Happy Día del Niño (Children's Day).
Schools all have special plans for today. My 4 year-old is accompanying his classmates to a wild animal park. My 6 year-old is participating in the festivities at his school. The typical festivities include:
No-uniform day. Street clothes only, because;
They have spent hours decorating eggshells and filling them with flour to;
Splatter all over one another. They will arrive home looking like ghosts, and;
Filling water ballons to splatter all over one another. Make that wet ghosts.

In light of the above, I visited a private school this morning where I serve as a consejero, or advisor, spent an hour and a half with the seventh grade class, then got the heck out of there.

I have no special plans for my school, but I imagine that absenteeism rates will run high this afternoon.

This begins a run of festivals for the next two weeks which will include Día del Niño (today), Labor Day (May 1), Cinco del Mayo (May 5), and culminating in Mother's Day.

Cinco del Mayo is an official government holiday only in Puebla, because it was here that Gen. Zaragoza defeated the French army and stopped it's march to Mexico City. The French army returned the following year (a year during which Gen. Zaragoza died of illness) and the defense this time was not successful. The French marched on to Mexico City, took control of the country and put Emporer Maximiliano in power, where he remained until his reign, and his life, was ended by Benito Juarez.

The Cinco del Mayo parade here is one of the country's largest and is usually visited by the president. I have not heard whether President Fox will be here this year, but he probably will.

Email problems
I still can't get my email link to work, but I can be reached at markmoorefarmer@hotmail.com