A Fish in Florida!

We just returned from a week on Sanibel Island in Florida. My spring break coincided with my mom’s, and she was dying to spend some time at the ocean with her only grandchild, so we headed south with my parents. It was nice to travel and do everything with a four-to-one adult-child ratio—made it much easier to relax, and Agustín and I were even able to go out to dinner alone one night. We took walks on the beach, biked, swam, ate (well!), and went on an airboat ride in the Everglades to see crocodiles.

Emilia makes sure she gets every last lick of ice cream!

Emilia enjoyed catching crabs (well, watching them after someone else took them out of the ocean for her to see; no worries—they were all treated very humanely and all went back to where they came from) and playing in the sand at the beach, but what she loved more than anything else was swimming in the pool. She’s always enjoyed going to the pool, but once there has usually been more interested in playing with the toys than actually swimming. Eventually she’d get in the water and enjoy it, although she didn’t love going under the water too much. But in Florida, where she was in the pool at least once a day, she was a total fish! She was jumping off the edge and going under on her own practically before someone was ready for her to do so, swimming all on her own with a noodle under her armpits, and loving every minute of it. It was so fun to see!

Our little swimmer moves on to diving (well, we still need to work on the form a bit)!


The above two pictures were taken at the house of some family friends that moved to Florida years ago, the Bresnehans.

Going to the Zoo & Going to the Chapel

Just wanted to post a few photos from a recent trip to the zoo, as well as from last Saturday, when Emilia thoroughly enjoyed shopping for a flower girl dress for Tío Jojo and Tara’s wedding.

The look on Emilia’s face (well, the reflection in the mirror) is so sweet in the picture below, although I’m sure it’s hard to see in this small size.

Unique Fashion Sense

Emilia seems to have developed her own unique sense of fashion lately and it quite opinionated when it comes to clothes. Above is an outfit she put together. What was the occasion? A trip to the grocery store….where, I might add, she wore her sunglasses the whole time (which she wanted nothing to do with during the summer sunny months).
And here she is modeling the hula skirt her grandma brought her back from a recent trip to Hawaii. She likes to pull the skirt up under her armpits and declare, “It’s like a bra!”

Again with the sunglasses on a recent trip to the park on a particularly “warm” February day.

The shoes that came with her flamenco dress (which she’s outgrown, much to her dismay) now fit just perfectly, and she can’t get enough of them. She loves the noise they make when she dances around the hardwood floor (she’s even learned to say “hardwood floor”). People sure look at you funny when you go furniture shopping with a two-year-old wearing heels!

With a favorite stuffed animal’s hat and scarf, and her favorite “shiny” purse.

Boy Parts!

It’s a boy! Here’s one of the ultrasound images from my 20-week appointment, which was almost two weeks ago now. The technician hadn’t had the probe thingy on my stomach more than two seconds when he said, “Those are boy parts.” Agustín was still getting situated under the pile that was my winter outdoor wear and purse. “Did you hear what he said?” I asked him. “No. What?” he asked innocently. “He said our baby has boy parts!” That time he got it. It was pretty funny. And sure enough, the “boy parts” were pretty darn clear in the ultrasound. In an effort to not begin embarrassing our son before he is even born though, I won’t post the ultrasound that explicitly points out these “boy parts.”

Emilia understands that mommy has a “big baby boy” (a.k.a. “big baby boy brother”) in her stomach, and she no longer insists that she has a baby in her tummy too. (I hope she’s not demonstrating some type of psychic powers or sisterly intuition with the “big” part, especially since her dad was a ten-pound baby.) Oftentimes, when we ask Emilia “What’s your name?” or “How old are you?” she responds, “I’m a sister!” (her use of the present tense demonstrates she definitely doesn’t get the whole gestational period concept yet). She’s even pointed out that the baby is “Papa’s son,” which took me by total surprise when she said it because I’d only explained this to her once. She likes blowing on my stomach to give her baby brother “zerberts.”

If anyone has baby boy name ideas (only requirement is that they work well—preferably are pronounced very similarly—in English and Spanish), please post them in a comment or e-mail!

Spain, Part II

One highlight from our visit to Spain was the opportunity to meet up one day with one of our former roommates from when we lived in Madrid, and his wife and daughter, who is just two months older than Emilia. Coincidentally, they also suffered a miscarriage two months before us, and are now expecting their second child two months before us. Above and below, Emilia and Celia get to know each other.

To celebrate Reyes (see previous post), most Spanish cities and towns have a big parade featuring the three wisemen, along with music and lots of projectile candy. Emilia was a little leery about it at first, especially when she took a handful of candy to the head. But she soon got really into it and was dancing in the street to the music like a maniac (she definitely takes after mom in this area).

Above: Enjoying a beautiful paella made by Agustín’s brother in the plaza in front of his house on Reyes.

Emilia kept stealing Javi’s sunglasses, acting as a model for Optica Malet (the family optical store).

Sevilla has changed a lot in the ten years since I lived there in 1998/99. The main downtown streets are now pedestrian-only and there is a great above-ground metro system. Both Agustín and I were impressed and took a few pictures to document the changes (see above).

Above and below: Meandering through the famous barrio Santa Cruz and historic district.

Perhaps one of Emilia’s favorite memories from the trip was our visit to Parque María Luisa where it is a tradition to feed the pigeons. Although she loves the idea of animals, Emilia is typically a little reticent around them. Yet she was completely unruffled when the pigeons pecked away at the food in her hand and flapped their wings in her face. It was so funny to watch!

As usual, we spent two days in Ayamonte, a small town on the southern coast right on the border between Spain and Portugal, where Agustín’s brother has an apartment. This is the little street kiosk where Manuel and his wife serve up some great tapas (and good picos and pan, according to Emilia), and below we enjoy a walk along the beach.

And we stayed just long enough to attend Javi’s birthday party on our last day. Emilia wasn’t too sure about sharing her cousin with his friends, but was pretty excited to be included with the big kids.

Spain, Part I

This year we once again headed to Spain (Sevilla) shortly after Christmas to ring in the new year and celebrate Reyes (a Spanish holiday on January 6th celebrating the three wisemen bringing their gifts to baby Jesus) and our nephew Javi’s birthday.

Overall, it was a good trip. Emilia loved the bar culture of Spain (which she actually demonstrated on our last trip there as well) and spending time with her only cousin, Javi (who just turned eight; he’s expecting a baby brother soon which will double Emilia’s cousin count). We would go into a bar for a pre-mealtime tapa (like an appetizer; this pregnant lady had to eat many times a day) and Emilia would pull a stool up to the bar, climb up (with help) and demand picos (like a small pieces of hard bread) or pan (bread). It was fun to see how much her Spanish developed even in just the three weeks we were there. Although she understands most everything in Spanish, she typically speaks mostly in English, since this is the language she’s most accustomed to others understanding. But you could almost see a light turn on in her head when she said something in English and realized the other person didn’t understand. By the end of the trip she was often translating for others—saying something in English, then repeating it in Spanish. She went from saying sentences primarily in English with the key words in Spanish to combining Spanish verbs and nouns to get her point across.

We were also surprised at how outgoing Emilia was with everyone. She quickly took to calling her grandparents “Yaya Quita” (Paquita) and “Yayo Mio” (Emilio; coincidentally, “mío” also means mine, so this translates to ‘grandpa of mine’) (yaya/yayo is the term for grandparents in the language spoken in the Barcelona region where both Agustín’s parents are originally from) and giving them hugs and kisses every night before bedtime. And every time we left the house she asked if we were going to see cousin Javi.

So here is our trip in pictures (the first of several such posts).

Above: At the park with Javi. Most people bring their kids here to play. On this particular day, some man brought his baby goat to play, much to the delight of all the kids.

One day Agustín and his dad were enjoying some snails (spicy ones, I should add) and Emilia began demanding a taste. After telling her several times that she would not like them and her becoming only more insistent, Agustín finally pulled one out of its shell and fed it to her (see above). Instead of spitting it out like we assumed she’d do, she demanded, “More, more!” She ate about four or five of the little buggers before Agustín cut her off for fear of what the new food might do to her system.

Above: Checking out a bull head in a local bar with ‘Yayo Mio.’

Emilia loved being in such a heavily-populated urban area, particularly playing in the parks and plazas. Above she’s playing with one of Javi’s Transformer trucks in the plaza in front of the building where he lives.

Above: Modeling masks with Javi.

Belated Holiday Update

We arrived home one week ago from our three-week trip to Spain to visit Agustín’s family and I am just now getting caught up enough to update the blog. So, this is the first of many posts over the coming days. I’ll focus here on our holiday celebrations stateside.

We celebrated Christmas Eve with my immediate family, then Christmas day with my mom’s side of the family, which is a large and crazy bunch (there are ten kids in that family, all with their own kids and many grandkids now as well). My brother Devin was in town from DC with his girlfriend, Noelle, and her mother. And my brother Jordan announced he’d proposed to his girlfriend of approximately four years, Tara (ironic, I know). A huge congrats to them! Although Jordan headed off for a three-month internship in Chile (Patagonia) and Tara to Vail to work the winter season, I believe they are planning a September wedding. We are very excited to officially welcome Tara to the family!

This was, in a sense, Emilia’s first “real” Christmas. I say this because she is beginning to understand it, or at least the part of it that is most important to a two-year-old. She loved opening presents (highlights included a red outfit from China, an Obama doll, a hand-me-down rocking horse of Tara’s from when she was little, a piano and a bath-friendly doll) and still asks daily when we’ll see Santa again (despite the fact that she was petrified of the guy).