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We took a few days "off"' from our vacation to go to Buzios, a beach town about two hours from Rio. Here's the scene:
Amelia spent at least six hours a day on the beach. It was fantastic.
Here she is with cousins Ana Carolina and Luiz Felipe.
After several hours in the sun, we got some down time too:
After the downpour of rain the first day, the downpouring of family on the second day, the sun came out and its starting to really feel like a vacation.
We've done a lot of this:
And I did a lot of this:
Just because it's no longer anywhere near Amelia's birthday, my family in Rio doesn't let that stand in their way. Since we came to visit only two weeks after Amelia's birthday they threw a joint birthday party for her and my cousin's son, who is going to turn one on April 11th.
I asked them please not to make a big deal about it because we had already totally overdone her birthday and we were probably going to be pretty tired still from the trip. "No problem!" They said, we will just have a few people to hang out:
When you invite a Carioca to a party, they assume you mean "please come to my party and bring your family... and by family I mean your husband, child, in-laws, your sister, and her kids and her in-laws and her 2nd cousin who also has a child somwhat close to the age of the birthday child who might enjoy the party, and by the way, I haven't seen your mother in a while as well, so please bring her, her sister and her sister's caretaker."
The phrase "everyone and their mother" doesn't even begin to cover how the invitation extension works in Rio.
They cooked a little food:
And it wouldn't be a birthday party without a giant table of candies and cake:
And they got a little toy for the kids to play with. The "little something" they got (a bouncehouse) doesn't even fit into the photo.
But in the end, Ameila was pretty satisfied with the day:
We're getting ready for our trip to Rio and I get very stressed about packing, making lists, forgetting items to take, passports (apparently need to be slightly more panicked about those...).
Over the weekend I started to pack and thought I'd get Amelia's things out of the way. I was trying to find a way to keep her busy while I packed her clothes. But as you might recall, Amelia likes to sort her clothes, so I thought she might like to pack.
Understatement. Of. The. Year.
We started with her shirts and she was so excited that she got to help pick and fold all of her clothes and put them into the luggage:
We got about halfway though the packing process when she stopped, grabbed my shoulders and shouted directly into my face: "Mommy! I love this thing we're doing!" She was also motivated during the packing process to chose this outfit.
