Saying “Adios”: Our Final week at La Mariposa (Until next time!)

The final morning, before loading up the van. Smiles for the picture, but the morning was full of tears!

Our last weekend ride turned out to be our first ride with a full group of other riders, needing all 6 horses! Actually it was what we thought was our last ride, but midweek Thea and I got a bonus ride with some new students who wouldn’t get a chance to ride on the weekend. Two horseback trips up the mountain in one week made for a good finale!

Thea’s favorite horse, sweet little Lucy who is blind on one side.

Having a weekly family day at the lake will be a hard routine to leave behind! With reports from back home of dangerously record-low temperatures from the “polar vortex” and lots of snow, we were especially grateful to be hanging out in our swimsuits and paddling around a pleasant lake!

Because, those CHICKENS…I need more…
(And also other non-chicken souvenirs the kids picked out for the cousins and other family members). I could seriously search around artisan’s markets for treasures all day long (if only we had more luggage space and didn’t have 4 more countries and multiple destinations to get through carrying it all…)!

SO. MUCH. LAUNDRY. Keeping up with handwashing clothes in a family of 5 was challenging, and “keep up” we definitely did NOT do. We tried to get enough washed per week to make sure each person would have clothes to wear for the next five days or so, but the dirty laundry bags seemed to always still be full no matter how much we pulled out to wash. By the end of our stay we decided that in order to be able to pack our clothes mostly clean, we were going to need some assistance! So we finally took advantage of the service of asking one of the kitchen staff wash a number of items for us while we were in classes or at an activity, which for 3 Cordobas (10 cents) per item, we realized we were crazy not to have been getting some help all along! But there are parts that I will kind of miss, like working together with my two older children to help them each wash their own clothes.

There is a large, beautiful children’s park we discovered on a trip to the markets in Masaya. It is right beside the overlook of the lake and volcano, and has beautifully huge old trees for shade and lots of other plants and flowers all around the many different playground sets and sports areas for children, and even a section of gym-style exercise equipment meant for adults! It also has many little snack shacks so you can buy a slice of pizza or an ice cream cone, which was probably our kids’ favorite thing about going! They also have fun memories of spontaneous friendships made with other children there over an invented game of tag combined with dodgeball using a half-deflated ball they found, and of going with daddy to watch a 9-D movie experience that has a little trailer in the park (and terrified poor Shiny who had to cover her eyes for most of the time!). The park became a go-to whenever the afternoon activity was a trip to Masaya for shopping in the markets; Denver would get dropped off in the park with the kids while I got to go shopping with the group in peace!

Josimar is one of the admin staff at La Mariposa, and had just ventured into opening up a little restaurant on the side with his family, easy walking distance from the school, so we tried to give them our business as often as we could! Josimar’s was a favorite place for afternoon snacks like pizza, chicken, french fries, excellent Calala (passion fruit) juice, and my personal favorite indulgence-a cappuccino complete with frothy milk! The extra fun part was that they supplied games like UNO, Mancala, and Memory, so we could combine snack time with family play time!

I mean, this sweetheart…someone just please go hold her hand for us while we’re gone, okay?

A fun part of being students here over so many weeks has been getting to meet new people from all over the world each week. A group from Texas was just arriving for a 10-day stay on our family’s last day. It was the first time our kids had another child close to their age at the school, and with only one day she and Thea still were quick to make friends and squeezed in a good amount of play time (and a walk to get ice cream!).

This kid…he might have whined sometimes about waking up and going to classes in the morning, and might have been reluctant to speak his Spanish most of the time, but did he ever CRY when it came time to say goodbye to his teachers (and made them cry too!).
Cheyenne’s main teacher Daleska also spent a lot of extra afternoons with our kids whenever we needed childcare during a history class or to get some extra work done (more laundry…), and she became really attached to her (despite all the 3-year-old tantrums and screaming “no”)!

On their last day of class, the kids’ teachers planned a special trip for them to Josimar’s restaurant for pizza!

lAnd of course, the grown-ups had some really cool teachers who we will miss too!

There were many tears shed saying goodbye to La Mariposa founder Paulette, who made everything we experienced at La Mariposa possible, and who made our children feel loved and welcomed there! (Spoiler alert: this goodbye wasn’t for as long as we thought, because Paulette likes us enough to make a trip up to visit us in Esteli at the end of our month there, but that’s a future blog post!)

We were also sad to say goodbye to interns Andra and Jaime who we got to know well over our 6-week stay, as Andra was there for almost our whole stay (she left the weekend before we left), and Jaime was there the whole time (and still is; she keeps extending the length of her stay because it’s just too hard to leave!). Both worked hard for the school on things like fundraising and updating the new website Denver helped design, and also were great with our children! After dinner Andra was often pulled away by Cheyenne to the library to read books, do crazy dances like Baby Shark and the Chicken Dance, and create things with blocks (while Cheyenne’s parents got to sit a while longer at dinner and have pleasant conversations with other adults–thanks again Andra!!!). On Andra’s last day there was a special surprise cake for dessert at lunch that we all got to share in celebration of her time there and all she had done!

La Mariposa’s excellent conductores (drivers) Oscar and Javier took us on so many wonderful adventures in the school’s beat-up but trusty vans, and man.y enjoyable conversations with other students happened in those vans on the long drives as well! Our final ride would be with Oscar to be dropped off at the bus station in Managua, northbound for Esteli.

Our next destination is more of a city setting, making these beautiful gardens and trees with their colorful flowers and birds especially hard to leave behind!

La Mariposa: Thank you for all the wonderful memories, all the things you showed us about your beautiful country, all the improvements on our Spanish, all of your patience with the antics of our children, and for giving us an extra “family” to be a part of in Nicaragua–we’ll be back!!!