We were maybe five blocks from home, walking down the main road, when the kids both decided it was time for a break. Lowe needed a snack and a drink, Ouest needed to write something. This was a ten-minute delay.

Some buildings are just so god-awful ugly and insanely dangerous looking. I’m partial to that beautiful brick work on the third floor, but really that fourth floor that looks like a Jenga piece was yanked out from under it is the crown jewel of this one.

Older Mexican men are handsome studs that know how to wear a hat.

I can’t even fathom a guess at the number of girls employed by Telcel to do this all day long.

Transferring bags of dry cement to the roof to continue an addition begun years earlier.

I get to go swimming with Lowe all the time, but haven’t had many opportunities with Ouest lately, so while Lowe slept this afternoon the two of us snuck off for a dip. For some reason when we got back she asked me and Ali to take a picture with her. After the picture her and Ali went into her room to color. A couple minutes later Ali came out and delivered a picture Ouest had drawn for me—ocean, sky, a beach, and two stick figures in the sand. Ouest said the picture had been “on her mind.” Apparently she’d been thinking of drawing this for me all the way home. So much so that when Ali asked her if she had taken a bus or a taxi home she couldn’t remember.

Ouest buckles my knees with things like this every day it seems.

We’ve sort of decided to just let the kids have fun with spaghetti. They laugh, we laugh, and best of all, they actually eat.

Ouest likes to carry the map and yell out, “Left. Right. Derecho!”

I’ll say, “Left? What’s that in Spanish?”

“Izquierda!”

Her vocabulary is growing daily. She doesn’t speak in sentences yet, but there is a lot of Spanglish going on in this family.