As I’m nearing the end of this second box of Thin Mints, I was thinking that next year I should actually place an order for some. Andy, being the “problem solver” that he is, immediately started calculating how many boxes I should order. I’m eating 4 cookies at a time, every other day or so…there are maybe 40 cookies in each box…how many boxes do I need to buy to have enough for the whole year? But, he has missed the point. I explained that I don’t need to have enough cookies for the whole year. Aside from needing to purchase a new freezer to store the cookies, it just doesn’t work that way. Part of what is so great about a box of Thin Mints is the fact that it’s somewhat rare – you can only get them once a year. What comes with a box of Thin Mints is that sense of anticipation, of knowing that you waited all year for this. It just wouldn’t be the same if you get eat them any time you wanted.

Next year I’ll place an order for only a few boxes of Thin Mints. A girl has to have something to look forward to.

Exactly a year ago Andy and I were staying at Julia and Carter’s house in Oakland. I was extremely pregnant and woke up with a seriously bad cold. Andy popped out later that day to get me some hot chili and a cold frosty from Wendy’s. (Wendy’s is a bit of a novelty after so many years in Mexico. There were definitely no fingers!) He also gave me a lovely card with a drawing of a fabulously dressed pregnant woman on it, wishing the Mom-to-be a Happy Mother’s Day. It was a great day (except for the cold) and was filled with excitement about our future.

Today, Trinity woke me up at 6:30. That’s unusual for her, normally she sleeps in until 8:00 am, a much more civilized hour, but she has a stomach infection and I’m sure her little digestive system is messing up her sleep patterns. It was hard to get up because I stayed up too late last night – watching Dr. Who and also an episode from last season of Grey’s Anatomy. However, when she smiles that little toothy smile and points at the ceiling fan and says “dat”, it’s hard to resist giving her pudgy cheeks a kiss and getting up to play with her. While Andy slept in for a change (lately he’s been getting up with Trinity while I have a bit of a lie in) I decided that I had to have blueberry pancakes. Thanks to mom for bringing those boxes of Bisquick on her last visit, I was able to quickly make a yummy breakfast.

Instead of doing yoga during Trinity’s morning nap as I normally would, I decided to catch up on some sleep myself. I had a delicious 2 hours of uninterrupted sleep. Because Trinity slept for 2 1/2 hours herself, she had a hard time getting off to sleep for her afternoon nap. I spent 50 minutes in the rather warm sun of Zihuatanejo, walking in circles around the neighborhood until Trinity finally fell asleep in the stroller.

Now that she is napping, I’m trying to decide what to do this evening. I think I’ll have Andy go out to pick up some Chinese food for dinner (mu shu pork, Shanghai chicken, bbq pork ribs and spring rolls - not as good as we get in San Francisco, but it'll do). Perhaps I’ll watch another few episodes of Grey’s Anatomy. Or maybe I should invite Rai to come over so we can see last week’s episode of Alias. Whatever I end up doing, what I primarily feel right now is that I am a mom, and I couldn’t be happier.

Let me start by first saying that Trinity was never actually missing. I have to say that, because people like my mother will be reading this and having their own personal heart attacks until they get to the end and find out that everything was okay.

Last night we came back from having a fabulous dinner at De Donde Eres, and while Andy was giving Rai a ride back to her house, I was getting Trinity’s bath ready. We were in the kitchen and I went to check on the bath water, with Trinity following me. I turned around, and she wasn’t there. I went back into the kitchen calling her name, and she wasn’t there. I walked more quickly to my office and didn’t see her. Then I checked the front terrace, to see if she walk out the entryway, but she wasn’t there. That’s when the adrenaline kicked into high gear. I ran back into the bathroom to see if maybe she was under the sink, and I didn’t see her. Then I ran to the kitchen and checked behind the high chair. Then I ran to my office to look again, now calling her name frantically. There was still no sign of her. I decided to run upstairs to see if she decided to climb the stairs by herself, which she never does. As I was heading out the entryway, I was screaming her name in a voice that had become uncomfortably high-pitched and girly. Just as I was about to climb the stairs I heard her plaintive cries. She was somewhere in the downstairs living room. I ran back in, following the cries and finally saw her. She was sitting in the corner behind the water bottle. She had been quietly watching the show of mom running from room to room. She only spoke up because she thought I was going to leave her alone downstairs.

I quickly picked her up and hugged her close to me while I tried to get my breathing back to normal. As I wiped the tears away from her face and told her everything was okay, I was doing all I could to not burst into tears myself. The whole episode only lasted a matter of minutes, but my heart was still racing, and I had seriously high doses of adrenaline pumping through me. I already knew it, but it had become clearer to me last night: the walking-thing is going to be challenge.

My husband looked at me with an expression of amusement, and said that no one would mistake me for a hippy. But I honestly thought that retiring from my job as an uptight Employee Benefits lawyer in San Francisco at the early age of 35, and moving to a beach-resort town in the tropics would make me a bit of a hippy. I’m not talking a hippy with the flower-child tops and long hair (been there, done that) but a hippy of the new millennium, someone who thinks outside the box, and lives life in a slightly different way than is expected. I mean, instead of love beads hanging in the doorway we had a bumper jumper for a while there, but it was equally as annoying to push aside to get into the kitchen. Anyway, at least I thought I was being quite the hippy by leaving the City and moving to the tropics.

Although I have chilled out a lot since we moved to Mexico, I have begun to realize that you can take the uptight yuppie out of the City, but you can never really get the City out of the uptight yuppie (even if she is less uptight and less yuppie). Granted, we live in a Mexican beach town where if people have shoes, they are flip-flops, getting dressed up involves wearing something other than shorts or a swimsuit cover-up, and when the power goes out, you call it quits for the day and have a margarita. But as great as it is to be in this environment, we still remember what life was like before we moved here. We remember the way things were “back in civilization”. You never really get over city life.

As a result, we still expect to receive a bill for the phone and electricity before they are shut off for failure to pay. When we find a jar of Best Foods Mayonnaise at the grocery store, we expect to be able to buy more when we run out. But that is not how things are done here. So the result is that if the bill hasn’t come by a certain point in the month, we check in with the phone/electricity companies to see when our bills are due. When the grocery store has cheddar cheese in stock, we call all of our gringo friends to make sure they know before it’s gone. We happily take a 3 1/2 hour road trip over 80 speed bumps to Acapulco or a 4 hour road trip on a toll road to Morelia just to buy tofu, coconut milk, rice noodles, mango chutney, Best Foods Mayonnaise, and to check out the latest appliances and furniture in Sears. Okay, the tofu was for Rai, but I bought all the other stuff, including appliances and furniture.

We also discover exactly what we can get away with as far as airline luggage requirements. We have paid extra and checked or brought onto the plane: 2 Japanese shoji screens, 6 electronically controlled air-conditioner ducts, an ice-cream maker, a marble pastry board, a Dutalier Glider (rocking chair) and matching ottoman, a co-sleeper/pack’n’play crib, a flat panel computer screen, more than 100 books, and lots of other smaller items. When we first moved to Mexico, most planes allowed 2 free pieces of luggage up to 70 pounds each. Over the last few years, all the airlines have reduced the weight to 50 pounds each. I believe this change is a direct result of my own personal abuses of the system.

So although I think I’m being really laid-back and chilled out, I still go to certain extremes in order to have much of the “stuff” I would probably have if we were still in San Francisco. I have the tools to create an awesome meal, we have the décor that we really want and I have the comfy rocking chair for all those hours I spend nursing Trinity. I haven’t gone as far as the Yoga Mamas in the AOL article, (they buy only the best, brand-name things for their babies), but I have to admit that I recognized many of the brands that were mentioned in the article.

So, I guess I’m not a new millennium hippy. I haven’t gotten over what it’s like living in “civilization”, and even when funds don’t really permit, I find myself loading up my suitcases (or those of visitors coming here) with familiar items that I miss and just can’t get here. Call me lame if you like, but tonight’s dessert will be homemade cherry pie a la mode, (the flakey dough rolled out on the marble pastry board, and the rich vanilla ice cream made in my ice cream maker). I think I’ll continue to strive for my kind of civilization, even if it means I’ll never really be a hippy.

My friend Rai is awesome. Not only did she want to give me a fantastic Christmas gift this year, in the form of my very own website, she created one that is user-friendly, Bev-friendly, and aesthetically really pleasing to my eyes. She also spent more hours than I’d like to count uploading all the photos that I had previously posted on my mac homepage. Rai has now spent a lot of time looking at photos of Trinity, because that’s mostly what the homepage was about, and she still wants to be my friend and lets me blab on about the baby during our thrice-weekly walks. Some friends are more precious than gold.

So, here it is, my own website, containing photos with cool categories, and also a blog. I have a blog. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to read what I would have to say, but for those of you who get concerned when you haven’t heard from me in a while, check my blog, and you will probably find out what I’ve been up to and why I haven’t been writing. (At least my intention is to post to it regularly.) However, the quick answer to why you haven’t heard from me: I have an 11-month-old baby.

In addition to posting current photos on the website, I’m hoping to go through old photos and post them, so you can see our house, both before and after shots, and our cats, and our friends, and whatever other interesting things I can find to put on the site. I’m really excited about this! The photos I’ve posted so far are only up to New Year’s Day, so there’s many more to come, including a ski trip/family vacation with the Greens and most recently a 2-week visit from my parents.