Ava speaks spanish!

So, all my efforts have not gone to waste. My little nieta (grand-daughter) said her first word in spanish today! She said 'hola', and she knows what it means because she was waving when she said it. YAY, YAY, YAY!

She isn't too good at pronouncing the letter L, she's only 8 months old, so it comes out more like oh-wah, but she is definitely speaking spanish.

She also understands a lot of spanish. When I'm feeding her and tell her to 'abre', she opens her mouth. If I say 'adios', she waves goodbye. If I say 'cuidado', she looks at me for more instruction of what to be careful about. I sing her bedtime lullabies in spanish, and she loves them. She hums along with my songs. At least someone likes my singing, hehe.

I had to e-mail all my friends in Mexico immediately, of course. I can be such a ninny sometimes about things, but it was exciting, to me at least.

Now, if I can only get her to call me Lita instead of mama.... ;)

Here is little "Poops-a-lot" herself, having fun on a sunny day


Have a great weekend, and remember Sunday is MayDay.

Cat

Finally!!!!!

The missing posts showed up. There IS a "blog help", but I still have no idea where they reside because I e-mailed them.

Can you believe the problem was that I had to clear my cache? I can't figure out what my cache has to do with it since the blog is on a different server, but my cache needed clearing anyway. Oh, well, all fixed now. YAY!

Cat

I wonder why....

I don't understand why it takes so long for my writings to appear in my blog after I publish them.

For instance, I wrote an entry last night, and it's still not showing in my blog this afternoon. If I preview my blog, however, it's in there. That doesn't help you very much though, does it? Hmmmm...

OK, well I'm submitting this one at 1:50 pm EST. Let's see when it appears. I may have to call "Blog Help", hehe. Is there even such a thing? And if there is, are they located in India?

Cat

PS...Well, that was a bunch of nothing just to fill a page, wasn't it? haha

To gulp or not to gulp? Is that the question?

As I make my way around Mexico, I don't really feel like a vacationer. I feel more like a visitor to someone's home, even though that "home" is a huge country. I feel comfortable there, and people everywhere in Mexico are always more than willing to take a break from their day to have a conversation with this 'extranjera' and answer all of my questions about their life and their country.

Even though I've been visiting and studying Mexico, her language (well, one of them), her people, and her cultures for over 10 years now, the more I visit there, it seems the less I know and the more I want to learn. There is truly so much to discover!

With each visit I learn a little bit more, like taking small sips of a drink. But I'm so impatient. I just want to down it all in one large gulp and know everything immediately.

Or.....maybe I don't. Perhaps it's comparable to drinking a fine tequila. You can't appreciate the taste unless you sip it slowly, savoring each sip, and feeling it work it's way from the taste buds on your tongue to the mild burn in your throat and finally that satisfying feeling in your stomach.

So, I will continue to appreciate and uncover the beauty of Mexico in small sips, to be thankful that I am able to keep on visiting, and to know that the glass is always full and waiting for me to return.

Cat

The eyes have it

Well, I always thought I should have been a proofreader. I catch mistakes in everything I read.

I finally have my big chance. ;) My stepdad has written his biography and has asked me to proofread and edit it for him. It's over 500 pages long! He has led quite an adventurous and exciting life, and it is very interesting reading about it. I cannot believe all the details he remembers from his youth; I sure don't remember that much. (But then again, I can hardly remember what happened yesterday, haha) Names, dates, places, everything. When it's finished, he is going to have it bound into a book and give a copy to each family member.

The work sure is hard on the eyes though. And I find myself going back and forth, and making changes to prior changes as I read on further. Should the chapter end here or there? Should that have been a comma or a period three paragraphs ago? Did he really mean to capitalize that word, or is it a mistake needing to be fixed? Should this word be which or that? And why is my computer picking tonight to be a pain in the ass and freeze up every 10 minutes?

Although it's been many hours of sometimes tedious work, I feel honored to be the first in the family to read it. It's been fun. And I hope that I fulfill his expectations and edit it correctly, without changing the meaning of anything he wrote or altering his unique style of telling a story.

OK, enough rest for the weary. Back to work now. I just pray it doesn't take me as long to edit it as it took him to write it.....two years.

Cat

Breaktime

I took a hiatus for two weeks, sorry I haven't written anything. I'll be back up and running in a couple of days.

Hi Jos!

Cat