Ladies' Island

We are last-minute jet-setters these days.

Old ladies everywhere demand to hold him.

We hopped a shuttle bus to Toluca Airport on Thursday morning and found ourselves on a Caribbean island that afternoon. Nice. Our beach getaway was a hit all around: Ivan got his first taste of sun and surf, Sergio was in seafood heaven and Sasha was just happy to read, read, read. Hooray for beach vacations!

What is this strange, sandy place?

We flew to Cancun and took a short ferry ride to Isla Mujeres, a kick-back little island that had a Key West type of vibe.

Our ride.

There wasn't much to do there other than go deep-sea fishing, snorkel, eat seafood, drink or, of course, suntan. We saw some serious suntans.

Those legs belong to a caucasian.
Sasha wants this to be us some day.

Most of the visitors were Americans, with lots of Midwesterners and Southerners which made for a very friendly atmosphere.

Well, there were clearly some French people too.

Our hotel was right on Playa Norte and it was a really short walk to town. Convenience galore.

View from our room.

CARNAVAL!

Everywhere in Mexico seems to like b-ball except DF. Why? WHY NOT?!

Our boy likes elevators.

With our little adventurer in tow, we mostly worked on staying out of the sun. And no fishing took place though we did our best to consume as much of the ocean's bounty as possible.

Mmm, coctel de camarones...

Grilled octopus tentacle. Tastes about how it looks.

Ice cream in a cemetery? Why not?

We did plenty of hanging out, reading and relaxing.

Fun with cup.

Fun with magazine card.

This book is terrible, trust us.

Happy sleeping beach Buddha.

And our biggest outing was a trip to the sea turtle sanctuary out at the southern tip of the island. Ivan was bananas for the turtles. Of course we brought our camera, but funny thing is that cameras need batteries. Sigh. Trust us when we tell you that 8 month old kids LOVE to watch turtles swim around. Ivan nearly hyper-ventilated watching them. We are planning lots of aquarium visits in his future!

We didn't do much nightlife, obviously, but from what we saw this was an earlybird special kind of island, which suited us fine with our 6:30 AM wake-up calls from Ivan. We did manage to go out to dinner one night to a truly terrible steak joint. But they did have a drink special...

2-for-1 margaritas! (the "1" meaning "Sergio")

The most important part of the trip was introducing Ivan to the water. He was pretty anxious about it at first, even though he loves a bath. He seemed particularly intimidated by sand: yelping as soon as his bare feet touched the stuff. We took baby steps, of course, and started off in the pool (a really big bathtub we figured), then moved into the ocean and finally, encouraged him to romp in the sand.

Conveniently super-shallow pool.

Starting to sorta swim...

Fully-acclimated!

Beautiful clear water!

Then Ivan met a darling older girl named Penelope who happily showed him the ropes of the ol' sandbox.

All in all, it was a grand success.

One gorgeous sunset...

...after another.