We have been in Spain for a bit more than a month now, and we’ve been in our long-term rental house for about three weeks.  Things are starting to feel a bit more settled, although we still have some nagging to-do items, which include buying a car so we can stop changing rental vehicles, and assembling or returning the dining room table we purchased (we’ve been using an outdoor patio table for a dining table).  We have been fully unpacked for about two weeks, and we finally got reliable internet service about a week ago (hooray!).

What is Our Life Like in Spain?

The pace of life here is SLOW.  We anticipated this, and so we have been patient with things we would not be accustomed to waiting for (like a company that will actually install the internet service speeds they promised).  We have also been intentionally chilling out – not signing the kids up for extracurricular activities, not visiting local attractions or taking any road trips yet, and instead, just enjoying leisurely afternoons and evenings at home or within walking distance.  The kids stay up quite a bit later here than they did in the states, so they occasionally nap, but mostly they have been enjoying swimming.

The average day starts when one of the kids awakes around 7 or 7:30am.  I drag myself downstairs and make coffee with my newly discovered squeezable bottle of sweetened condensed milk (yum!), nurse the baby, and help make breakfast.  We all eat and get ready for school, and one of us will walk the kids down the mountain around 8:30 (a relaxed walk) or 8:40 (a somewhat rushed walk), to arrive by 9:00am.  If we are running late, we can drive down in about 10 minutes.  After we drop the kids off for school, we sometimes have coffee with some of the other English speakers that live here (they have coffee together every day!), depending on what errands need to be run.  Ryan and I have been taking turns bringing the kids, but usually he gets started on work and I take them down.  It has been great to have him home all the time, and no commute!  Cora has been taking a morning nap around 10:30 or 11:00, which gives me a little bit of time while the bigger kids are at school to do something else.  Usually, that involves food prep, cleaning, going grocery shopping, other errands in town, doing work on the computer, or my favorite, which has only happened a couple of times – taking a nap! I  really want to use some of this time to do some painting, but I haven’t been able to do that yet, because as I said, it seems everything is slower here, so errands and such take longer, too!  (Maybe it’s just me in slow motion…)

Too Much Cooking!

The kids get out of school at 2pm, and we have lunch, which is basically like dinner.  The Spanish tend to make that their big meal of the day, so we have been trying to do that, too.  The only problem is that now I’m basically cooking two dinners a day, and it’s more time in the kitchen than I care for!  Back in America, I would cook in the evening and we would eat leftovers for lunch the next day.  Since Ryan is working from home and he isn’t a big fan of leftovers in general, my old cooking schedule doesn’t work for us.  I decided today that I’m going to have to come up with a new plan to simplify the amount of cooking I’m doing, maybe by prepping both meals at once, or by making enough at lunch to eat the same thing for leftovers at dinner the next day.

Our afternoons now involve helping the twins translate their homework (Ella and Peter haven’t really had any), doing chores, swimming at home, sometimes going to the beach, or napping.  Ryan basically works normal business day hours on Spain time, so he is most often working in the afternoons, but he does have some flexibility and can help with homework sometimes, too.  One afternoon, I took the three oldest kids to meet a new friend at the beach, Cora was napping, and Peter stayed home and played by himself while Ryan worked.  I got to sit under a palm tree reading a novel while watching the kids play in the Mediterranean!  It was like a dream!

We have tried to go out to dinner a few times, but none of the restaurants open back up until 7:30pm, which is a bit of late start for us to be out (for the baby in particular).  When I cook, we try to have dinner around 7:00, but since it stays sunny and bright so late, and because we’re really doing the “laid back” thing, I often don’t realize it’s time to start cooking until 6:30 or 7:00, and then we get a late start even at home.  A 7:30 dinner is still pretty early for many Spaniards, but most families with young kids eating around then, I think, so they can get the kids in bed at a reasonable hour.

Taking Advantage of the Amazing Weather

We love eating our meals on the patio by the pool!  It is perfect weather for it, and it’s just so easy to relax out there.  It seems like at least one of the kids is in the water near dinnertime anyway.  They have been swimming literally every single day since we arrived, even though the average temperature is usually in the low 70’s!  After dinner, we usually put Cora to bed and do something fun with the kids for a bit, like watch a TV show, play a game, or  do the less fun work of finishing up the chores.

Sunset is almost an activity of it’s own, because we have a particularly beautiful view from our upper terrace, and I just love to sit up there (sometimes with a glass of wine) and enjoy the splendor of God’s creation in action!  Tonight we played board games with the kids up there and enjoyed watching several paragliders take off and land down on the beach.

It doesn’t really get dark here until almost 10pm, so it’s a little too easy to stay up late.  The kids make their own meriendas to eat at school (effectively, packing their elevensies lunch), and we all pretty much go to bed at the same time (although I am often the last one awake doing things like writing this blog post, talking to someone in the States, or checking Facebook, hence having to drag myself down for coffee in the mornings).

In many ways, we feel like we’re on vacation (well, a working vacation for Ryan), and it is fantastic!  I highly recommend the less busy lifestyle.

It was a successful first day of school!  The kids were all very “nervoucited” (nervous/excited) about it.  When we arrived in the area outside the gate, there were several little girls Ella’s age that came to meet us.  They were very excited, too, because apparently, word had already gotten around that the new americans were starting class today.  We met a couple of girls who speak English, and a Spanish family with a girl in Ella’s class.  Then the music came over the loudspeakers, and the kids all ran into the courtyard and lined up with their teachers.  I was able to go in and meet the teachers briefly, but generally, parents aren’t supposed to go into the school yard.  Ella and the twins both have male teachers, and Ella’s speaks a little English.  Peter has a young lady, but we met several of his classmates that speak English and can help him translate.

After the kids went into their classes, we met the other English-speaking parents outside the gate.  There are several Americans, some British and I think Irish.  They said they go get coffee almost every day after they drop the kids off, and they invited us to come, but we had plans to drive to Malaga and pick up a few things at Ikea.  They warned us that we might not have time to get there and back before 2pm, but we were optimistic – it’s only an hour away, and we had five hours!  Certainly it would work!  Right?

Well, we should have listened.  As it turned out, it took us a while to walk back up the mountain to home, finish a phone call with mom about Jon’s accident (more on that later), and then get in the car.  Then I forgot my Ikea list and we had to go back home, and then I took the wrong road to get out of town, and ended up driving through some frighteningly narrow one way streets in Las Maravillas (the high, hilly part of town), before finally making it back to the highway, so we didn’t arrive at Ikea until noon!  Well, we figured it wouldn’t take us more than an hour to shop, and we’d have an hour to get back, and all would be well.  Did you know that Ikea is a maze intended to keep you there forever?  We did, but we thought we could get through it fast enough. We were wrong!  In retrospect, we should have abandoned our cart and just hoofed it through every shortcut we could find once we realized time was getting tight.  But we thought we could buy the few things we had and still make it.  Of course, there were long lines and checkout was SLOW!  So it was 1:15 when we left, and we knew we were in trouble.

As we sped back towards La Herradura, I called the school and told the secretary we would be 10  minutes late.  She was not pleased! She told me “This is a school, not a day care!” and warned me that if somebody was not there to pick up our kids, the local police would have to come, because the teachers all leave.  I was mortified!  What a terrible first day impression to make.  (Can you see me wringing my hands and hanging my head?) I had not put anybody’s name on the matriculation forms as others who are allowed to retrieve the kids, because they only people we know here are the Wagoners, and I didn’t want to burden them with that responsibility.  But what could I do?  It was physically impossible for us to get there on time (due to our own newbie foolishness), and we had no other options, so I called Heidi.  Thankfully, she was home and was able to go pick up our kids!  I called the secretary back and explained that another American lady would be coming to get my kids and stay with them until we arrived.  She seemed glad (though I am sure was still not at all happy with me).  When Heidi arrived, another parent we had just met that morning who also knew her had to assure the teachers that it really was okay for her to take the kids, so we had yet another person come to our rescue.  Thank you Heidi and Joaquim!!

When we arrived at 2:10, the kids were all sitting on a bench in front of the school doing their homework.  There were no tears, and no shouts of joy when they saw us, either – they were all engaged in their work!  All of the Americans were hanging out talking and waiting for us, so our shame was fully public in the expat community.  But the kids seemed like it was a good first day!

On the way home, they told us they really didn’t understand much of what was going on. There were several English speakers who helped them, and the twins came home with photocopies of pages from their math book for homework.  Their favorite part of the day was recess, of course!  I will interview them after their first week and post a video so you can see what they think right from their own mouths.