cutting the barber's hair

I'm sure everyone is pretty well sick of hearing about our vacation by now (yes, everyone loves to hear about a fun trip, but after a certain point it does veer into that "endless slideshow at your grandparent's house" territory--not that I don't love an old school slideshow, mostly because I like to push the big button and I like the sound it makes when the slide cah-chung advances in front of the lamp), but in this final post of our vacation week, I would be remiss to not talk about the Bluefields staff that made our vacation so special.

So look, for real, I felt weird about having so many people around whose sole purpose was to make sure that we had a nice vacation.  I know that's the whole reputation of this place, that it takes exquisite care of its guests, but having so many people around to help felt...I don't know, like putting on airs.  When we go on vacation, we take care of our own kids, carry our own luggage, corral all our own little pool toys at the end of the day, fend for ourselves, you know?  Being waited on makes us feel a little spoiled.

I remember when I first started working at St. Joseph's down in Atlanta (everyone knows where I work now, right?  It's on all my press info now, no real point in keeping it some big secret anymore) right after I finished residency, and I was just in the habit of doing everything myself and getting and assembling all my own supplies, because...well, because old residency habits die hard.  This principle can be generalized to our entire lives.  I was worried that they'd be sitting around watching me and I'd be watching them and we'd smile at each other awkwardly and it would be Awkwardville, the capital city of the state of Awkwardia.  Because we're just folks!  We don't need a headman and a cook and a nanny and guy who sets out beach chairs for us!  Hey, bellman, gimmie that thing!  How about I'll carry it for you!

And I'll not lie, even now, at the end of the week, it still feels a little weird, because Joe and I are very used to taking care of other people, and not so used to people taking care of us.  But the staff here is so warm and so helpful and so present, but in the most seamless, unobtrusive way possible, that quite honestly, it stops being very very weird and starts to become...well.  Let's just put it this way: it's always nice to be so well cared for.

One of the ways that we notice it the most is that when you travel with young kids, there are a lot of little details that you have to worry about.  Packing beach bags.  Lugging towels.  Rinsing out sandy swimsuits and hanging them to dry afterwards.  Procuring and transporting a reservoir of snacks and drinks to bring with you. (Right now, at home, I have a diaper bag crammed full of used little Ziplock baggies with crumbs in them which have been used for this very purpose.)  Planning meals--where, when, how, and what.  Trying to spend time with one kid while supervising your other kid who is trying to go kamikaze over the side of the pool.  You know, nothing bad, nothing difficult, nothing that any parent doesn't do all day, every day, but just...things.  The little things.

And that's the magic of this place, and the staff here.  The little things.  The little, little everyday things.  Like: OK today.  I'll just tell you about today.

Today we went down to the beach.  We went down to the beach with our beach bag and our towels, but we forgot to bring our little sand toys.  Before we could even say anything--before we even realized that we'd forgotten them, it seems--Kerri Ann came down with a pile of buckets and shovels for Cal's sand castle, and then very unobtrusively left us alone to our family time.  Later on, we came back up from the beach to the pool (I know, I know, such a tough life, look, I HATE ME TOO), Rosemary magically appeared with these little tiny grilled cheese sandwiches for the kids to eat, because lunch wasn't going to be until a little later and she thought they might be hungry.  (They were.)  While the kids were in the pool, I came back to the house for half an hour, and while I was inside, Rosemary stayed outside with Joe and the boys, just to be available as an extra hand by the pool, since Mack can't swim, and Cal sometimes thinks he can swim a little better than he actually can.  At lunch, Dwight made strawberry banana smoothies for Mack, because he loved them the first day he was here and Dwight knows that he's been asking for "that pink drink" basically every day since then.  

Or like this: our first day here, after our walk down to the beach, we came back to find that our suitcases had been unpacked for us.  A few days later, I found a folded piles of clean kids clothes in the closet, fresh from the laundry.  We're going to have a suitcase full of clean clothes to take back home with us.  This has never happened before, ever.  It's also allowed us to travel so much lighter, because usually, for Mack, if we're going to be somewhere for 7 days, I'm packing, like, 21 changes of clothes.  I am not exaggerating.  (Kid's a mess.)



Or like this: yesterday, someone came to get us in the front yard to tell us that "the donkey is here."  There's this donkey that lives nearby, and when there are kids staying at Bluefields, sometimes they have him come over to give rides.  And the donkey wears a wreath of flowers and little hat.  WHICH IS AWESOME.

It's things like that.  The little, little things.  Things that make this family vacation a real vacation for everyone, and about someone taking care of those who are usually taking care of other people, like that old riddle of who cuts the barber's hair.  It's not about being overly programmed or not even about having someone else take your kids off your hands for the whole week.  We don't want that.  When we're off from work, Joe and I want to be at the bottom of a dog pile of kids.  But it's about a vacation from the little things, and making new, lasting memories of the big things that are important.

We're leaving here Saturday morning, and I'm going to take a little break from blogging for the rest of my vacation until we get back to the ATL.  But from me and my family to Bluefields and theirs, thank you so much for taking such good care of us this week.  We will never forget our first time here, and can't wait to come back.

community

I know I said I was going to talk about the incredible staff here today, but I decided that we're going to do that tomorrow instead, because today I'm going to talk about the Bluefields Basic School.

One of the things that appealed to me when I was originally doing research about Bluefields was the fact that, perhaps unlike some of the larger hotels and guest houses here, this family-run resort really seems invested in the local community.  Aside from the fact that they employ so many people from the town to work at the resort, they also give back quite a bit to the community in other ways, and one of the ways is in funding the Bluefields Basic School, a local early childhood education center for three, four and five-year olds in the area.

One of the things we really wanted to do when we came down was to visit and help support the school, and we were so pleased that they weren't yet on summer vacation, so we could actually meet the teachers and the children.  Given that Joe and I are in healthcare (duh), we were particularly interested in earmarking a portion of our contributions towards something related to early childhood health and safety.  As one concrete example, some of the contributions from Bluefields and friends of Bluefields have gone towards subsidizing healthy and fresh school lunches for the kids, some of whom don't always get a chance to eat breakfast before school each morning.

Another reason we wanted to go visit the school, and perhaps a more selfish reason, is just for the sake of keeping perspective in check.  Joe and I are very lucky people, our kids are incredibly blessed, and we're having an unforgettable family vacation.  But part of vacation to a foreign country should be learning about the community you're visiting, and we thought that spending some time at the school would be a interesting and familiar way for Cal to do just that.

Plus, did I mention how adorable these kids are?

That little one, there, in particular, mounted quite the charm offensive.  After I took that photo, she magically extracted camera right out of my hands with the force of SHEER CUTENESS and took all those pictures below. Kid's got talent, right?

Anyway, everyone loves being on vacation, but it's also nice, when being taken such good care of by a community of people, to be able to give something back.  Learn more about Bluefields Bay and their local community initiatives here.  And thanks so much to the Bluefields Basic School for letting us visit on their last day of school!  Have a good summer vacation kids!

out and about

Our first full day here, we basically let the kids run the beach-pool-beach circuit to their heart's content, and the fact of it is that if that's all that we did during our week here, they'd be perfectly happy.  But starting on Monday, Joe and I wanted everyone to try one new activity per day.  Because new activities are fun, and, to be honest, our kids aren't exactly known for their easy acceptance of new things.

Our first activity was snorkeling.  A local guy with a boat (his name was Herman) picked us up at our beach, rocketed us twenty minutes along the coastline to a coral reef, where there were a billion pelicans just sort of hanging around, waiting for fish to jump into their mouths like Nigel in "Finding Nemo."

It was...not a total success.  Cal has gotten fairly proficient with the snorkel in the pool, but something about the combination of having to drop out of a boat and having some slightly choppy seas kind of freaked him.  So he came back in the boat after about five minutes.

Joe gamely pushed on for about ten minutes after that, but then he started getting claustrophobic (truth be told, he's not the world's best swimmer) and the rest of us in the boat were getting fried in the sun, so we headed back right after that.  Yes, we are lame, but even for me, who didn't end up getting to snorkel at all (Mack wouldn't let me out of the boat), the jaunt along the coastline and the view alone was worth the trip.

Today we took a day trip to see some crocodiles on the Black River, and visited a local waterfall formation known as YS Falls.  Part of what Bluefields does for these trips is provide a van and a driver, arrange a local guide for the falls, and pack a full picnic lunch to eat there.  (We had fried chicken, fresh banana bread and vegatable curry--so, you know, not a stack of PB&J, though I would have gladly eaten that too.)  It was really fun.  All the local interest without any of the attendant logistical stress.  Really lovely.

This was a side trip that we consider going on just with Cal, because it was a little of a drive to get to both these locations, and we just weren't really sure whether or not Mack would have more fun hiking to a waterfall versus staying at the pool for the day, bobbing in his life vest like a cork.  (Apparently it's much more fun than it sounds.)  Every cottage at Bluefields is very fully staffed, which includes a full childcare, in any permutation that you might need it (stay with one kid while you take the other kid out to do something special, stay with all your kids while the adults go get potted at learn fascinating trivia about distillation at the Rum Factory, sit in the house while the babies are sleeping so that you and your spouse can have a nice candlelight dinner on the beach, what have you).  However, ever since Mack started preschool three days a week he has had the worst separation anxiety, and given that we were on a family vacation, I just couldn't stand to get him all worked up.  We were here to be together, after all.  So we brought him along.

Anyway, it turns out my concerns, much like my pre-trip concerns about the weather, were misguided.  Mack napped in the van on the way there and the way back, and he loved seeing the crocodiles, loved boating down the river, went apeshit about swimming near the waterfall.  It was really special.

(I will admit that there was one part during our waterfall excursion where Mack got a little bit of water in his mouth and I leapt towards him in slow motion, shouting, "Nooooo....GIARDIASIS!"  But that aside, I was able to pretend that I had not gone to medical school and was, in fact, a normal human.)

Anyway, the activity level of this vacation has so far been just right.  There's enough to do outside of the villas that you could actually be programmed up to the gills every single day for the week that you're here, but no one is Cruise Directing you, telling you via bullhorn that you should be participating in karaoke up on the Neptune Deck.  It's just very self-directed and whatever you want to make of it.  If you want to take a day trip or two (or five), poof, it's arranged, and there's the driver outside your door with a wicker basket of food and a cooler of drinks the following morning.  Or, you could spend the whole week lying on the beach and by the pool, doing your best impression of a sea sponge--and that's totally OK too.  As the staff here has told us repeatedly, "No problem mon, it's your vacation."

Which leads me to the topic for the next entry: the staff.  Which is a fact that, to be totally honest, I felt kind of weird about before we came here, because, what do you mean there's a staff for each house?  What if we're used to taking care of ourselves?  We're not demanding, we don't need stuff.  We don't want people to be waiting on us.  So are they just going to stand there, like, looking at us?  It's going to be weird, right?  Totally weird.

Short answer: yes, it's a tiny bit weird, but it also stops being weird after, like, 20 minutes.  And then you realize that it is AWESOME.  We'll talk about it tomorrow.

grub

You guys may remember our summer family vacation last year to The Tyler Place, which is a wonderful family spot that everyone on the planet seems to love unabashedly, but for a number of reasons, was just not quite for us.  Tyler Place really emphasizes fun for the entire family, but there's also quite a lot of separation of children's and adult activities, which is probably great for people who spend a lot of time with their kids at baseline, but want vacation time to be a vacation from all aspects of their everyday lives, including having to cater to a lot of child-centric activities.

I'll be totally honest with you when I say that Joe and I feel like we don't spend enough time with our kids as it is, and the last thing we want when we're on a hard-won family vacation is to spend a lot of time away from them.  So when we were planning our summer vacation this year, we deliberately looked for a place that was low-key, a little more free-form, and allowed for a lot of family time and activities that we could do together.  And after some extensive research (OK, I'll admit, when it comes to vacation planning I usually do most of the research and Joe's job is to vote yay or nay--usually yay by the time I'm done making my case because as a writer I can be very persuasive) we found Bluefields Bay.

I'm telling you all this partially to give you a little more information about the Blogging from Bluefields program, which I had mentioned in a few earlier entries but had not gone into too much granular detail about because, to be totally honest, it's the kind of thing that can kind of make people write mean anonymous messages to you.  But I was making the reservation for our annual summer vacation, talking with the owners, when I mentioned to them (they are very friendly, and the entire resort is family run) that it was going to be a perfect time for a vacation, because it was going to come about a month and a half after my book release, so we'd probably be due for a little quality family time right around then.  Talk of the book begat talk of the blog, which ultimately led to a collaboration with the Blogging from Bluefields program, meaning Bluefields is absorbing a portion of the cost of our trip here.  I know.  I know.  I HATE ME TOO, GUYS.  But let's be clear about this also: they don't dictate content, and they don't edit what I write.  Probably the only thing that's appreciably different is the immediacy and extent of my writing--I'm blogging while on vacation, in other words, instead of putting up one big entry after I get home.  Otherwise, it's just a matter of sharing our experiences, which, lord knows, I do more than enough in our normal lives anyway.  Anyway, I just wanted to make that all transparent.

OK.  So.  The food.

Joe and I don't take big trips all that often, but when do make travel plans, I find that although part of us would prefer to stay at smaller, independent hotels or B&Bs, taking kids along for the ride makes us lean towards staying at, like, Le Gigantic Chain Hotel because if all else fails (exhaustion-provoked self-destruct sequence or similar), there's always the hotel restaurant in the lobby, or in case of absolute implosion, room service to save the day.  When we visited Atlanta during our pre-residency graduation blitzkrieg during the February of 2008, we made the mistake of staying at a hotel without any kind of food situation save a vending machine, thinking, perhaps, that we could always find food off-site.  But traveling with a two and-a-half year-old and having to plot every single day where and when and how we were to find meals for a whole week (between daily job interviews, meetings with realtors, and preschool tours) was, to put it simply, THE WORST.

Let's cut to the chase.  You don't have to worry about food at Bluefields.  Ever.  All meals are included.  All snacks are included.  All drinks are included, and yes, that includes booze drinks.  (I'm no lush, but despite the limitations of being an Asian lady, I will occasionally partake in a booze.)  Not being a food blogger or anything even remotely close, I'm a little out of my element when it comes to talking about cuisine (though, for a better food blog, may I recommend Ginger and Scotch, the new and frankly fabulous food blog launched by an old high school friends), but look, a picture is worth a thousand words, so let me just show you what we've been eating the past few days.

Breakfast: saltfish and ackee for the adults; french toast with bacon and scrambled eggs for the kids.  (Not pictured, the mound of fresh tropical fruit at the table.  Very nice.)

Lunch yesterday and today: spicy beef crepes with fries; a local spicy fried fish with rice and veggies.  What kind of fish?  I don't remember. WHAT DO I LOOK LIKE, AN ICTHYOLOGIST?  On second though--don't answer that.  (It tasted good.)

Dinner last night and the night before: don't ask me to remember what it all was.  Though I do remember eating it all.

Each house has its own chef, who plans your meals with you in advance.  They told us when we arrived that they could make special food for the kids if we wanted--of the mac and cheese, chicken fingers genus--but I told them I usually preferred Mack and Cal to eat what we were eating, so that's exactly what they've been getting.  Of my two kids, Cal is the pickier one--he's far more likely than Mack to eschew a dish just because of the consistency or the sauce or some kind of specific spice that he deems "weird"--but I think he's been so hungry from all the activity and the food has been so good that he's basically been clearing his plate at every meal.  And Mack...well, when it comes to eating, I don't much worry about Mack.

All meals are served in your accommodations, by the way, so no schlepping around.  So special and wonderfully intimate, particularly for a family that rarely gets to eat its meals tout ensemble.  Our cottage is a little smaller that some of the others so there's no formal dining area, but this is remedied by the fact there's actually a separate oceanside pavilion in which all our meals are served, just one short flight down from the main house.  It's steps from the pool and steps from the beach, and that, as my kids will tell you, is alllllll right.

So, there you are. Food?  Diagnosis: DELICIOUS.  And now I will leave you with a picture of some local island drinks, and Cal's oceanside toast to his new favorite beverage, Ting.  

Tomorrow I'm going to talk about some family-friendly activities, both locally and off-site.  For example, tomorrow we're planning to take a short day trip to hike to a waterfall, where we will swim and have a picnic lunch.  AQUAROBICS.  Don't forget to follow along with my Twitter feed or look to the Flickr set for my iPhone photos, and I hope you're all having a good week.

the digs

So, as promised, the accommodations.  The accommodations here...are pretty sweet.

There are four other villas here which vary in size--some can accomodate up to 12 guests, which seems like it would be fun for large or multi-family groups--but as we are terrible introverts with no friends apart from our two kids (how much you think we're kidding basically depends on how well you know us), we elected to book Cottonwood Cottage, which is a two bedroom lodging with its own small pool, right above Bluefields Beach.

Kids don't really care about the view, but there's a killer view out every window, and it's just a few short flights of steps down in order to see that view up close and personal.  It's a public beach, but it's incredible how private it feels when you're down there.  I think there was one other family down there this morning, but they left mid-morning for their flight back to the States, and after they vacated, we were the only ones down there.

Kids also don't care about the furniture and stuff like that (and to be perfectly frank, neither do I, really) but even a philistine such as myself could appreciate the attention to local historical detail and the interesting architectural flourishes, like the hexagonal-shaped rooms to maximize ocean cross-breezes, and the high wood vaulted ceilings.  It's pretty neat, honestly.

To be totally, totally honest, here were the things I really cared about infrastructure-wise before I came here.  First, was there wireless internet?  (Yes.)  Two, was there air-conditioning?  (Yes, but you're not spending that much time indoors, so who cares.)

Which brings me to the main point that I love about this place, which is that everything is incredibly convenient.  Want to go to the beach?  Walk down the stairs.  Want to go to the pool?  Walk across the front yard.  Want to eat?  Turn around and there's someone trying to shove food and drinks directly down into your gullet, though in the most charming local way.  Guys, I ate breadfruit chips today!  I thought they were saying "grapefruit chips," and was silently puzzling, 1.) how they could possibly chip and fry a grapefruit, and also 2.) why the grapefruits on this island tasted like potatoes.  The chef, so friendly, and probably sensing my confusion through supernatural means, ran straight out of the kitchen and put this in my hands, proceeding to tell me about at least five local breadfruit dishes and how they are prepared.  Like I said: absolutely charming.

I am taking a lot of pictures (obviously), and the ones from my iPhone I'm loading up to my Flickr account as I go, because, to be honest, there are a lot of pictures.  You can follow along here, I will add new pictures day by day as we go so I don't have, like, fifty skrillion photos to upload all at once when we get home.  Here are some of my favorites from today, but check out the full set if you have some time to kill, you can never see too many pictures of my family in various stages of aquatic submersion.

Next, we're going to talk about the food. FOOD. Mack has some opinions, and he'll share those with you tomorrow.