At least once or twice a week, I can count on looking right up a horse’s behind during a long mountain drive. And if it’s not of the equine persuasion, I’ll be staring at the business end of a bovine, or porcine. It’s slow going when I get stuck behind one of these little trucks. But I always get stuck behind one of these little trucks. Luckily this one wasn’t spitting out stinky diesel fume or burning oil. The horse’s didn’t emit anything either.

There’s no where to pass, as you can see. So, it’s another lesson in patience. In fact, I like to turn it into one of those weird and hilarious music videos I see on a daily basis. The Crash Test Dummies come up on the shuffle:

How Does a Duck Know?

How does a duck know what direction south is? And how to tell his wife from all the other ducks? You can cut a chicken’s head off, but it will keep on running and twitching….

When everything seems planned out. Everything seems nicely planned out. Well the human race will come smack your face……

And when the Dummies fade and Billy Holiday begins a delicious Cole Porter ditty, I turn up the volume and sit back and enjoy the view.

At Addison’s last therapy session, I confessed that it just didn’t seem like he was progressing. At times the milestones seem so slow in coming, it feels like we’ve pushed the pause button.

“No. No,” said the therapist as he taped animals and toys to the white board and encouraged Addy to climb up to them. “His development is really good. What Addison has is a lot of quality in each step. It is better to develop slowly and do it correctly than to rush and then walk all funny the rest of his life.”

I know that. I knew that. And I am certain Addison will walk. There’s not a shred of doubt in me, and I don’t walk circles around the house mumbling how slow it’s going. We do our daily exercises; cherish Addy in our little family fold; take baths, play, and eat like other kids. But I never knew it could be this slow. All of a sudden another 3 or 4 months go by and I’m a little surprised he’s not walking yet.

As I watch my son learn to walk, I am humbled and educated at the same time at what an incredible feat it is. I see soldiers come home from Iraq without legs, and they are right in the position of my son. The muscles, the neurons, the balance, determination, and the concentration it takes to connect pieces looks effortless when we have all our parts, but it’s is one of the hardest tasks out there when you’ve got a missing leg or born with an extra chromosome. With Addison’s older sister, I thought about walking for a few months, like every mother does. At eleven months she was up. And down. And up again. Then she was off, and I never had to think about it again.

The parallels I can apply to my own life are endless. And as I watch Addy climb that mountain and come face to face with the ladybug; I learn how to approach my new life with tranquility, even when I fall. And when I stumble so far, so far down that I think I can’t find the strength to put one foot in front of another, there’s my little son leading the way and teaching me how to put one foot in front of the other as if to say: Hit the play button mom! Get on with it!

I was talking to a friend about the environment in Costa Rica. She said: Companies like Auto Mercado and others have to step into the 21st century and get a clue that they are part of the bigger picture. This coincided with an article I was reading in Vanity Fair about an architect and designer, William McDonough. He’s written about a concept he termed: Cradle to Cradle Design. Waste is food. No one gets squeamish when we think of cow manure being spread on plants to fertilize fields. What if we thought of the world as this abundant place that just recycles and regrows and re-digests everything it spits out?

“Minimizing toxic pollution and the waste of natural resources are not strategies for real change….Cradle to Cradle Design’s strategy of eco-effectiveness is rooted in the systems of the natural world, which are not efficient at all, but effective. Consider the cherry tree. Each spring it makes thousands of blossoms, which then fall in piles to the ground-not very efficient. But the fallen blossoms become food for other living things. The tree’s abundance of blossoms is both safe and useful, contributing to the health of a thriving, interdependent system. And the tree spreads multiple positive effects-making oxygen, transpiring water, creating habitat, and more. And it is beautiful!

Eco-effectiveness seeks to design industrial systems that emulate the healthy abundance of nature. The central design principle of eco-effectiveness is waste equals food.

When waste equals food, the “be less bad” imperatives of efficiency fade. When a product returns to industry at the end of its useful life and its materials are used to make equally valuable new products, the minerals or plastics of which it is made do not need to be minimized-because they will not become waste in a landfill. Industry saves billions of dollars annually by recovering valuable materials from used products. Similarly, products designed to be made of natural, safely biodegradable materials can be returned to the soil to feed ecosystems instead of depleting them.”

I think Costa Rica has this great opportunity to pass over some of the destructive ways of our more “developed” neighbors. We have a culture of people that at one time, used everything! Nothing went to waste. Unfortunately, I see these sad signs of the times when motor oil is dumped down the drain, insecticides are sprayed wherever and whenever someone wishes, and cars spit out disgusting fumes and “supposedly” pass inspections. Sometimes I wish I could scream - no! no! Costa Rica you had so many things right. I mean, WE DON”T HAVE AN ARMY!! Let’s be leaders - even as small as we are - for designing a culture that relishes and reuses everything we need.

When I went to the grocery store, mentioned above, I looked up and right in front of me where canvas bags - the kind that’s reusable. For a moment I was so happy! I bought one right away. The answer? No. A little step. You bettcha! Cotton involves an intense agricultural barrage of chemicals…yikes….sometimes change seems impossible. But I get excited about the fact that someone is thinking a little.

In Costa Rica, the grocery stores range from those that cater mostly to the Ticos, and there are those that stock their shelves with more imported goods for the ex-pats and the Costa Ricans looking for more goods such as blueberries or garlic stuffed olives or imported chocolate. Every Saturday, I get an organic food delivery to my home from NaturaStyle. The food is fabulous. It’s comes from happy cows eating grass; coconuts swinging in the breeze; vegetables harvested without pesticides. Coco was assigned a project based on a book photographed and written by Peter Menzel and writer Faith D’Aluisio: Hungry Planet: What the World Eats.

As National Pubic Radio reported: “The husband-and-wife team wanted to see how globalization, migration and rising affluence are affecting the diets of communities around the globe. Each chapter of their book features a portrait of a family, photographed alongside a week’s worth of groceries. There’s also a detailed list of all the food and the total cost.”

Most of the food we get on Saturday is also in less packaging. The milk comes in a big milk can (the one Coco’s leaning on) like in the old days. I transfer it to glass I’ve recycled. The vegetables don’t come in plastic bags. The vendor crates them in boxes, sets them on my counter and takes the crates back for another use, and another and…It’s a lot of work. On Saturday, I can spend up to four hours cleaning, condensing, and getting all this stuff to fit into my refrigerator for the week. When I’m done, I set the containers to the side and the organic company picks them up next week.

Most of the time, I’d rather have someone else cook for me. When I face yet another load of food, I’d rather go out to eat. But it’s not just budget concerns that keep me thinking about what I eat and HOW it gets to my table. It’s this planet. It’s the planet - you know that thing we walk on - get air from, the water….that planet. I do have to go out and shop once a week to get those other things that doesn’t come on Saturday. But even there, as I’ll write about tomorrow, I can try to reuse, reduza & recycle.

Possibly a paradigm shift will save us from choking on all the plastic and toxic bits and parts we produce. Instead of a disposable society where we have to figure out how to burn, bury, or dump or old stuff, why not make it so it all rots and we eat, breath, and drink it all over again? That could be the ultimate paradise.

In order to get my car back it the garage, I needed to connect my dryer. My good, old car works better during the rainy season if she gets a break from the rain and parks out in the garage. (She’s gets touchy around the wires if soaked.) However, during the dry season we’ve enjoyed the extra space of the garage as “that” extra room every family needs for stuff like: bikes, strollers, coconuts, and Addison’s therapeutic jumping machine; old exercise equipment, and bags of old toys I’ll be donating to someone someday.

I was determined to get the jumping machine, which is tall, large, and ugly, upstairs. In order to get it up the stairs, I had to saw off some of the base. After an hour of sawing, I held up the cut off wood in victory. I disconnected the stanchion from the base, and a nanny and I tried to twist and turn it’s way up to the second floor. After scarping the walls and chipping the stairways, I decided it wouldn’t fit. Back down it went. I gave up the idea of a stylish, modern living room and gave in to a having a stylish, modern living room with that tall, large, ugly jumpy thing in the corner.

In order to get the machine in the corner, I had to move a book case. To move the book case, I had to remove all the books. I pushed the bookcase across the room and swept away about 10 ten cockroach carcasses before putting all those books back. (Would someone please tell me why cockroaches ALWAYS die on their backs??)

I don’t believe the person who installed the washer/dryer hook-ups actually ever did laundry. The water spigots are directly above the 220 outlet. And as all of you know, the dryer comes with a really short cord and washers, short hoses. Since the last muchacho installed hoses that exploded due to cheap plastic and fittings that leaked with every load, I plumbed the machine myself with the help of the other nanny and, of course, duct tape. I finally got help with rewiring the 220 dryer connection (as I am terrified of electricity since getting a shock I can still remember when I was 10).

What was left? The bikes were moved to the patio. And now, the stroller has to be collapsed after every use to fit back in the garage. Coconuts? Tucked neatly in a tina - little tub - on the side of the dryer. The car fits. We can’t fully open the doors, and the hood serves as a place to set the laundry baskets between loads, but we’re in.

A task is never disconnected from another; an action always gets a reaction. A butterfly fluttering it’s wings in St. Louis effects the weather in Alaska. Now me and the kids can get in and out of the car without getting soaked, and the old vehicle just might last another season or two. While I put the last of the books on the shelf, I looked at my little corner of the world. It didn’t look so bad. So, CASAVIVA wouldn’t stop by for a photo shoot. There’s always next year. The dryer buzzed, another load was finished; another day was done.

I sold lemonade on the corner of my block. Little table, a sign, and a few cups…I think I made 30 cents. So my daughter decides one day off from school she’s going to sell lemonade. She makes the sign - in Spanish and English - squeezes the lemons - which are really green limes here - decides on a price of 100 colones (about 20 cents) and sets up for sale.

It’s amazing how songs and traditions pass down like blood pumping away, and we don’t even know it. I told her nothing about selling lemonade on the street corner. Well, today it’s in the condo complex, but the lessons are all the same. The budding entrepreneur made 300 colones. As she wait sitting for more customers to pass, she drank the rest of her profits.

The juxtaposition of the “developing part of Costa Rica” mixed with with the “old-day Costa Rica” is bizarre and surreal. On runs, I often pass this huge mall packed with all the modern conveniences we need to keep us distracted from the real movies of our own life. I trot by nice homes, expensive furniture stores, and then tin shacks, a falling down bridge, and always to my delight, usually a cow or two (or at least a goat). And the funny thing? The rich and the poor are all mixed up. This cow pasture was right next to a big, busy store that sells discounted boxes of stuff from China. Sadly, I know these empty lots and lovely beasts will too give way to the cement of parking lots and shrines of shopping. But for now, I can enjoy the show. The lady above wandered over, slowly, to check me out.

In fact she was so friendly, she kept nudging her way closer. I think she wanted a pet on the snout. What do you think?

Only in paradise do I get to say:

Today, while chopping open coconuts, I splattered my brand new white t-shirt the first time I wore it. And I don’t mind a bit.