Here I am sitting at my laptop, blogging at 9:26 pm, because the house is finally quiet and the kids are in bed. Yea! Brad just called me upstairs to talk about our future trips to Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. Yes, we have big plans. In April we plan on going to Belize for a month. I say plan because we are still trying to figure out this budget thing, how to live simply and happily. I am thinking that we should get the Belize trip done with before we talk about Nicaragua…

So, we got a letter from our gated-community the other day. It was in English and was very polite. I know they put a lot of effort into writing it for us. At first I wasn’t going to blog about it because frankly, it’s embarrassing. The first part is no big deal. They asked us to stop putting our wet laundry on our front, outside, upstairs railing. Remember we are line-drying our laundry now to save pesos. And we don’t always have enough space on our lines in the back yard. But I guess after that letter we will just have to find other places to hang our wet towels and jeans. Because the front, outside, upstairs railing is not very pretty with wet laundry on it.

Finally, our most recent parenting fail… the next paragraph in the letter was about a certain little person, age 3, with the last name of Ernspiker, jumping in front of passing cars on our street. For fun… because he thinks he is too cute to be run-over and that everyone in those big metal vehicles will stop for him. I have seen him do this! I freaked out, of course, and told him “NO! We don’t do that! You will get hurt!” Apparently he didn’t listen to Mom. You see, the last few weeks we have been letting him play outside with his big sisters. They are 10 and 8. They were told to play around the house and watch their brother. And please take note… Our street is one circle in a small gated-community, a very nice Mexican neighborhood. I feel safer here then I did in our sub-division in Louisville, Kentucky. But that doesn’t matter if your kid jumps in front of a car and gets run-over. Our fault. We gave too much responsibility to our girls. They can’t keep Sawyer out of the street. He doesn’t listen to them and they forget to watch him. Tonight, the girls went out for a little while and Sawyer threw a huge fit because he had to stay inside with Mom and Dad. Oh well. He will get over it. I would rather him not get run over by a passing car. We did take all the kids for a short walk, once Sawyer stopped having his temper-tantrum. It was a beautiful evening in Mexico. Did I mention it got up to 90 degrees today?

Signing Off, Tina, the crazy Kentucky mom, living in Mexico, who is still learning to be a good parent, even after four kids ;-)