a Mexican Mother's Day

It was Mother's Day on Sunday and for some reason that touches me every year more and more. Before I would just say happy mother's day to my mom and go on with my day. My mom would always say, well if you can't be nice to me all year, one day will not help or if you have been nice and thoughtful all year then that's enough. Something like that. She kinda took off the pressure of the day. I'm thankful to her for it and I try to do the same for my husband. We can celebrate each other and our love when we feel for it and it comes from the heart, not because the calendar says so. 
Why Mother's Day touched me more this year, was perhaps because we are in Mexico and surrounded with grandmothers, mothers, kids and families all over the place. The way it should be. You go and see a Cumbia music concert and have kids of all ages running around https://youtu.be/i99COewt0dI
or if you go to a cool bar/restaurant, late Saturday night you have them there. This doesn't happen so much in Canada or Finland. It's a lot of this adults only things going on. A good example was this party we went to with the Finns in Montreal, celebrating Vappu (wrote about it in my last post). Somebody complained that there shouldn't have been kids around as they were playing and making too much noise. I couldn't have disagreed more. Vappu is just as much kids running around with balloons in their hands having an overdose of sugar as it is adults dancing around with sparkling wine glasses in their hands having an overdose of alcohol. Both are equally part of the tradition. Both parties need to behave and control their intake of sugar of course and that is the responsibility of us adults. 
Mexican children are by far the cutest children on this planet. I don't know what is the magical formula but they are adorable. I know how this country has issues with a constantly growing population but there is something about the family values here that I feel at least Finland could learn from. We are a country where people are more and more preferring to live alone, not even being in relationships, even less having children. A lot of us, including myself, tend to travel the world instead of settling down and having kids. A certain amount of sadness and loneliness will slowly start sipping into our lives with this way of living.
So I have decided to become a kind of a world auntie. Play with children who happen to be sharing my path during a certain period of time in my life. Like here in Mexico, I became good friends with a lady from the UK and her 8 year old son. 

We have something in common. We both have chocolate colored husbands working at the same company, more or less the same hours. We clearly understood we didn't need more than that to become friends. Our friendship has given me the possibility to get in touch with my inner child and bringing back sweet childhood memories, playing with my brother or my cousins. So, for the last months, I have been shooting with water-guns in the swimming pool, I have been bouncing around on trampolines,

playing dodge ball, playing table tennis, folding paper planes, 

playing with hot wheels, playing with lego and hearing about the super powers of all kind of weird creatures I can't remember the names of. 

I have tried to take a bit of the load off of my friend when she has needed a break and I have given my presence here a better purpose. Feel like I give a little and help a little. Because when you play with one child, other children see you in a different way and all of a sudden you find yourself folding paper-planes with three boys instead of one and playing with them for several hours and giving a nice break not to one mother but three mothers. 
And as I saw how much I enjoyed it myself, I thought I could share the joy with my husband as well. So I took the two boys trampolining one fine Sunday.

   
Me and my husband were the only adults around jumping on the trampolines. We were playing dodge ball with 20 other children and having the time of our lives. Something that I enjoy about my husband is that he, just like I, can switch off the adult in him in no time and become a child again. I wish more adults would do this instead of complaining about the noise. I wanted to say that to the people at our Vappu party. Join their game and you will see the world from another point of view, instead of the blurry one you now see through your sparkling wine glass.
Not that I'm saying there is anything wrong with enjoying some sparkling wine. It's very much needed when you want to celebrate something, like a mother and her efforts. After all mothers are the ones who are doing the job that is the most important in the entire world. Otherwise none of us would exist.