decisions decisions

We have really developed a love/hate realationship with Mazatlan. We are never bored, the kids are endlessly entertained, and the weather is always nice. There are plenty of opportunities for Rus and I to make ourselves useful (we had been starting to feel a little useless in Dublan - the only thing we could find was the library work). The fact that this is a much larger place makes it easier to find things to do. There are plenty of spanish classes. There is one institution that organizes volunteer work and there is also a volunteer-run library. Some of the things that we hate however, are the crazy traffic, the noise level late into the night and the heckling street vendors. It seems that there can never be things so wonderful without the contrast of things so terrible. We are a little concerned about Liam's education for the next few months because we haven't found a suitable school here yet for him and even if we did I think it would be too hard on him to go to yet another school where he doesn't know anyone. Before we left Raymond, I got all the material from his teacher that his class would be doing while they were gone. She was really good about taking the time to organize it and meet with me. If we relocate to Mazatlan, I will use this material to homeschool Liam before he heads to the beach every day. I'm just glad that we started this now and not later in our lives when we would have three school-aged children to worry about. Something that we are trying to remember as we make our decisions is that we might never make it back here again and so we should squeeze as much out of the country as we can.

We are returning to Dublan tomorrow on a night bus, where we will finalize our decision on where and when to relocate.

Note the smiling picture of Liam. He lost a tooth! Here, there is a tooth mouse (raton) instead of a fairy that left 50 pesos for Liam under his pillow.