Mexico Medical Student |

I’m finally back!! Actually, I came in last Thursday in the wee hours, but the fact that it took from last Monday to Wednesday night/Thursday morning to get here should tell you the hell we’ve gone through. Traveling with a newborn is hard–very hard–even for short trips across town, much less internationally. Traveling in a caravan makes things difficult many times over. Dealing with 100 degree heat and having to transfer a crying baby in exactly 10 seconds before she gets overheated is that special kiss of awful, just like salt on a wound.

Caravaning with a vehicle which breaks down in Mexico…..well, let’s just say thank God for pharmaceuticals.

Long story short, the car we had intended to cross broke down about 40 minutes into Mexico. Thankfully, it was an easy drive back and whatever is wrong with it did allow for short spurts of functionality, allowing us to turn a 30 minute return trip to the bridge into much more than that. We really had no choice but to then drive further back to my parents’ house, an hour away, to park the fully loaded truck into the garage for safe keeping and a renewed attempt the next day (Claudia’s dad lives 5 minutes from our crossing, but there is no garage).

Starting over again, far too late (the days of my cracking the whip and getting us to leave at 6AM, fully packed with coffee and breakfast (did I mention I am a morning person, especially on trips?) ) are obviously over. Like way over. Sometime that afternoon, we picked up my sister-in-law, who graciously allowed us to swap w/her car for these few months until we drive back so she can get the other one fixed. The crossing was uneventful, except that it took over an hour to get my vehicle permit because, well, this little bridge doesn’t really see FM3 visas, no they shore don’t. “Well golly gee willickers (or the equivalent in Spanish) what have we here?” was what I had to deal with. If it was legal for me to pay $20-something to get a temporary tourist visa, I’d have gladly done it just to make things go faster, but alas, they are actually computerized and they’d know I already had a (much more elevated) visa.

So…the rest of the trip was spent stopping for potty breaks, baby diaper change breaks, our dog’s nature calls (usually coincident with ours since we were stopping enough), getting turned around in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon (one of these days I’m finally going to get a map of that infernal city to figure out how to get on the periférico [outer loop] when coming from my father-in-law’s to bypass the middle of the city)–the list goes on and on.

We unloaded, Claudia and I started bickering about something or other (2.5 days of road trip between two vehicles and a crying baby kinda does a little something to the nerves), continued unloading, and crashed, or at least as much as we could until 3 hours later, baby awoke demanding more food. Apparently gone are the days where I can drive like a bat out of hell, consuming all sorts of [legal] stimulants, driving to exhaustion, and sleeping as long as I want because “Damnit, I deserve it for getting us here in record time!” Yeah. This little one is cramping my style, I’ll say that right away.

But I wouldn’t change anything. I love my Niblet.

We’re here, safe and sound, mostly unpacked/organized and school has begun anew. A new semester with scarier classes (I did mention I have this complex with neuro?) and more work, for sure. This time, I promised myself I wouldn’t allow myself to fall too behind– schedule/time-wise or grade-wise–even with baby. This means Mentat-like concentration and work ethic. Right. We’ll see.

Believe it or not, I am glad to be back. As long as my family is here and this is where I continue going to school, this is our home for now and any trip away is just that–a visit with a return ticket.

P.S. I’m going to be posting a few more posts here shortly, mostly queued up from the trip and the last few days, but I’m not going to change the post dates/times because there’s no point.