pura vida

Friday was a good day! Can I tell you all about it? It was possibly the best day I’ve had here. Now that I’m thinking about what actually happened on Friday, it doesn’t seem so remarkable, but it felt significant to have a really great day.

It actually started on Thursday, when we met up with some friends. I’m not sure we’re in friend zone yet actually, but I think we might be getting there. I met these folks the Friday prior at a pool party for the school. I was feeling totally out of place at this party because our school definitely has a private school vibe. Which makes sense because it’s a private school. I guess for me that translates to feeling a little out of place. So I was standing around wishing my kids were with me instead of playing nicely in the pool so I could look less awkward (which is when you know you are not having fun) when I saw a sorta unkempt dad who was counting all his kids (not in a neurotic way but in an overwhelmed way, which I can totally relate to). And I was like … I think these are my people. So I took a deep breath and started in on all the small talk.

Small talk was great, and easy, and turned into something real quickly, which is my number one criterion for friendship. I mean that and participating in and/or bearing with me while I’m crying, because tears are my love language. Anyway! I digress. So they were checking all my friend boxes. Some level of political alignment, check, your parents are here and they are cool too, check, pretty down to earth and not concerned with image, check.

But then in my head I started getting into logistics, like: you have young kids and I have old kids. What about when you want to go to the park and we want to go to the climbing gym? What about when we try to hang out but the kids don’t have anything to do and drive us all crazy? I know it’s good now, and I love your family and everything, but we have to think about the future, ok, and it’s not going to last. Well! All this future tripping came to an end when we figured out that we were going to be neighbors, because they were living in the same little property we were moving into that weekend.

So on Thursday, we went to dinner and it was total chaos between our 7 kids ranging from 1 to 14, but it was also a little comforting and familiar and definitely fun.

AND they gave us the name of their cleaning person which was HUGE. Some of you know that we moved from a pretty resort-y gated community into a more homey, simple house. Don’t get me wrong, the grounds of our simple house include a pool, foosball table, tropical flowers, monkeys (of course), and a coconut and mango grove. So overall, not too shabby. But the house itself was inhabited by the dirtiest frenchman you’ve ever known.

Full disclosure: I don’t know any other frenchmen. In fact this text editor is telling me that frenchman is not even a word, that’s how uneducated I am about frenchmen. But I am fairly schooled in cleanliness and our new house was disgusting. For the Mais: it was worse than the Newport Beach house rental. Way worse. Not only were there old towels under the bed, there was dog hair everywhere, small cockroaches in the kitchen and large flying ones in the bathroom. The kitchen and two of the bedrooms smelled really bad, and we had to wash our feet off every night because the floor was making them so dirty.

By Wednesday night, Trieu and I were hatching a backup plan on how to get out of the rental, and I had given up on cleaning because it was a lot of work and it felt like we were getting nowhere. So the presence of our neighbors who could be friends, in addition to the idea of hiring a competent person to clean our house felt like a revelation on Thursday night.

I finally reached the Friday component of this long tale, which as advertised earlier was not revelatory. Vien had a total meltdown in the morning, but I have a new strategy of listening instead of trying to fix the problem + boundaries that helped me survive the meltdown. I knew we were getting help with the house cleanup on Saturday. And after school, we went to Playa Grande for an electric beach day which, if you don’t know, is when purple clouds come over the beach and there is rain and lightning, but you are enjoying the restorative power of warm ocean water too much to care about anything but body surfing until there is only 3 inches of water between you and perfectly soft sand. If you can’t tell, I highly recommend electric beach days.

And since this really optimistic Friday, our new house has come so far (!) in the cleanliness department, we got a hot tip on someone who can fix the screens on our windows, we watched two more beautiful sunsets, and I shed a few poignant tears listening to Prince Royce’s bachata version of How Deep Is Your Love on the radio. I’m not sure why this song caused me to cry (why ask why sometimes with the tears), but it might have had something to do with being asked in such a familiar way about the depth of my love as the unfamiliar warmth of the rain poured down around me, causing red puddles on the ground and surrounding me entirely with water.

Sending you the deepest part of my love from the temporada de lluvia! XOXO Ingrid