Brazilian Blowout

I wish I could pay someone to come prop my children up on a table and groom them. This grooming is too late for our state department couches, though. Why did they give us WHITE furniture with four kids and a dog?

Look how green everything is! The rainy season has only been upon us for about a week, but Brasilia has already become lush and beautiful. The onset of summer also brings a plague of giant insects that descend upon us every day. The rhinoceros beetles are particularly melodramatic with their long, drawn-out "help, I'm on my back and I can't get up" swan songs. My girls have created a cemetery for them in the yard with names for each beetle and lovely flowers covering their hideous heads. On the extra-big ones, they've scotch-taped little hand drawn paper outfits to their exoskeletons. Soooo cute! Okay, so gross, but we still don't have our stuff, and as long as they're occupied, I'm happy.  Olivia has been our first South American insect victim, but after a round of heavy-duty antibiotics she's doing much better.  The other morning I found my dining room table inexplicably covered in dead termites. It's so strange, finding all these piles of dead insects everywhere (and of course we all run to Google to see what it is and if it will kill us dead).

Everyone is home today for Dia das Criancas (Day of the Children-because the other 364 days of the year aren't about them at all). One bonus of living in Brazil and going to an American school or working for the US embassy is that you get both American and Brazilian national holidays off, which is Suh-weet!

Love notes

Mitch will be home from Djibouti this weekend, just in time for Valentine's Day. We're not big on the whole Valentine's Day going out to dinner nightmare, but the kids love having parties at school and having heart-shaped pancakes and pizza, and we always make a decadent dessert for dinner. Last year I got a beautiful bouquet of some red strappy sandals I'd been coveting (seriously, men, if you want to impress your lady, you can't go wrong with a great pair of shoes. Or maybe that's just me.). This year I'm expecting a mug from Djibouti or something of that nature.

Usually the kids make all their valentines, but this year, I had the valentines printed up from a cute idea I saw on the internet and they are decorating the envelopes:

Henry's was pretty typical of a ten year-old boy. It was all his idea and pretty much the only way he could be convinced to pass out valentines in school. He was a little disappointed by the lack of dripping blood:

And then there's Jack, who apparently is the dog's valentine this year. Seamus finally has a job that he can be proud of besides chasing the foxes out of the backyard.  Every morning it is a TRIAL to get Jack out of bed and I have to stand over him calling out his name to get him up. This cuts into my morning coffee-in-bed time, so I came up with a plan that worked better than my wildest dreams could have imagined.  When it's time to get Jack up for school, I open his door and say, "SeamusgogetJack!" in the same tone we used to say "Seamusgogetthechickens!" when the chickens were in the flower beds. Seamus quivers for the briefest of moments, and then goes tearing downstairs, jumps on the bed, and rubs his butt on Jack's face. Then he lies beside him and pushes him out of the bed with all four of his paws. Jack can't get mad at him because, you know, man's best friend and all. It's pretty much the most awesome thing I've ever seen, and it's my favorite part of the day.