Last night we went out for a walk shortly before bedtime. We were sitting down watching Lowe try to reach a tree branch that was just out of his reach when Ouest suddenly jumped up saying, “Me help you Lowe. Me help you Lowe.” She sprinted towards him and Ali and I were both watching and thinking how nice that was of her when she tripped at full speed and skidded across the sidewalk on her knees. Under normal circumstances we would have felt terrible for her, but watching as she raced over to be the helpful big sister only to have her knees scraped open in a fall was awful. She is a pretty tough little girl (“Me big girl,” she would immediately remind me if she could read this) but she cried all the way home after this one.

Lowe has started something new: when he sees a camera pointed his way he gives us a great big smile complete with squinting eyes and a crooked jaw. Not sure what brought that on really as we never say, “Smile for the camera Lowe.”

Ouest only discovered today that if she looks through the bottom hole on this camera there is a slide show of zoo animals. She loved it. After an hour she asked for, “New,” meaning she wanted us to switch out the pics. Sorry little girl, somebody invented the View Master for that. View Master has now been added to the shopping list, though I’m not sure I’ve seen one of those down here.

Every morning after breakfast we take a walk that ends up in this vacant lot next door to the marina. It’s littered with trash treasures for the kids to play with; strings, sticks, rocks, bottle tops, hundreds of zip ties, broken glass, barbed wire, and anything else you can think of to keep a kid entertained for hours. I can’t even imagine what the local Mexicans think when they see us.

We’re just sort of bumming around here lately. The big Carnaval parade is on Sunday (second biggest behind Rio they say). Have no idea how we are going to manage 1) to get to the malecon, 2) to see anything with two small kids in tow, and 3) to keep the kids up beyond their bedtime. Number three may be the hardest—Lowe fell asleep at 6:30 tonight.