Officially a toddler

My little baby turned one yesterday! Technically speaking, we have a toddler in the house, although despite the fact she´s shown she can walk, crawling is still the preferred method. She´s usually head down and bum up as she races round on her hands and knees. Maybe she´ll skip walking and progress straight to running.

I still marvel at the amazing amount of things she has learned in one year. Even the seemingly little things like her latest trick of pointing to everything, including herself. How exciting must it be to finally be able to show us what she’s thinking about. Being a baby must be frustrating at times and each little skill learned gets her that much closer to independence. She’s really showing her personality more each day; sweet and cheeky, a little shy, but quick with a loud guffaw for something funny (particularly if done by Guerita), daring (climbing already!) and persistent (I will not be deterred from turning the water cooler tap on, Mum) and very, very cuddly.

Rocky’s birthday was the day before, so it’s been party central around here. Of course, his birthday was a bit over-shadowed by Chiq’s - a first birthday is much more exciting than a 37th. He’s fine with that.

We had plans to visit the local Parque Infantil (Kid’s park - part theme park, part playground, stuff for kids of all ages) and arrived at a leisurely 11.30am, to find it all shut up and not open till 4pm! Huh? I just don’t get it. I’ve talked before about how different the Mexican schedule is, but I can’t imagine embarking on an outing to a huge park like this at 4 in the afternoon. We would have spent at least 3 hours there, probably more, so there’s no way we’d be doing that so late in the afternoon. *sigh*

So we walked across the road to another park which had a playground that was quite big, but in a pretty bad state. The slides were mostly concrete with no sides or old rusty metal with sharp pieces hanging off or missing parts leaving the kids to fall about 3 feet at the bottom to the rocks below.

Guerita, Rocky and Chiq are in these photos for scale - Guerita’s about 110cm tall (roughly 3 feet) so those drops are nearly as high as her, and Rocky is 6 foot so that slide he’s near must be 10 feet high. We called it the Slide of Death.

This is one of those little cultural differences that for the most part we cope with, but every now and then it just gets annoying. The problem is that we waltz in here with our first world expectations and our views on HOW THINGS SHOULD BE. There are good reasons why we have a lot of safety regulations at home and it is second nature to me to immediately survey a new environment for hazards. It would be unthinkable for us to let the kids drive in a car without a car seat (or seat belt, or even sit in the tray of a ute) or leave the kids to play unbidden on dangerous playground equipment so I find it hard to accept when I see it happening here. But the Mexican economy doesn’t have the luxury of enforcing all the safety regulations. And here we are with all our righteous indignation, passing judgment on the state of their playgrounds. I feel quite conflicted about it because on the one hand it’s frustrating not to have nice safe parks to take the kids too, but one the other I don’t want to judge. And the park was full of kids playing happily without getting hurt. Our kids had a great time on the slides with our help. I know these things bother us a lot more than them.

In any event, we had a nice day. After all, she’s only one. She’s easily pleased. We went out for lunch where the kids were showered with attention and affection. THAT is one of the lovely things about living in Mexico. I never been to a place where children are so adored and fawned over as here, and not just by old women! Men and women of all ages will approach us want to admire the kids, hold them, stroke their cheeks, marvel at their blonde hair and blue eyes. I’ve even seen teenage boys coo over them. (Not in a pervy way, I promise.)

Chiq was worn out by all the excitement by the end of the day and had just enough energy to experience her first birthday cake, made by Guerita and I. It was a shared one for her and Rocky and I can see this will become a family tradition that one half of the family make a birthday cake for the other half.