casa de kaloi

“Is there a duck in there?”
“Nope.”
“Is there a dinosaur in there?”
“Nope.”
“Is Mama’s throat in there?”
“Yep.”
“Is there a monster in there?”
“Nope.”
“Do I have a throat?”
“Yes, this is your throat.”
“Am I an ostrich?”

I think the coolest thing about Jasper right now is that I really enjoy being around him. He is a pretty engaging kid, and he loves to ask questions, so we’re able to have actual, real-life conversations. Having convos with your kid is something a lot of parents I know have really looked for, and once you get to that stage it’s kind of hard to realize you’re there. I know in a few more months he’ll be speaking even more fluidly, and then in a year or two it’ll be hard to remember a time when he pronounced some words with a “w” that isn’t there or added an extra l or two, but right now.. it’s just so fun.

JUST THINKING.

I’ve also been thinking about homeschooling lately, and by lately I mean a whole lot. I’m slowly amassing a collection of homeschooling blogs in my Reader, so I can see how different people do different things. I’m encouraged by all of the people who basically take it day by day, and inspired by people who are secularly homeschooling. I think between Sean and I and a small team of super smart people that we’ll inevitably have to discover, we can do it. BUT OF COURSE, since we’re talking about at least another 2 1/2 years… we’ll just see what happens.

SOOO also, I’m obviously back from Seattle. I’ve written about the trip here, and there’s also been plenty of mentions on Offbeat Bride and Offbeat Empire, and our photographer from the event posted a whole ton of photos that have blown my mind. I’ve never been part of a party that was quite like that one, so having it all documented in such a lovely way is triple special. 

Holy moly, I didn’t realize I managed to turn a trip that last a week into three weeks of posts, but here’s even MORE.

We spent two days on Isla Grande, aka Heaven, aka the place where Jesus lives in the ocean:























Kim and I woke up one morning around 6:30. We were pretty gross (one thing the island lacks is hot water, but it’s ok because you can just run out into the ocean, jump in, and feel mostly clean), so we decided to get out of bed and go take photos. I absolutely love shooting this early in the morning, and would do it all the time if I could.


















We THEN mosied down to the beach, which is also perfect in the morning (and every other time of day):













The next time I post about Panama it’ll be the last post from this trip. PROMISE! 

Let’s see.. where did I leave you?

I was surprisingly NOT hungover the next day. I don’t think Kim was, either, but we were QUITE tired and, in retrospect, sporting some interesting hair. Side note: why did our hair go to Crazy Town?

We walked around with the sole intention of taking photos, which was another big goal of mine. My friend from high school is also a photographer, so he was pleased (I believe) to embark upon the excursion. Something I’m working on getting better at is taking photos of strangers who didn’t hire me — basically, street photography of people. I get really shy at the last moment, afraid that they’ll yell at me or turn away or whatever. It’s kind of funny, because I sometimes feel totally invisible at weddings, where people expect me to be there, but totally obvious on the street with hundreds of other people milling around.

These photos are by Kim & I:






















Oh! and Moi took this one, since we don’t have super-long arms of crazy proportions:




I was going to make this post a big combo of the rest of the trip, but then going back through the photos I realized we went to Isla Grande for two days after this, and that definitely has to be its own post. UNTIL THEN!

Our second or third day in  Panamá found us at the Bahá’í House of Worship. That we even went here is all thanks to Kim — I had no clue it was there! There are only eight around the world (you can see a list here), so it’s cool to have been to one. I’m not Bahá’í by any stretch of the imagination, but I do know quite a few people who are, and I love them dearly.

Something we failed to realize about the temple is that we’d need to be dressed appropriately — neither of us were really thinking “wear clothes that are appropriate for holy places” when we were packing. We weren’t thinking “wear super skanktastic, ultra-revealing shit” either, but we didn’t really have extra body-party-concealing clothing stowed away in our bags for the trek. However, the woman at the temple had plenty of garments for us to choose from, so we managed to not be too offensive. Go team!

We also went toward the Canal Zone, and our journey there included a car ride that in turn included listening to Radiohead and “Don’t Look Back in Anger” by Oasis — both of which were perfect. We roamed a forest in the area that allegedly plays host to tiny monkeys that can really freak you out. I say allegedly because I was only told the story, and did not in fact experience anything like this…but I believe! The forest was excellent but we were tired and hungry, so the most exciting thing we did was watch a dude dive to the bottom of a pool for shrimp (I think) and then hold one. LET ME TELL YOU, those suckers have crazy little legs that can really freak you out, if, say, you’re not really into holding shrimp (or whatever).

The Canal was really cool, even though there were absolutely no ships going through it — at all. We were told by our friends that this was the first time they’d ever seen it ship-less. I’ve been reading about the expansion of the Canal, but other than that I knew only scant details. I’m glad we went!

We went back to our rooms to sleep, and then went out that night to see Señor Loop play (note: the two awesome photos below were taken by Jorge Arango, our new friend who tells me he doesn’t have a website for me to link to. Just noting!). This experience was all kinds of crazy. Much to our very enthusiastic delight (can you say that?), they played The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, and The Strokes in rapid-fire succession before the band came on. At some point The Clash was played, and if they had followed it up with Oasis I think they would have hit on all of our high school jams. We entertained (I think) the people around by very, very loudly singing along, and then proceeded to get incredibly intoxicated. I have to note this because I usually drink like… a handful of times a month. Maybe? I mean, sometimes there are two or three nights in a row where I have a glass of wine, but then there are also weeks in a row in which I don’t drink at all, so the fact that I was able to drink three drinks and a beer or two in one night and was  still coherent and able to walk around was impressive. To me.

We met a lot of awesome people at the show, including a guy that said he was DJing later (was he? I have no clue), a French guy who had his Spanish-speaking friend translate his questions for me into English (he said he thought I was European, which I’m going to believe even though it’s probably not true), and a few other dreamy characters. After seeing the band play we went to a friend of our friends (is that confusing?) and stared at the lights playing on their walls for a few hours. I mean, we did more than that, but the lights are what I remember the most.

Kim woke up the next morning with “Jeff Buckley Just Like a Woman BobBobBob” in my handwriting scrawled down her left arm, so I think it’s safe to say we had a good time.

I’m here! I’m here! I’m here!

Kim and I recently returned from our jaunt to Panamá. I use the word “jaunt” loosely, since it was a week and for a lot of people, that’s a long time. For me, if my little two-year-old shot of love had been with, I could have easily stayed for months on end.

I’m going to have to break the Panamá posts into several, because… there are hundreds and hundreds of photos, and I’m pretty sure some of you would have a nervous breakdown over how long the posts would be if it was one big one. Right? Maybe.

The idea of going to Panamá originated sometime last year, when Sean discovered that his university offers a study abroad program for two months each summer. He made tentative plans to go, and since it was going to be the bulk of the summer, I made tentative plans to bring Jasper and go for 2-4 weeks. I have a good friend from high school who lives in Panamá, and also just a curiosity about the country. Sean’s plans fell through, but at that point I’d already been talking and thinking about it so much that I still really, really wanted to go. Then, it hit me: why not just go with Kim?

I’m writing about this on Offbeat Mama this week (Wednesday! 12PM!), but Kim and I have known each other since we were 15, and we’ve ALWAYS wanted to do something like this — or several things like this. We talked about it, planned it, and daydreamed all kinds of trips and adventures. As it seems to, life happened/happens, and we delayed, delayed, delayed. So when I was still entertaining the possibility of taking a trip, I asked her what she thought. She was most naturally down, and we booked in January or February.

I was a little nervous about traveling for a week without Jasper, but all for emotional reasons — Sean is a fantastic father, and I knew Jasper would be totally fine with him. It turns out I was correct, though I did fiercely miss my smallest sidekick.

My friend told us about Spirit Airlines, which among other things flies to various parts of the world for way, way cheaper — ONE ticket to Panamá is around $1200 (when I checked), and we got TWO for under $1000. We had to drive to Atlanta and then fly out of Fort Lauderdale (ugh, that airport) overnight, but the colossal amount of money we saved was worth it — and saving the money was what made the trip possible.

We stayed at Hostal Urraca, which I can’t recommend enough. We had a few mishaps in the beginning, but they make for a classic first-night-in-a-foreign-country tale now. We landed in Panamá around 2AM, and someone associated with the hostel was supposed to be there to pick us up. No one was, so after we stumbled around the airport for an hour or so with my three-year-old (as in child) level Spanish, asking to use a phone through mostly mimed actions and discovering that I couldn’t get the pay phones to work (apparently they never do), we just stood outside and… waited. One thing we quickly discovered about Panamá is that there are many cab drivers, and most of them are quite happy to pick you up and take you wherever. We were almost immediately greeted with “Taxi?” to which we smiled and said YES YES YES PLEASE OH MY GOD, and we arrived at our hostel after a harrowing taxi ride (holy shit, drivers in in Panamá are CRAZY) that included listening to a lot of Spanish hip-hop with random samples of Usher songs.

After we got there, we quickly realized by the blank look on the face of the woman greeting us that we were about to have to engage in some serious miming and grabbing for phrases and words. She didn’t speak English, I barely speak Spanish, and for some reason they had us arriving 12 hours later than we actually did — which meant no rooms. We ended up calling our friends (at 3 or 4AM), who worked it out quickly, and we shared a room with a guy who didn’t come in until 6AM and was probably quite surprised to find our sleeping selves there.

Kim had never stayed in a hostel before, which is important for the next bit — she went to shower first, and when she came back she was very cold, very sad. I was all “What’s up?” and she told me that the only shower she could find was through the kitchen, in a tiny room, and it only had cold water. I was a little surprised by this, but it was so late (early?) that I didn’t ask too many questions. Instead of navigating to the kitchen when I showered, I looked around — and lo and behold, there were three or four showers, all with very hot water, awaiting us. I’m still not exactly sure what the bathroom Kim used is for, really, but we never had to use it again.

(unless noted, most of these are Kim’s photos — she took so many, and I am so grateful! I totally zoned out.)









This hostel was BY FAR one of the coolest places I’ve ever stayed. Like I said — I’d go back in a heartbeat. Once we sorted out the initial confusion, we were instated in our rooms and free to spend the rest of our time totally happy, which we did. Everything is so incredibly BRIGHT and COLORFUL at the hostel, look:

(a few of my photos)







We went to breakfast at the grocery store Riba Smith, on Calle 45, at the advice of Johanna, who owns Hostal Urraca. It turns out it’s PERFECT for breakfast — the cafeteria is jammed with food and all kinds of interesting people. Kim and I are both bit people watchers, so we reveled in it. We also kept a good disposition about not speaking the language — we both wish we knew more Spanish, but it’s also totally surprising how nice people can be about it. 
Speaking of, something I really loved about this trip was, for lack of better words, “being on the other side.” As a white American, I don’t experience “otherness” nearly as much as other people of other ethnicities or nationalities. When Sean and I went to India we didn’t have a lot of this — there were people who wanted to touch my skin, hair, and eyes, but when it came to language nearly all of the people we met were excited to speak English with us. I didn’t expect this in Panamá at ALL, but there’s also no real way to prepare yourself for suddenly wearing the other shoe — you go from living where everyone can understand you to where you can’t understand anyone around you. A lot of people in Panamá speak English, but there’s no real reason for them to do so unless you’re engaging in lengthy discussion. After a day or two, it was actually almost nice to sink into a place where I wasn’t totally sure what was going on — mostly. It was also challenging. In short, it was an experience that I wish many people in the United States, particularly those who live in the south like I do, could have — I think it would allow for a lot more empathy for people from other countries who are trying to learn English. I often found that an hour or two after I tried talking with someone I could kind of work out what they were saying, but when they were in front of me, even if they were smiling and trying to speak slowly, I was gripped with a sensation of “OH MY GOD I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT IS GOING ON” that totally thwarted any attempts I could make at trying to effectively communicate.
Moving on!
We met up with our friends, which was a very delightful reunion with my friend from school, who I hadn’t seen in five years, and introduction to his family. We stayed in their house for a while, talking and deciding what to do, and then he took Kim and I down to Casco Viejo while he worked.
(photos by Kim)



























After our adventures around Casco, we returned back to the hostel to play with another new friend:



SO! I believe we ate dinner at Madame Chang that night, which you should also check out should you find yourself in the neighborhood.

I keep meaning to blog about this!

Jasper and I had an early morning flight home the other week, and I obviously had no clue who would be next to us — in these situations, I always hope that the seat will miraculously be empty, so that fellow passengers are spared any “moments” Jasper might have, and so we can kind of spread out and take over the row. We were able to board first since I was traveling with a child under five (in our experience, some airlines do this, some don’t — we flew US Airways and they did every flight.), so there was no way to know. Everyone boarded (and boarded…and boarded), and it seemed like the line was dwindling, and I was getting increasingly more excited that no one would be next to us, and then they arrived. Our fellow row-sitters.

They were two guys, one probably in his forties, and the other probably in his sixties. When they sat down I noticed their New Jerseyian accents, their Italian appearances, and observed their gold rings and bracelets and sunglasses, even while inside the plane. I may or may not have also started making up a story in my head about how they were secretly mobsters, because..that’s what I do in airports and on planes and in most situations in which I am surrounded by strangers that I will probably never see again and will only share a few hours with — make up stories about their lives.

They were complaining because their carry-on luggage couldn’t fit, as all the overhead compartments were full. The flight attendants took their bags, and they settled into their seats, the older man (who is the father of the younger man) wondering aloud how they would know to check their luggage to Newark (“It’s in the system!” his son kept saying) when our flight was going to Charlotte.

We took off, and mid-ascension the father lets his son know that he forgot his checkbook, papers, and medicine in his luggage. It’s obviously too late to get it, which he also mentions, and then ponders aloud as to whether or not he should ask the flight attendant for Valium. I’m silently cracking up in between bouts of trying to get Jasper stop throwing his milk everywhere, because the idea of this guy asking a flight attendant for “a vodka and Valium” as he put it, was something I REALLY wanted to witness.

So, they get our their newspapers and read the business section and are generally pretty quiet, until the dad says he’s feeling bad and goes to the restroom. He proceeds to stay at the back of the plane the rest of the flight, which he didn’t tell his son about — after about 10 minutes I noticed his son was standing up, sitting down, standing up, sitting down, all while looking at the back of the plane. He finally decides to go check on him, and his dad is totally living it up in an empty seat, hanging out and talking to people. The son comes back, and moves over to the window seat, blessedly leaving the middle seat free so Elmo and Jasper’s books can sit there.

Jazz and I slept the rest of the way, and both woke up when the dad returned. He told us he’d felt claustrophobic (we were sitting behind the separation barrier between the sections), and then settled in, with sunglasses still on, and closed his eyes. This was apparently too much for Jasper to take, and I saw a little Puna finger reaching out, very hesitatingly (and probably in time for me to stop him, but I admit I was curious about what would happen), and poke the man on the arm.

Nothing. He didn’t open his eyes, didn’t move away, didn’t flinch. So Jasper did it again. And again. And after the third time I stopped Jasper, but he kept trying to poke the guy, often times succeeding because he got faster, the entire time the plane is descending.

When we finally touched down in Charlotte, and were about to get off the plane, and Jasper had poked this guy eighty-five thousand times, the guy lifted his sunglasses off his head. He leaned down low, a few inches from Jasper’s face, and said, “Were you poking me while we were landing?”

Jasper’s eyes got HUGE, and then the guy looked at him again and said, “You need a haircut.”

I spent the rest of the time, all the way up the ramp and into Charlotte’s airport and walking toward our next terminal, completely cracking up. It was one of the funniest sentences uttered in one of the funniest instances ever.

In other news, we’re also hustling out of our apartment, or trying to. The people below us smoke quite frequently, and the smoke comes up through the floor. It pretty much overpowers our entire living room, aka the room in which we spend the most time when we’re awake, and it’s really gross. Sean has asthma, Jasper is a kid, and I am totally disgusted by cigarette smoke (not to mention somewhat allergic), so we’re booking! We got out of our lease without incurring charges, but are now trying to find a home large enough for us and our soon-to-be two roomies. We need LOTS OF LUCK.