On May 9th, 2025, Emerson turned 7 years old. How is it possible that we have a 7 year old! Unbelievable. The morning of his birthday, we started off with a yummy chocolate chip pancake breakfast, which is family tradition.

To celebrate at school, Emerson was allowed to wear "street clothes," aka not his uniform. So, after breakfast, he opened up a present from Auntie Courtney in Australia, which was an All Blacks Rugby jersey from New Zealand, where Courtney is from and where we've visited several times. The All Blacks are the best rugby team in the world. They are like the Yankees in baseball, except they come from a super small island with far less resources and budget, and yet they still dominate. Since the boys are learning rugby at their school, I thought it would be cool if they had All Blacks jerseys, so I asked Courtney for them awhile back. She graciously bought them on a trip home and shipped them to us. The shipping from Australia cost $56, probably close to the cost of the jerseys. Yikes. Thanks Auntie Courtney!!

In addition to street clothes, Emerson is also allowed to bring in a treat to share with his classmates. Traditionally, people bring in a cake made of barquillos, also known colloquially as cuchuflí. They are similar to praline sticks Nana used to bring out for Christmas, except they are normally lined in chocolate and then filled with dulce de leche, manejar, or Nutella. We got to try some from a local barquilleria down the street, and they were amazing, so I was very excited to order them for Emerson's class and possibly have a couple left over for us. I order the "cake" on Sunday, and his birthday was on Friday. So, I set the delivery for Thursday night, between 6-8pm. Well, Thursday we had a giant rain storm; it basically rained all day. So when there was no sign of the cake at 7:30pm, I called the shop and asked what was the deal, as I knew the shop closed at 8pm, and after that I wouldn't be able to talk to anyone. The lady told me, I think, that the delivery guy was leaving in 20 minutes, and everything was fine. Well, the cake never showed up. At 9:30pm, we went to bed hoping for a miracle midnight delivery, these are just guys who zoom around on scooters, and they operate at all hours. But, it was not meant to be. In the morning, no cuchuflís. I took the boys to school, then rode my bike straight over to Líder, our Walmart equivalent that is 5 min away where we do most of our shopping, and bought the saddest little muffins to take back and drop off at school. There was nothing else available: no cupcakes, no cookies, nothing. So he got sad little muffins. At this point I was pissed and sad. For one, I didn't understand what had went wrong; did I make a mistake in the ordering process? Turns out the rain just made it impossible for the store to find a delivery person. But true to Chilean form, they did not notify me of this, I was just ghosted. I also worried Emerson's classmates would make fun of him for his sad muffins. I haven't talked about this a ton, but parents here let their kids eat like garbage; it's definitely a major difference from the Colorado schooling scene. Kids are bringing candy in their lunches every day, cookies, chips, every kind of junk food you can imagine. So sad muffins were probably not going to register on most of the kids' radars as celebratory birthday treats, but simply everyday food. But, whatever, I tried. Emerson said the muffins were yummy, and he had fun giving the extras away to teachers and such, so he didn't seem scarred for life by it. So hopefully there won't be a therapy session in his future labeled "My mom doesn't love me because she sent me to school with sad birthday muffins." Whew.
That evening we had Emerson's birthday dinner. We have a tradition where the birthday person gets to pick out the dinner menu from top to bottom. Emerson ordered spaghetti and meatballs, cucumbers, blueberries, and chocolate cake (a flourless dense torte I've made in the past) covered with strawberry cream cheese frosting. Drew spent several hours on Friday making homemade meatballs and red sauce, which turned out great, and I made the cake. Since I don't have electric beaters, I knew the torte was a losing proposition, as you have to beat cream into stiff peaks, and I wasn't doing that with a hand beater. I've never seen a hand beater before, but one showed up in one of our bulk purchases of used kitchen stuff. It works decently well for simple things, sauces and such, but beating cream to stiff peaks was beyond me. Overall, dinner was a success, and between that and presents, Emerson proclaimed it was the "Best Day Ever!!" which always feels good.

Also, the rain the day before cleared out all the smog, so that Friday was the clearest day we've had. Allowed us to see the mountains and the new snow fall really well. Very lovely. This is the view from our guest bedroom for whomever comes to visit!
We also got to talk with lots of family members virtually: Grandma, Grandpa, GG, and Uncle Adam, then Nana and Papa, Auntie Leah and Uncle Osman, and finally Auntie Stephie and the cousins. Thanks all for making Emerson's day feel super special.
The following week, we had a birthday party for some neighborhood kids. We decided to skip the entire class birthday party tradition, and kept it smallish. We invited 5 other families, so 11 kids and 12 adults in all. We had pizza and an ice cream sundae bar, and we rented out the communal party room in our building since the group had gotten too large for our apartment. The event room has an adjoining garden, which is great for the kids to be able to run around. We didn't rent anything extra, no trampolines, no jumpy castles, etc, we just brought down some of the boys toys from upstairs and borrowed a soccer goal from a neighbor. Emerson's favorite part was when he and his friends were making "stew" in the garden, aka mixing water with garden bits and bobs. Score for the simple things in life. It's not what you do, it's who you're with.
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