BUT...
Just to make sure there is no disillusionment about the experience as a whole....let me tell you about our typical weekdays. The weekdays were definitely a reality check. Here's a peek into what our weekly schedule looked like:
SCHOOL and PRESCHOOL-3 hours/week if I was good.
When we arrived in Brazil, Brazilian kids only had 1-3 weeks of school left before summer break. As I understood it, the kids who did well got out a couple of weeks earlier than the kids who were struggling. Anyway, they didn't go back to school until the week before we went home so Safari Girl had a 2nd summer break. Luckily, I talked to Safari Girl's teacher before we left, who gave us all the math her class would be doing through the middle of February. She said just to have her keep reading--Safari Girl already knows what they'd be working on until February. It worked out that we had about 3 math pages per week to do.
Missing school was what Katelyn was most sad about when we left. She absolutely adores her teacher and cried for several days when she learned we'd be going to Brazil for three months. However, shortly after our arrival she realized something positive about it--being in Brazil and not going to school meant that she got to play ALL DAY LONG! Soon it was quite a chore for me to get her to do even a half hours worth of math three times a week. She was NOT happy to leave her play even for that short time! She finished the last page on the plane on our way home. Oh, we also brought a 1st Grade work book and I had her do several pages from that each day as well--or at least when we did school....
We didn't keep up with reading as well as I would have hoped either. Safari Girl loves the Cam Jansen series and reads the "Young Cam Jansen" books on her own. We brought two of those and three of slightly harder Cam Jansen chapter books that we own. (Since I taught school I have an extensive library of children's books!) She read all of those multiple times motivated by the incentive that if she did she could get a new game on her iPad. I had planned on us reading e-books that we could check out from our library and read on our iPads but the library didn't have as many children's books on her level as I thought it would so we really didn't read as often as we should of. At least we got scriptures in most nights....Safari Girl took a reading test when she got back and scored slightly higher than she did before we left so luckily she didn't lose any of her reading skills!
For The Boss, I bought a wipe-off letter printing book from Costco and I brought our "How to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" to work on. The Boss wasn't much of a fan of taking a break to do "preschool" either. We only got to lesson 14 in our three months there but at least he got some practice in. By lesson 14 he was already reading words like "sat, mat, rat, sit". I was impressed. Hopefully, teaching him by this method doesn't mess with his head when he gets to Kindergarten.
So during the week, if we were being really good we got in maybe an hour of school every other day. It might have gone better if we did it in the mornings but it was just SO HOT that if we were going to go out during the day at all, outing HAD to be in the morning. Otherwise, we'd melt. Even swimming had to be in the morning because the in afternoon the pool was too warm to be refreshing.
UNO-5 hours a week. The Boss loves to play games so when we found UNO at Big for R$12 we bought it. I ended up playing Uno with The Boss for an hour EVERY DAY. Literally. Yep, that deck was well loved by the time we left.
WASHING CLOTHES-5-8 hours/week.
I thought I'd have all this free time there but instead I spent a lot of time doing chores that I have machines to do for me at home-washing dishes by hand, rinsing, wringing, and hanging clothes to dry, and making a lot of food from scratch. We did have a washing machine. It was so simply made, we installed it ourselves in like one minute. We just screwed the hose up to the faucet on the wall in the laundry room. To do a load, I had to turn the faucet on and wait for the machine to fill up and then turn it off. The kids will be sure to tell you that at least twice I got distracted and let the machine overflow. So fun. It has a little manual dial timer that I always turned to the maximum time, which was only about 20 minutes. When it was done, I had to empty the water bucket by bucket into the sink. Then I'd rinse the clothes, rinse them in a fabric softener, wring them out one by one, and hang them to dry on the clothesline. One large load, which was smaller than a load of wash in my machine at home took me 1-2 hours from start to hanging it on the line. I tried to do a load 3-4 times a week. That means I was doing wash from 4-8 hours a week. I didn't mind the work so much since I didn't have much else to do but it was a little stressful to me making sure I did the right load of wash at the right time so that we didn't run out of clothes. Because of the humidity, each load took a full day or two to air dry so if we discovered suddenly we were out of underwear, we were out of luck for at least another couple of days. The other difficulty with doing laundry was that up until the last couple of weeks, the laundry sink pipe had a leak. I did a typical Brazilian type fix--found a container skinny enough to fit under the sink to catch the water but I didn't dare try to duct tape the pipe or anything because I had this feeling from my Brazilian friend that rental rules here are pretty strict. Which meant that even with the container catching water, I still had to mop the floor after every 5-10 minutes of rinsing clothes or I'd be wading in water. I was so happy when Papai finally replaced the pipe for me sometime in the last few weeks before we moved.
I forgot to close the window during a rainstorm once and came home to a filthy laundry room!
During Christmas break we were so busy for two weeks straight that I couldn't keep up with the wash and we ended up having to take all our laundry to the laundromat. It's tough to find a laundromat there where you can do it yourself. Instead, you drop off the clothes, pay a fortune and come back a day later to your laundry washed, dried, ironed, and folded for you. It was kind of heavenly but it cost us over R$200 for just 5 small baskets. That was about US$80!!!! Just for 5 small loads! Still, it was heavenly to have our towels and sheets completely dry. I always had to enlist Papai's help to help me wring out the towels more completely in hopes that they would dry all the way before developing that gross mildewy smell, but even with his help I feel like the towels were always somewhat smelly. The air was just too humid to let them dry quickly enough to NOT have that smell.
Other random laundry fact: I still have a callous on my hand from wringing the clothes.
Doing all the laundry by hand did have it's benefits though. I had visual evidence of my hard work for a couple of days while the clothes dried. Seeing my line full was like a big pat on the back for me! Totally rewarding? __________________ for me. Also, I think I sweat off several pounds while doing laundry. It was in a part of the house where the air conditioning didn't reach so each time I did laundry I was a sweaty mess after. Like--rivers running down my back, the sides of my face, behind my ears and sometimes into them. Ew! And my chest was a huge puddle. I didn't know it was possible for me to sweat that much and in some of those places! By time I finished, whatever clothes I was wearing needed a good washing. Gross, I know but between the heat, the humidity, and the arm workout that wringing clothes is, I know I lost a pound or two just by sweating. Another bonus of doing the laundry by hand is that our house alw.ays smelled like clean laundry!
SWIMMING--4-5 hours/week. Some weeks we only went once for a couple of hours but the last month in particular we tried to go 2-3 times a week. We'd only last about an hour and a half before one of us had to use the bathroom and I didn't discover there was a bathroom near the pool until the last week so when someone had to use the bathroom we were done. But the pool was definitely the best entertainment! We usually went in the morning because in the afternoon the "sun was so strong" (as the Brazilians put it) that we burned easily even with sunscreen and the pool wasn't very refreshing because the water was so warm.
Me not getting in the pool lasted all of two times. In this picture I was positively roasting! Then I saw that they really do clean the pool and you couldn't keep me out of it in that heat!
OUTINGS to Zoo/Shopping--1-2 hours/week. When I first found out the location of our apartment I could see on Google Maps that we had a nice zoo/botanical garden within walking distance of our apartment. A little research showed the zoo was even free and I knew that for sure that we would be spending a lot of time there. What I didn't count on was that it would be so hot! Between the heat and the fact that we had to walk anywhere we wanted to go because I didn't have a car, we ended up not getting out of the house very often. We had to walk a little under a mile to get to the zoo and I could hardly ever convince the kids that it would be worth it. For my own sanity, I tried to push them to go at least once a week but it really was just so hot when we went. I took before and after pictures of poor The Boss. After just 45 minutes, his head/hair was drenched in sweat. It's no wonder they didn't want to go very often. The same with shopping--not that they like that much anyway but we had two shopping malls within walking distance AND we were right IN downtown so there was all kinds of shopping to explore but I could hardly ever convince them to do it because it was so hot. They were willing to walk halfway down our street to this well-known bakery to get some pigs-in-a-blanket to eat. One time I made them walk to Big (basically, their Walmart) to try and get some grocery shopping done during the day instead of having to wait until Papai got home from work. I think they'd tell you I tortured them. It was only a mile to the store but I made them each carry two sacks home. We had to stop a bunch of times for them to rest and by the time we got home I was afraid of eating the few refridgerated or frozen items we bought because I worried they had spoiled in the heat since it took us so long to get home. So basically, we didn't end up leaving our apartment much--it was just too hot for the kids.
The closest mall--Casa das Flores (Flower House). The entrance makes it look so small. When we discovered it was an entire mall we were shocked!! The building is in a plus shape so you only see one end of the "plus" from the street.
Koi pond inside Casa das Flores Mall.
Poor kid is drenched with sweat after only 45 minutes outside! Bakery goodies.
WATCHING NETFLIX and PLAYING iPADS--the whole rest of the time. Yes, literally. That's pretty much what we spent our weekdays in Brazil doing. Netflix has some different shows in Brazil than it does in the States. The kids loved watching this British show called Mister Maker that was this silly young guy with a British accent showing how to make kid crafts. The kids loved it and we would have had lots of fun making the crafts but it was nearly impossible to find the very basic craft supplies he used. On the rare times we ventured out of the house, I searched for craft supplies in any store I thought might have something but the best we found were some colored pencils, colored paper and glue. We eventually found some glitter that we had fun with but that was about it! No pipe cleaners or pom poms or clay or acrylic paint (we found some tempera that was cheap and watery) or even construction paper. We only found either scrapbooking type cardstock which was really expensive or this pack of regular paper but it had four pastel colors. That's what we went with. I did find a yarn store and we did a little project making little hat ornaments but that was pretty tricky even for Safari Girl. The kids had a few toys we brought (Hotwheels and some track for The Boss, Palace Pets and Zinkies for Safari Girl, plus some Legos they got for Christmas and whatever toys they got from KinderEggs or from McDonalds) that they played with but that was it. They loved using the tons of pillows from the couch to build forts and "zoo animal cages" but I had to consciously force myself not to stress about that too much since the couch wasn't ours and they were dragging these pillows all over the dirty ground (no matter how often I cleaned that white tile we always had a layer of black silt on the floor!) and jumping all over the pillows ruining their shape. Other than those few activities, they were really on their iPads or watching TV ALL DAY LONG! I had to make a rule they could only download one free game per day. The Boss was thrilled that Paw Patrol, a show his closest friend loves, was on Netflix. I couldn't even name all the seasons of shows we watched or all the movies. You can imagine by the end of the day when Papai came home how restless and irritable the kids could be on some days having done next to nothing all day. We were usually okay until about Wednesday. The weekends were SO MUCH FUN that they carried us through Tuesday. But then Wednesday hit and we were clawing at the walls and at each other half crazy with boredom and heat and lonliness. I was like, "Um SERIOUSLY people!?!? It's been two hours! Why haven't you posted something NEW on Facebook!?!?!?!" I was NEVER so thankful as I was in Brazil when Friday rolled around.
The Boss and his cars.
Safari Girl and her toys--this was after she lost a tooth and set all her toys up like this with her tooth in the Squinkies Cinderella carriage for the tooth fairy. The tooth fairy brought her two reias. You can see her Zinkies and her McDonald's Mario toys.
We found a yarn/fabric store. We definitely had the stuff to crochet or sew if we had wanted! But other types of craft materials were harder to find!
TV/computer/Netflix set-up
Literally plugged in!
The iPad Mini's were the kids' early Christmas presents. That was not something we ever thought we'd give them but we weren't sure how else to entertain them for 12 hours on a plane when we couldn't bring much with us. It definitely entertained them for 3 months in Brazil!
Sometimes I got to Skype with my Brazilian mission companion living in Curtitiba. This was pretty common in Brazil. The internet is actually really good there-sometimes better than the phone service so a lot of people would Skype rather than call. Plus, Skype is free!
Oh, and here's more Netflix time...
I like hearing about the day-to-day. I'm definitely not jealous about the laundry part :)
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