Well, Hey.

I know: it’s been a long time with no updates. I was on a long vacation, followed by a period of post-vacation recovery. I am finally beginning to catch up on sleep and work and processing Cute W’s harvest and laundry. Hooray for a long weekend with very few plans.

So, basically: when J found out that her internship would pay well and leave her without plans for August, she decided that she would take a trip to Mexico to explore and practice her Spanish. Cute W and I were jealous (we’d planned a family trip to Mexico for April 2020, but that didn’t work out), so we decided to join her. Poor M was also jealous, but she’s now a real grown-up with work responsibilities, so she couldn’t come along.

My last post was on August 2nd. On August 4th, J and I flew into Oaxaca, Mexico, and then traveled to Puerto Escondido, which is in southwest Mexico on the Pacific Coast. We arrived late on Monday and stayed there until Saturday, when we returned to Oaxaca and met up with Cute W. We stayed Oaxaca until Tuesday the 12th, when we flew to Mexico City. Then we all spent five full days in Mexico City before we split up again on Monday: I flew home while Cute W and J flew to Guadalajara. Then Cute W came home on Wednesday, and J trailed after us on Friday.

It was a fantastic trip: the three cities I visited were all very different and I loved them all. There will be more on Mexico soon. But meanwhile, it’s felt like my recovery has been slow. First, by the end of the trip, I wasn’t feeling well. I think a lot of it was just that I literally could not keep up with my family’s pace, variety, and volume of eating. We ate a lot. We ate many different things. By the time we’d made it to Mexico, there were a couple of mornings when my husband and daughter would head out for another culinary excursion and I was like, “can you please just bring me back some plain bread?” Then, we had three separate flights back that were all delayed, so that means that on Monday night I was wandering the Albany Airport’s parking lot at 1:30 am trying to follow the location pin Cute W had left me for the car (imagine me squinting at this screen with my roller bag and terrible sense of direction in tow):

Then on Wednesday night I went to bed and set my alarm to pick up Cute W at 3 am, then on Friday night we both (both! I know! But we love her so, neither could stay home) were back at the airport at 2 am for J. So I was sleepy all week while trying to catch up on work and housekeeping.

And meanwhile, guess what? We welcomed an exchange student to our house the following Tuesday night! And for those keeping score, that’s last Tuesday night, so S, who is from Belgium, has not yet been with us for a week. So I was preparing her room and making a poster and fielding emails and filling out forms to get ready for her. The lovely S will likely only be with us through November or December because there are a couple of other families lined up to host her, too, but we like to do our best to Shock And Awe a new student with plenty of fun so that they’re too busy and happy to get homesick, so that’s kept us busy, too. We’re fortunate that J has been home to help entertain her, but J returns to college for her junior year on Tuesday, so we’re also trying to get organized for that as well.

And that, my friends, is why I’ve been M.I.A. And meanwhile, the people who know me well enough to say, “Hey, why aren’t you posting?” also know that I’ve been super-busy, but you know where I’m getting a guilt trip? Frickin’ Facebook! For a while I was trying to step back from Facebook entirely, but it’s one of the easiest ways to find out what’s happening, whether it’s political stuff for me or kids’ activities that should be on KidsOutAndAbout.com, so I’ve been back on. But meanwhile, perhaps to encourage me to become more engaged with the page, Facebook has been letting me know that it’s serving up my Capital District Fun page to tons of people.

Which is low-key embarrassing because I haven’t been doing anything with it. And now I guess I’m going to let Mark Zuckerberg bully me into participating because I don’t want people to think that the page is a sad ghost town.

So! That’s what’s been happening. One activity we did recently was to watch the Flotsam River Circus, which is performing along the river, if you’d like to catch it.

It was a very fun show, but sitting in the grass at the edge of the river, I was eaten alive by bugs, and now if you run into me in the next few days, chances are good that I’ll be bent over, scratching my ankles.

And if you’ve been diligent enough to read all the way down, here’s a little Mexico preview….