me so, but since it was out there and not in the middle of foot traffic, I just said "okay, don't touch it, it's dirty. mommy will come clean it" and continued drinking my coffee. A little while later, he came to the top of the stairs and told me again, but this time accompanied by a long stretch of Ju language that I was unable to decifer, so I thought I'd better take a look. When I came up stairs I saw he had a diaper sitting in front of him, and inside it was the cat poop. Outside on the veranda I found another diaper with more cat poop in it. I guess he just wanted to help.

Some interesting random things from this week:

Since I took one side off Ju's crib, he's been climbing in and out several times a night, sometimes falling out onto the flip out chair we leave beside it for that purpose, and sometimes going to sleep in the hammock. The other night Gustavo went into say good night and he wasn't in any of the former listed places, but UNDERNEATH the crib, sleeping away on the hard tile floor in just a diaper. Gustavo reckons he was hot and got out to sleep for that reason, as it runs in the family (Gustavo will slither off the bed onto the floor if he's hot and NEVER sleeps with covers, even in the winter, usually). I think it's more likely he just rolled off and found his way under there.

Ju is getting very resourceful and is climbing everything! I had to take his Spiderman ball from him today and put it up on the bookshelf because he kept throwing it at the computer screen, so he just climbed right up the shelves and got it down again. This was a real test of limits for him, as he did it right in front of me, laughing the whole time. I should also mention this shelf is eye level for me, so he was up pretty high for him. Later, he kept doing the same thing with a straw hat, so I took it and placed it carefully on top of the standing fan. He went over and shook it a bit, to see if he could get it to fall off. When that didn't work, he looked around, spotted a t-shirt I had left hanging on the dining room chair, took it and started whipping it at the hat until it fell down. Where do they learn this stuff?

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving.



I wish pumpkin pie could be mailed.....

The things you learn from television or perhaps parents trying to be funny....

Ju has been obsessed with Cookie Monster since he started watch Sesame Street videos he got for his birthday. This slowly evolved into a Cookie Monster imitation of daddy being "papai monster" and pretending to try to eat him. About a month ago, Ju started tearing all the foam letters and numbers to pieces with his teeth, and recently discovered the joys of doing this to onion skin and spreading it around the house. Today he went one step further and did a cookie monster with his soup for dinner. He seemed to understand that this was not appropriate when I told him I was upset about it, and then proceeded to ask if he could go do it with the onions instead - "a cookie monster widdy uhn-uhn, num num num."

Strange finger positions. I'm sure this is genetic, but it's not from either of his parents.

As I spend time reading up on other people's lives (more and more often people I know only digitally), I become more tempted to post photos and other things on here. I so enjoy seeing them on other people's blogs, and I wish I could do the same. I am, however, slightly put off since I link to my photo educational blog and there are links to that on several public sites, and I can't help feeling that thats just a whole can of cyber-stalker worms that I don't want to open. So, for those who wish to see more photos, videos, etc, I would invite you to facebook where the privacy settings are easier to manipulate.

Major reorganization. I have been bit by the antsy bug. I have reorganized both bedrooms and my classroom in the last three days. I even fixed my hanging plant that broke (this involved making a whole new chain and connecting holder out of some very thick wire with some very crappy pliers that gave me a very nasty blister on my palm) and spent some time organizing my magic garden area on the veranda. I am sure I had to actually accomplish some work this weekend, but I haven't done it. On the other hand, things that have been in the back of my mind are now getting done, so it can't be all bad.

Since it seems to be the thing to do - Introducing Ju-Leão!

It's starting to get warmer. You can now feel the heat under your clothes during the day, and the water in the water tank comes out a bit warm from the shower without the handy electric heater thing in the showerhead turned on. I wonder if I will feel any cooler this summer, as I will be spending it now for the first time not pregnant or breastfeeding, and therefore carrying much less strangeness in terms of hormones and excess water.

It's fascinating how here the leaves all fall off the trees in the spring, instead of in the fall.

Ju is now in a "what's this, mommy?" phase. I hear this question about 50 times a day and always try to answer it (how long do most moms stand this stage before they stop answering?). He is also trying to count "1,2,3,4,6,8,9" and everything is a "1,2,3 fill-in-the-object" And everything has the potential to be a car - a cracker, a shoe, a stick, a ripped up foam number...

I am addicted to iGoogle. I highly recommend that everyone get an iGoggle page, it's so nice to just stick whatever I want on it. I can read my google news, my email, and look at interesting photos all at one time! It's like the answer to the terrible twos!

You know you have officially registered yourself as a foreign resident when you start receiving SPAM mail from your home country. I actually got a solicitation to subscribe to The Economist, by mail. I used to get tons of this stuff when I was in college, I assume, because our addresses could be accessed online by automated programs, but I had not gotten anything since I moved down here more than three years ago, until now. I wonder how they got a hold of it. Is it really worth sending unsolicited mail this far? I have a friend who's mother used to subscribe to magazines using strange spellings of her daughter's name, just so she could track what companies were selling their info. Will I start getting credit card solicitations now? What about Pizza hut coupons? I could really go for some cheap Subway....

Independence comes with a price.

Ju has been wanting to do things himself, like close doors, put things away, turn on the T.V. etc. This is a great development and I usually encourage him to do his own thing. He even has been waking up and coming downstairs by himself in the morning, usually right before I go out to catch the transport to work, and I leave him to watch a Sesame street video on the couch while daddy takes a shower. The nanny often arrives about 5 minutes later, and as far as I know, he has not gotten himself into trouble with his early morning activities unobserved.

Until today.....

On the weekends, Ju usually wakes up, comes to our room, sees we are still sleeping, and goes back to his room to play until he hears one of us in the shower. It's very polite of him to let us sleep and I had really stopped worrying that he would fall down the stairs or otherwise hurt himself. This morning apparently he decided to come down stairs to play, and by the time we got up at 7:30, he had found his way into the storage room (probably under the pretense of feeding the cat, which is his job every morning) and had made the biggest mess I have ever seen him make. Cat food had been thrown around the room, mixed with some sunscreen he had emptied onto the floor outside the door, a pile of stuff including a keyboard, old motherboard, and painting supplies had been knocked over and spread around, and he was digging in the bin of cat food with his beach shovels and rake. Not to mention that he had a huge poop in his diaper and it was slightly escaping down his legs. We removed him promptly and put him in time out (luckily on the stairs and not on the couch considering the mess he left when he got up later because of the leaking diaper problem) for the duration of cleaning the room, and then threw him in the shower. Does this mean we now need to close his door at night so he doesn't escape?

Living in a foreign country is supposed to be.... what? What is it that we think will be so great about it? I remember thinking how cool it would be to go live in another country - I think all language majors go through this. I even had one former classmate from SPN 400 and something who had found me on facebook tell me she was "trying not to be jealous of my life." We have some kind ideal in our heads about learning another language, living another culture... And those of us who actually get to do it are left trying to remember why we were so obsessed with it in the first place. When I lived in the States, I couldn't get enough Mexican, then Argentine, and then Brasilian culture - I listened to "native" music with all my windows rolled down in the car at top volume, singing in another language at the top of my lungs. I read things in Spanish and Portuguese as often as I could, I listened to radio stations online, I went to chat-in-fill-in-your-language-of-choice-here groups.

And now the farther I am from my own culture, the more closely I cling to it. I enter my iPod world every day on the way to and from work; the music I listen to is mostly what you'd hear on the radio in the States. I cling to American friends online more than I do to Brasilian friends I see everyday day. I NEVER read Portuguese by choice anymore - I am desperate for things to read in English. I spend hours online each weekend reading up the profiles of people I have not had much contact with since I rowed with them on Crew in 2004, yet somehow this is more interesting to me than watching the weekend specials on our antenna television. I would rather wait for a YouTube video of part of a Simpsons episode to load than watch a full program here.

There is nothing to be jealous of in terms of living in another country. I don't know why I thought it would be so glamorous....

I spent my Sunday for Ju. Early in the morning we got a call from our friend Isis who also has a two year old boy with whom Ju has already spent some time playing. She invited us over to hang out and then have lunch. Ju had a great time running all over, jumping on beds with Vito, and was in such a state when it was time to go home that we ended up staying all day and going to a theater done by local street kids (says the paintings on the wall outside) late in the afternoon - Ju's first real theater experience. The subject of the play was fear and the story was pretty interesting and rather psychological as far as I could follow it. Vito cried and had to be taken out, mostly due to tiredness (neither he nor Ju slept at all since they got up at about 6 AM), but Ju enjoyed it and wasn't frightened at all by the lights and sounds and costumes. I have only gotten Ju into bed now - I'm surprised he made it this long!

Ju is eating canned sardines and pumpkin and rice for dinner. Mmmmmm, healthy.


Ew, and he just called me in there to show me a maleka he picked out of his nose! Are all boys this gross? Makes you wonder how they grow up and marry....

Story for today -

Last year, in about... I dunno, maybe March, our sick sick printer that used to jam 4 or 5 times a day (probably more, since surely I cannot be the only person who was unjamming it), suddenly was so broken that no one could fix it and disappeared. They told us in April we would get a new one, when there was money, then it was in May, then they told us a new one would be bought before the next school year, as there was not more money in the budget. At the beginning of this year, we heard that rather than buy a new printer for the 40+ teachers in the Elementary, a new one would only be bought for the administration office, and we got our old broken one back in the middle of August. It would print one document and quit, then it disappeared again for a week, then it was back. As of today it's still not spitting anything out, yet it remains there like a plastic tormentor every time I go to the bathroom or to check my mailbox.

I think I only managed to print 3 or 4 things on it so far this year, since it seems to receive a print command and then say it was printing, yet nothing would ever come out. Every time I need to print something, first I open the print jobs folder and see how many are in the line. More often than not, there are print jobs in que from at least 24 hours before, if not days. I finally quit relying on printing anything and tried to find time to either run over and ask the principal to print for me on his private printer, or go down to the high school and try to use the library printer when there was a computer free. When ever I sent an email to our tech guys, there was never a sign if the problem was dealt with, fixed, or even acknowledged.

Today was the last straw, as I often have sent "please go have a look at the printer because it's not working, again" messages, and yesterday I sent one saying "someone please go put the printer out of it's misery because it has been dieing for a long time" - I had to print a small note to send home with the kids tomorrow. The document was a whole 4 pages long. Wow, 4 pages, what a strain huh? I sent it to the computer lab, where I was promptly chewed out for printing there as it isn't for common use. The broken teacher's printer isn't the computer lab guy's problem and we teachers need to go to the source of the problem and get them to get us a new one. Yes, I have been CCing the emails I send to the tech guys to our director every time, what more can I do? Rather fed up with this whole conversation (been under so much stress the last two weeks, I actually was close to tears), I returned to my room and wrote a lengthy email to both the tech guys, our principal, and our director, saying in short that the whole situation with the printer was ridiculous and totally unacceptable that 40+ teachers have no where to print anything and that some kind of response would be nice so we know that actually someone out there cares and is doing something about it. The director actually did come in, told me he whole heartedly agreed with me, and that something was being done. But when?

Instead of lamenting that the blogs I read are not updated as frequently as I'd like, I suppose I should update my own. I have been so busy and had so many things to write about, I end up not writing at all. Also, Ju is a distraction. And I have other excuses, but I can't remember what they were...