And of course, this being El Salvador, there was a full-enclosed indoor playground for the kids to run around in. Kind of like McDonalds, but nothing like McDonalds.
Not all of the slide runs were quite so successful. Mimi got a little friction burn on one of them, and the first tear hadn't yet hit the floor when our server appeared out of nowhere with a cupcake for Mimi.
This place is magical.
We spent the rest of the morning wandering around the embassy neighborhood (mostly immigration lawyers, fancy restaurants, and auto mechanics). Cicely gave us a ride home on her lunch break, and we stopped at the roadside fruit vendor on the way home. That, in and of itself, would not have been particularly eventful. But a police cruiser and a couple of motorcycles stopped to check our car out. We weren't really sure if the fruit vendor, our overstuffed SUV, or the diplomatic license plates caught the police officers' eyes, but they rolled slowly along before we had the chance to find out.
Alicia and Isaias took their kids to the San Salvador botanical gardens while Aimee and I put all four of us down for a nap.
When everyone was back at the house and/or awake, we went back to the embassy for another dip in the pool. But this wasn't just any old Wednesday at the embassy pool, this was the highly-anticipated Spring team building karaoke event! It just goes to show, that even if your office is in the tropics of Central America, it's still an office.
There was a surprising amount of vocal talent in the Foreign Service community, but none quite so harmonious as the Peace Corps Nicaragua Health Section, class of 2007.
The high school senior daughter of one of Cicely's colleagues was our baby sitter that night, so we could all go out to San Salvador's main craft brewery. It felt a little weird eating Vietnamese spring wraps in the middle of a bustling Central American city, but I wasn't complaining.
But the real event of the evening was coming home to all six of the children asleep! It was a school night for Cicely's kids, so we gave this babysitter a bit more direction than we did over the weekend. We still knew better than to expect that a highschooler could coordinate the bed time routines of thee school-age kids, two toddlers, and an infant.
But she did! We were floored, and made a generous donation to her college scholarship fund, and offered to write gushing college recommendation letters. She wisely declined the letters, but accepted the cash.
Thursday had the distinct feeling of a vacation winding down. Our friends would be flying home the next day, and we were already pre-missing these guys. But Nan found a way to break through the melancholy by losing her front two teeth!
She had been showing off her loose teeth all week, but wanted no part of a forced extradition. But when one fell out without much fuss, she was ok letting her dad coax out the second.
The Nicaraguan tradition for lost teeth is to throw them onto the roof of your house (it makes no less sense than a fairy coming to take them), so of course we had to replicate that here! Although, slightly modified with a ladder to reach to the top of Cicely and Donyel's giant embassy villa.
The younger kids proudly showed off their full sets.
Who could possibly be in a bad mood with all this going on? And it only got better from there. We went to a local artisan market to buy some souvenirs (and dance to the live salsa singer impressively belting away at 9am).
And then to further chase away the end-of-trip doldrums, Cicely made appointments with the in-home salon she uses on a regular basis ("They've watch all of Game of Thrones with me").
Set up took a bit longer than usual, and on a related note, Quinn may not respond to anything but endearing calls of gordo for the next several weeks.
And while all eyes were on my six month old, I wondered if my two year old irrevocably progressed into a teenager that day.
I'm a little kidding, and a little terrified.
