When It Snows It Blizzards

I woke up in the wee small hours of the morning today, just barely awake enough to wonder WHY AM I SO COLD, a thought that semi-occurred to me as I padded off in the general direction of the bathroom, right before I collided with the hard, unyielding edge of my closet door.

Oh. We're back home. The bathroom's a bit more to the right.

We're back home, where it is snowing, where it will apparently be snowing FOR THE REST OF OUR LIVES, or at least the rest of the weekend. The villa staff did all of our laundry for us in Jamaica, so our suitcases are full of fresh clean..shorts. T-shirts. Tanks and sundresses. Bathing suits. I am tempted to just zip everything back up, shove it in a closet (I know just the one!) and sort it all out in June.

This weekend I am going to go through the roughly 40,000,000 photos we took and dust off my old expired Flickr account and upload them there, just to spare you the boredom of looking at 25 virtually identical shots of my preschool cavorting in the sand, dozens of sunset pictures, and there was this one day that I got really overly obsessed with getting photos of sand crabs. I have an ungodly number of sand crab photos.

THIS JUST IN: Sand crabs are ugly, kind of creepy.

PUT ME IN A SHELLACKED SEASHELL FRAME! PUT ME ON YOUR NIGHTSTAND! LET ME RUN ACROSS YOUR FACE WHILE YOU SLEEP!

In the meantime, if you are also stuck in the snow and would like to dream of a warmer climate (or, alternately, if your body temperature is soothed and warmed by feelings of burning hot jealousy), please to enjoy another batch of vacation photos. What? It's not like I invited you over for dinner and then set up the slide projector while you weren't looking. Oh Irving, remember the sand crabs? Here's a photo of a sand crab. Here's another one. Here's a photo that would have been of a sand crab if the sand crab hadn't run back into his hole right before Mabel snapped the picture. See that dot right there? Yep. That's another fucking sand crab, can you fucking believe it.

The most private public beach in the world.

Noah, post-beach-post-nap.

Contemplating the Jonas Brothers. Quite seriously, I may add. That Nick one sounds very driven! (NOTE: I have no idea which one is Nick.)

BLUE STEEL.

Oh! So funny story. After contemplating the terrible state of my toenails here, I decided to get a pedicure. And after finishing this beer here, I decided to open another. You know, to sustain me through the terrible ordeal of a spa treatment. Except that instead of the bottlecap coming off, the entire lip of the bottle went with it. And I stood there for a minute, contemplating this hunk of jagged glass attached to the bottle opener, when our housekeeper was all, OH HONEY! and pointed out that I had gashed my entire index finger open. Then I was all, huh. She bandaged me up and said something like, TSK! AND THIS IS WHY YOU ASK SOMEONE ELSE TO OPEN BEERS FOR YOU.

Anyway. My finger was fine. I skipped the manicure, though.

On Wednesdays, James makes jerk chicken for everybody. (And a hunk of jerk tofu for any vegetarians.) The cooking demonstration was, for Jason, about the equivalent of a teenager getting hair-styling secrets from the Jonas Brothers. The secret is to smoke it over pimento leaf. You know, FYI, if you were wondering what to do with that pimento tree in your backyard. I know I sure was. Lousy freeloading tropical climate tree. 

Yeah. I miss it already. It was really, really nice.

The Basics

I get the sense the staff here is worried that we are bored. We are not bored. We are, most likely, the boringest guests they've ever had. They keep reminding about about the hiking and snorkeling and fishing and kayaking and tubing over waterfalls, and we smile blissfully from our chair/chaise/hammock/other-place-where-we-have-planted-our-sedentary-butts and assure them that WE ARE FINE. WE ARE HAVING THE TIME OF OUR LIVES. RIGHT NOW, RIGHT HERE. WITH THE SITTING.

(We did massages. In our room. Practically rolled off the bed onto the table and back again. It was delicious.)

Every morning we wake up with the boys, cuddle for a bit before throwing open the windows and doors to survey the view and remember OH YEAH, we're in heaven, still. We pour ourselves some strong coffee our night watchman makes before he heads home. (I actually feel safer here than at any tourist-y peddler-targeted resort, but because we're so out in the middle of relative nowhere there are guard dogs and round-the-clock staff on the properties.) (And by "guard dogs" I mean a couple docile lumps of snuffully wuffully who's-a-good-boy-who-wants-a-scritchin' furbags.) The nanny makes the boys' breakfast (bananas and cereal for Noah; eggs, fruit and French toast for Ezra) while we head down to eat ours a bit closer to the water. (We've had just about everything you can imagine, from typical American grub to "real" Jamaican breakfasts like ackee and saltfish and callaloo omelets, all of which we've Hoovered up while being all, "OH MY GOD. OH MY GOD.") 

After we eat, the tough decisions start: What do we do first? Beach or pool?

IT'S VERY STRESSFUL.

Yesterday, though, we did finally leave the villa property. We visited the local preschool, the Bluefields Basic School.

The Jamaican government offers zero early childhood education, so it is up to communities and businesses and private donors to set up these tiny little places for three-, four- and five-year-olds to attend.

(The family who owns the Bluefields Bay Villas -- who, for full disclosure again, comped our stay here; we paid for airfare and staff gratuities [and those massages, heh] -- sponsor the three-year-old classroom. Other organizations and business support the other rooms. They pay for the teachers, supplies, food for the children and tuition for families who need help paying.) 

Most of the families need help. Tuition is 2,000 Jamaican dollars a semester. That's about 25 bucks.

Noah came along. The kids were delighted by their exotic visitor; they stroked his hair and swarmed him with tickles. Shrieking is the universal language of preschoolers, it turns out.

He sat in on a lesson about proteins and shared some peanuts. Here, they are discussing sardines.

(After disrupting everything, he at least attempted to restore order to the three-year-old room.)

Then he made himself right at home among the four-year-olds. "IT'S TIME TO WASH YOUR HANDS," a little girl is bossily instructing him off-camera. 

 

The five-year-olds were working in their composition books, carefully writing out the months of the year. Then we showed up and the pose-off started.

Using push pins and rubber bands to make shapes. Behind him: assorted Spider-Man, Disney Princess and Dora the Explorer backpacks.

After we got back in the car, I told Noah we'd go to the beach. "Okay," he shrugged. He waved goodbye to the ramshackle buildings and sighed. "I love that school. Can we go back tomorrow?"