Mateo’s New Suit

My son Mateo recently discovered my old Mamalita blog and told me he loved reading about himself when he was a little boy. So I decided to cut and paste entries into a file and put together a little book for him and Olivia–the baby book I never kept except for my years of blog posts.  Here’s an entry from Spring 2013, written during a trip Mateo and I took to Antigua, Guatemala, just the two of us. Lovely to remember. Mateo’s New Suit If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ve probably figured out I’m Catholic and my husband and I are raising our kids Catholic. What does that mean, exactly? A lot of things, which I won’t go into here because I believe every religion is valid and to be respected, as is the choice of no religion at all, by the way, and I’m not telling this story as a platform to discuss my faith. No, my reason for bringing up Catholicism is to share the experience of buying for my son Mateo his very own First Holy Communion suit, from the charming purveyor of First Holy Communion suits in the photo above, who practices his fashion genius somewhere in the depths of the municipal mercado in Antigua, Guatemala. The year before, Mateo and I had bought a suit from the same distinguished gent, intending to save it for the Sacrament this April. What we hadn’t counted on was Mateo’s growth spurt, which steered the original suit pants and jacket toward clown costume territory. But try finding the same tailor in the maze of the mercado! My remembered directions sounded like this: “Walk down the right side aisle, through the section with the pirated DVDs, past the candles and flowers and soccer balls, turn left at the section with the raw meat hanging, through the wrapping paper and baskets and candy, past the shoes and wallets and leather belts, beyond the place with the sacks of rice and beans and the guy who sells machetes. Somewhere around that.” Fortunately, the lady in the First Communion dress section knew exactly where the tailor who sold First Communion suits was headquartered and she kindly escorted us to the proper stall. Success! Not shown here are the suit’s handsome complementary items: the white ruffled shirt, the black bow tie. For that, we’ll have to wait for Mateo’s First Holy Communion “big reveal.” xoxox

Our front door

If you’ve known me for a while, you know I’m a total creature of habit. I’ve eaten the same breakfast for something like 40 years–crunchy cereal with yogurt, fruit and low-fat milk–do the same number of push-ups every morning (don’t be impressed; they’re bent-knee) and always pay my bills the day they land in my mailbox (mainly because I know they’ll get lost if I don’t). That kind of thing. Something else I do is take a picture with Olivia in front of the door of the house where we lived together in Antigua in 2003 while her adoption was being finalized. We do this every time we visit Antigua. Here’s our latest and some others from years past. (You’ll notice several years are missing. Keeping track of photos is not my strong suit ;-)) xoxo