Vacaciones de primavera

The first few months of 2015 have been spent by Alixa growing our new baby girl, Heidi. The pregnancy has gone as smoothly as we could have wished for, and both mom and baby are doing great. Everyone was a little bummed when we found out it wasn’t a boy, as we were all hoping to bring gender balance back to the house. Bo was in denial for a day or two, simply saying “no” every time anyone told him that he was going to have a little sister.

I don't know what's happening in either of these pics

Jenna continues to do great in kindergarten and loves it. She passed the first round of talented and gifted testing, and now gets to go through round two. Jarom took a day off work in January to be a watchdog, which is a program at the school that lets dads spend a day with their kid. It was fun for a few hours and Jenna seemed to enjoy having her dad with her at school. Jarom was glad that he already knew all the things that the kids learned that day. Jenna also started taking tennis lessons and really has a good time doing it. It’s funny to watch kids play tennis when the racket is as big as they are.

Bo has started up another soccer season, with Jarom helping to coach the team. He scored one goal and had a couple other good opportunities but had a teammate steal the ball from him right before he kicked it in. There were some tears and frustration. As a coach, Jarom tries to walk the fine line of telling the boys to be aggressive and go after the ball but not taking it from their own team. It is a work in progress. Bo also went golfing with Jarom during a nice winter Saturday and got to drive the cart and help his dad read greens. His advice was both helpful and consistent, every time he said “hit it right straight in the hole.”

Emmy is talking more, or at least vocalizing more. She doesn’t use many words, but will emphatically say yes or no. This allows adults to play wonderfully entertaining guessing games as they ask her if she would like A, B, C, D, etc… until she finally says “Yah”. I guess this is a step in the right direction.

Trying to comb Jazz's hair

February brought Alixa’s 30^th birthday, which was celebrated in a relatively subdued manner, with a bunch of dinners and lunches and get togethers with different groups of friends. Jarom’s parents went all out and got her and the rest of the family a one-week vacation to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Everyone left on Sunday morning from Dallas, stopping briefly (and luckily not getting kidnapped or murdered) in Mexico City on their way. They arrived at the rental house in the early afternoon and promptly got into swim suits to enjoy the beautiful warm weather. Back in the states everyone was getting snowed on and frozen, including Dallas. They felt bad for Jazz and I stuck in the ice, but couldn’t have been happier with the perfect weather every day all week. On Monday Jarom headed down to the airport to pick up Grandma, Grandpa, Jason, Annie, Adri, Juliet, Luke, and Charlotte. The house had plenty of space for everyone, and a great private pool with an attached elevated hot tub that was an ideal jumping spot for the kids. Even Emmy was brave enough to jump.

There was also easy access to a private beach that was basically empty all week. There the kids could play in the small waves, hunt for seashells, dig in the sand, watch the pelicans and frigatebirds, and they even spotted a whale just off the shore one day. There were maids that made breakfast every morning and cleaned the house every day. There was a fitness center and some brutally steep hills to run up (let the record show that Annie beat Alixa up the hill in the only race.) And there was TV, so the kids could watch Paw Patrol in spanish.

The views for the week

On Wednesday the family planned to head out to the zoo at 9 am. Unfortunately when Jarom turned the key in the van nothing happened, because he had failed to close one of the doors all the way. So it was a 45-minute delay while they waited for some maintenance guys to come out and jump the battery. Oops. They finally got everyone piled into the 15-passenger bus and started on the 1-hour drive through downtown Vallarta and along the pacific coast to the Zoo. It was awesome, mostly because in Mexico they believe zoos should be a touch-and-feel experience, so many of the animals had little or no cages. Even the big cats had no more than a chain link fence holding them in. This forced the parents to keep an eye on the little ones to make sure nobody stuck a hand in the cage, which they could have done. But it also made for a much more intimate, entertaining experience. The only downside was that they didn’t have any bug repellant, and there were a lot of pretty aggressive biting flies. They focused mostly on Alixa, who is still itchy even now, weeks later.

Jenna was brave enough to feed this emu by hand

The other day trip that the group took was a boat ride to a private beach called Las Caletas. They had paddle boards, kayaks, beach toys, chairs, hammocks, snorkels, and lunch. It was great. They also had a kid adventure park that Bo and Jenna were able to do that involved zip lines, a donkey ride, and playing with monkeys and birds. On the way back we had front row seats to a particularly impressive break dance battle done on a boat deck in choppy waters.

Mexican window shopping

Other than that most of the time all week was spent lounging by the pool enjoying the sun and taking the short walk down to the beach to enjoy the sun and lounge there. Which was about all the activity that anybody really wanted to do. On Sunday everyone got to experience church in Mexico, which was fun, and then they checked in to a Marriott downtown for one more night. That evening they all got to watch a sea turtle swim ashore and lay her eggs, which was a very neat, once-in-a-lifetime experience. Mix in some bartering for Mexican trinkets, a lot of homemade chips and salsa, and about a million geckos, pelicans, and iguanas and you have a marvelous family trip to Mexico.

 They found a store that sells costumes. So they bought some fancy dresses.