I woke up with the roosters on our first day in Miguel, even though we had gone to bed around 3 a.m. After catching up on some email I pried everyone else out of bed and we checked out the house more thoroughly. We LOVE the house and the location. It’s close enough to the main square (el Jardin) that we can pop home if someone needs the bathroom, but far enough away that we don’t hear the noise of the crowds. There’s plenty of other noise but it doesn’t bother me – neighbor dogs and kids, church bells, car noise and the occasional horn or radio, birds – including the aforementioned roosters, and police radios. We almost always see police patrols on our street when we go out, which freaked the kids out a little but I think it’s normal. I’m happy to have them here.

The house is perfect for us. You enter off the street into a small foyer. On the right is Adlani’s bedroom, with a connecting bathroom. Straight ahead is a small fountain, which Annie jumped right into when we arrived the first night (she was so thirsty she couldn’t help herself, but we’re trying to keep her from drinking out of it). When you’re in front of the fountain, there is no roof above you – the house is truly a mix of indoor/outdoor living, with a large terrace that has an umbrella table, a small terrace outside the girls’ room with a smaller table, and a roof terrace above their room. After going through the foyer and past the fountain, you enter the living area which has a kitchen with a counter and bar stools, a sitting area with a loveseat, chairs, a fireplace, and TV, and a dining room which has a door to Adlani’s bathroom.

The terrace is up a set of stairs, and our bedroom is up a few more stairs from the terrace. There is a washer and dryer outside of our bedroom, and plenty of closet space in the bedroom along with a gas fireplace and a bathroom. Up some more stairs is the girls’ bedroom, which also has a bathroom. There are A LOT of stairs and sometimes they’re in unexpected places and of random heights. There are tons of plants and the gardener comes on Thursdays to take care of them. The housekeeper comes on Mondays and Thursdays so hopefully that will motivate everyone to keep things neat (a girl can dream).  We’ll eventually post a video tour of the house and some more photos.

Once I finally got everyone up and into semi-clean clothes, we headed to the bakery we’ve been dreaming about for 2 years. About a block from our house, we ran into our Framinghamian friends – Don Taggart and his son Andrew, who arrived the same day we did. After chatting for a couple of blocks, they moseyed along to the wine store and we turned toward the bakery. The price for 7 pastries and 4 bottles of soda (yes, for breakfast) was 79 pesos – $5. We went to el Jardin to eat and get the weekly newspaper – Attencion, and then stopped by Solutions to pay for our mailbox. Our mail will be forwarded from Framingham, or you can send mail directly to us at 5802 Bob Bullock Loop, Suite C1#84-168, Laredo, TX 78041. The kids would LOVE to get some letters or postcards but packages are really expensive for us to receive and they take a long time to arrive.

We went to see my ice cream guy on the way home (who turned out to be a different ice cream guy but still had my favorite ice cream – piñon (pine nut)), and then had an ice cream party with the Taggarts at our house. After a nap, we got pizza from a pizza place we found on our last visit – La Grotta, and had pizza at the Taggarts’ house, which is actually our friends’ John & Carolyn’s home that we rented on our last visit. It was so much fun to see the new pieces of art they have added, and the amazing garden they created. By 9:30 we were home and in bed. We did a lot of walking – over 20,000 steps, and the kids slept for about 12 hours. A great first day!

Cool things we saw today:  A quinceañera, a beautiful serpiente mosaic on the wall beside our mailbox, and una tourista wearing a sombrero and holding a sword while sitting on a donkey’s back.  We also met our neighbor, Miguel.

I was trying to take a photo of the tourista/donkey but I wasn’t quick enough…you can just make her out with the green shirt.  It’s like a Mexican “Where’s Waldo?”

I knew that July 30^th would be a long day for all of us, but I figured the adrenaline would help us summon up the strength for the last push. We were up pretty early to get the rest of the “necessities” crammed into bags, say goodbye to even more friends, and try to catch Wally the cat who had been spotted outside the night before – he’s an indoor cat but obviously knew something was up and decided to opt out.

By 11:30 the house wasn’t ready but I just couldn’t do any more so I left Ben with lots of piles to address. We squeezed into Elizabeth’s minivan and had an uneventful trip to the airport. We were really early so we found Annie some grass in Revere and then went back to the airport where we hauled all of our checked baggage and the dog in her crate to the AeroMexico counter. I’m not kidding when I say there was a team of ayudantes working on us. Luckily there weren’t a lot of other people checking in because we were still pretty early.

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Most of our checked bags were a kilo or two overweight, so our choices were to a) take stuff out, b) pay $15 per kilo, or c) upgrade 1 ticket to first class. At that point I didn’t feel like digging through each bag and negotiating with the kids on what to leave behind, so Adlani ended up sitting in first class which in my opinion was a waste of free booze and a “gourmet” meal. Later when I asked if he had eaten dinner he said, “Yes, I ate a bun.”

We had plenty of time for an overpriced airport lunch and then waited at the gate through a 1-hour delay. We flew to Mexico City because it was a direct flight and I thought it would be easier and safer for the dog, but with the delay we were not going to arrive until about 10 p.m. There wasn’t anything we could do about it, so we just dozed through the 5-hour flight. Going through Immigration was easy, we found our luggage right away and followed the barking to find Annie. Two unlucky porters piled our bags on two trolleys and took us to SAGARPA – La Secretaría de Agricultura, Ganadería, Desarrollo Rural, Pesca y Alimentación.

I had read a lot about getting pets into Mexico, and our awesome vet (Wellesley Animal Hospital) put together a folder of official-looking documents with lots of stamps and signatures. They worked! I had to fill out a short form, the guy made a copy of my paperwork, and spent half an hour typing it all into the computer. He glanced into the crate at Annie, made us put the blanket she was laying on in a biohazard bag, and we were off to Customs where they x-rayed and opened every single bag. I don’t know what they were looking for, but there wasn’t anything that they questioned so we finally exited the baggage claim area around 11:15 p.m.

I found the driver holding my name right away, and headed in his direction. Imagine me, all happy and relieved, la-la-la, followed by 3 kids, a dog, and 2 porters. The first thing the driver said to me (in a super-grumpy voice) was, “I’ve been waiting here two hours.” I knew that it would take a while for us to get from the plane to the driver, so I had discussed this with the shuttle company twice and had been assured that it wouldn’t be a problem. He told me (in front of the kids) that it was very dangerous to drive at this time – in fact, it was too dangerous to let the dog out to pee.

Once the porters got everything squeezed into a giant SUV, we swerved through the streets of Mexico City as if we would be carjacked if we stopped at any red lights. We finally got on the highway and about an hour after we left the airport he stopped at a gas station so I could let Annie out. She would NOT pee – way too much to see, hear, and smell. We got back in the car and I started praying that she wouldn’t pee in the back seat because the guy probably would have left us on the side of the road. He stopped for a smoke break about an hour later and I let Annie out again – the driver did not join me in my victory dance when she peed.

Luckily the kids all fell asleep so I was the only one scanning the roadside for banditos. I don’t know exactly what the dangers were because the driver barely spoke and wore headphones the whole time. I know it’s not recommended to drive in Mexico at night, but we were on the highway with lots of other cars and we had no other option anyway. There was a period of about 8-10 miles after we got off the highway that we drove through an area where we only saw another car every 2 minutes or so, but there was nobody around.

The streets of San Miguel were deserted when we arrived at 3 a.m., and I nervously told the driver that I had to stop and get the key from our friends’ house. He was not happy. Well, tough sh*t. It took me less than a minute to run in and get the key, and their house is 150 meters from ours. When we got to the house I had a heck of a time getting the door unlocked because it involved turning the key 360 degrees counterclockwise, and then turning it clockwise to approximately 2 o’clock and pushing the door at just the right moment. Meanwhile the driver had piled all of the bags on the street and would have driven away and left us there if I had already paid him. Luckily I hadn’t, so he got the door open, collected his money, and took off.

We all revived a little bit and quickly checked out the house, then piled into my bed and were out cold in seconds. I can’t believe we’re actually here!!!

January 11, 2001 – Providenciales, Turks & Caicos

Ben and I eloped to Turks and Caicos at the beginning of 2001, and were married by a local officiant in front of our resort’s wedding planner, a Moroccan waiter, a small crowd of bored sunbathers, and a dive boat that unloaded on the dock while we were vowing to stick together through thick and thin. I vividly remember when the reverend started the service by saying, “We are gathered here today to witness the union of Michael and Kimberly…” Me: “No, that’s not us.” He flipped over a little bookmark with the names on it and started again. “We are gathered here today to witness the union of Frank and Maria…” Me: “Nope.” He got it on the 3^rd try.

Maybe I should have been concerned when our official marriage certificate did not arrive in the mail as promised, 6-8 weeks after the wedding, but time passed and I sort of forgot about it. Nobody ever asked for it…I didn’t change my name, and the IRS didn’t require any proof for us to file our taxes jointly, so eventually it fell off my list.

During my exhaustive research about how to prepare for a temporary resident visa application, I saw mention of needing a marriage certificate and I did my best to get it. I emailed and called over and over, to probably a dozen different people. I tried the registrar of course, but I also contacted random officiants, wedding planners, lawyers, the tourism board…anyone I could think of. None of them would really give me the time of day. Eventually it was time for our visa interview and I still didn’t have the marriage certificate, so Ben and I applied for our visas separately and the marriage certificate fell off the list again.

About a month later I got a letter from my company saying that they were doing a health care dependent audit, which means that every employee using the corporate health insurance has to prove that each person receiving health care benefits is a legal dependent. With the kids it was easy – just upload a copy of their birth certificate. But for Ben I had to upload our tax return AND MARRIAGE CERTIFICATE. The universe was obviously telling me to get my act together and have that document on hand…what if something happened to one of us and the other had to prove that we were the heir to the estate?

I started my calls and emails with renewed vigor – my contacts were all still on Island Time. Then I spoke to a really helpful notary/apostille guy in Quincy Mass (Jim Murphy), and he said, “Maybe you guys are not actually married.” Oh dear. I called our town clerk to find out whether we could get married again…we were getting down to the wire because we only had a couple weeks before I was due to leave and the deadline for the health care audit was a week after that. After checking with the state, the town clerk told me that I would have to provide a “negative statement” – a government document certifying that we were not married between 2001 and 2015. Considering how difficult it has been to prove we ARE married, it seemed almost impossible to prove that we are not.  The volunteers for the position of ring bearer and flower girl were disappointed, but getting married again was not feasible within our time frame.

Finally, I called a lawyer in Turks and Caicos, and for $540 (!) she said she could get the certificate. At this point, the options were to pay the ransom or have Ben get kicked off of my health insurance, so I agreed to pay on delivery. Over a 2-week period she applied for the certificate but the person who searches the archives was away. Then she said it had been located but the person who certifies the documents was out sick. Then the lawyer left on vacation. Yesterday I received a scanned copy by email, and I can’t even think of words to express the feeling of relief after such a frustrating process.  It was a nail-biter, especially because I didn’t want my company to think I was a deadbeat who had a non-qualified dependent on my insurance.

Photo by Marc Jobin, official will-signing witness and photographer.

In other news of legal documentation, we signed our wills this week. We’re not planning to die in Mexico, but it felt like an important loose end to tie up. We met with a lawyer, Carolyn Spring, over a year ago, but there were a couple of issues we couldn’t agree on. Luckily Carolyn didn’t give up on us and had her notes from our meeting. We still don’t agree on the issues, but we came to an acceptable compromise. The first was that I want to be cremated and it’s against Ben’s religion, so my will states that if he dies first I will be cremated and if I die first he can decide. I don’t care that much, because I’ll be gone. I just don’t really want my body taking up space on Earth. The second issue was who to leave our estate to if our entire immediate family dies at the same time. We finally narrowed it down to a short list of 15 family members who will divide our assets and will each end up with enough money to take a vacation or buy new living room furniture. If you’re local and you need help with your estate planning, Carolyn was great to work with and reasonably-priced.

3 more wake-ups in the ‘Ham and one in Nashville!

I feel the need to share, because I am so truly touched and grateful for this moment.

Some people probably think I’m an over-planner, that I am too detailed…a perfectionist even. If this paints a picture of a super-analytical worry-wart, that’s not me. I can embrace the spontaneous, appreciate the unexpected, and seek out the unfamiliar. But I do get a certain sense of comfort from knowing what to expect and being as prepared as possible.

Last summer when I was attempting to move 19 people around Morocco without losing anyone, there was an 11-page description of our daily plans that I reviewed with my fellow travelers. I didn’t pre-plan every second or make a bathroom schedule, but with so much to fit into the trip and such an unwieldy group, I had to think about how we would get from Point A to Point B, who was sleeping with who, and when a guide would show up to lead our merry band through the streets of Marrakesh or Fez. Because all of the “big stuff” was pre-planned, that left us with the less critical missions like procuring wine, negotiating fees for camel rides, and shopping for treasures.

I have done a lot of planning for our trip to Mexico. While it would be more romantic and fancy-free to jump on a plane with a backpack and let serendipity guide me, it’s not an option I’m comfortable with when I have 3 kids and 2 pets in tow. The process of learning, preparing, and overcoming each obstacle has been an important part of the experience. At the beginning, thinking about obtaining visas, dealing with pet paperwork, finding a place to live and a school, dealing with finances…it was a lot.

We’re leaving one week from today, and at this point we’ve gotten through most of the planning and just have a few more preparations to complete. One of the loose ends that was on my worry-list was the key to our rental house. Our property manager will be out of town when we arrive, so getting into the house when we hit SMA sometime after midnight involves all of the stars and planets aligning with the row of ducks. The property manager is supposed to drop off a key with our friends’ (Friends #1) housekeeper before she leaves on vacation (What if she forgets? What if the housekeeper is not home when she stops by?). The housekeeper will then give the key to other friends (Friends #2) who are arriving the same day as we are and renting the house of Friends #1 (What if they miss their plane?). When we arrive in town, our driver will then stop at our friends’ house and I will get our key from Friends #2 who have pledged to stay awake until we arrive (What if they doze off or get sick of waiting for us?).

In my daydream about our arrival, we get off the plane in Mexico City and receive a text message that there is a problem – Friends #2 either did not make it to Mexico or do not have the key. That gives me the 3 1/2-hour drive to try to figure out where we can sleep. The dog and cat complicate the arrangements, so I imagine the driver leaving us in front of our house – picture me with 3 kids, a dog, a cat, 8 big duffle bags, 4 rollie carry-ons, 4 personal items, and a stack of pesos stuffed down my pants, on a street in Mexico from 1 a.m. until someone arrives to help. In the best version of the dream, the driver lets us sleep overnight in the van, but I haven’t worked out where we would pee.

This morning, Friends #1 emailed me to say that they want to mail us a key to their house as a back-up plan in case Friends #2 do not arrive in SMA on the 30^th or something else happens. I swear – I cried. I don’t think I was obsessing over the key issue, but it was in the back of my mind, and for someone to think about us and go to the effort of mailing us a key – I was so touched. When something starts to bug me and I hear my inner voice ramping up, I keep telling myself that everything will be fine and usually I even believe it for a while. This act of generosity reminds me that things will work out, we are not alone, and the universe is on our side.