Our son, Elijah Thomas Brimhall was born yesterday at 1:14 p.m. Guadalajara time. Â He weighs 9 lbs. 3 oz and is 21 inches long. Â He is the most special thing that has ever happened to me.
Don’t expect to see a lot of updates in this space, but we’ll be updating the gallery linked above whenever we can.
Over the last couple weeks Megan went to the doctor for two tries at a 3D Sonogram. Â Below you can see the results:
We also found out some big news! Â We are having a baby boy! Â The due date is still tentatively Nov. 15th and the doctor says it looks like he’ll be a big boy.
Yeah, it sucks that I lost my passport, my work visa and my bank card – all in the last week. But I also sat 9 feet away from my favorite actor (ohmygod!, ohmygod!, ohmygod!), Gael Garcia Bernal, at a press conference. I also had a nice interview with Yann Martel, author of one of my favorite books, “Life of Pi.” My interview with Yann made it into the newspaper – but my nice little caption story on Gael did not. My editor says he wants to attract a younger audience. Hel-lo! print a damn photo of the hottest, coolest, most respectable actor out there!
Film Star and Author Host Fund-raising Event
Actor and activist Gael Garcia Bernal joined Nobel Prize winning author Jose Saramago to present Guadalajara’s Civil Hospital Association Foundation with a check for 475 thousand pesos, representing the proceeds from their joint reading of selections from Saramago’s latest work, “Las internitencias de la muerte (The Intermittence of Death),” at the Teatro Diana on Wednesday evening. The donation will be used to assist children battling cancer in the city. Bernal, who grew up in Guadalajara, said he felt honored to have been invited to work with Saramago in his hometown, and that he feels the event is a great example of what each person can do in his or her life to help others. “The Intermittence of Death” describes a fictitious country in which the inhabitants cease to die and are suspended in an eternal old age, much to their increasing despair.
Only a couple days after we decided to move into our new house (but before we actually had moved in) Megan stopped by a veterinary office to see if they knew of any pet shelters were we could adopt a kitten. It happened that they had a kitten up for adoption who had been attacked and wounded by a dog. Megan met the kitten and was instantly in love. A few days later I went to the vet’s office with Megan and met the kitten and was equally enamored.
So a couple days after we moved to our house we had a new little kitten. We decided to name her Huérfana, which means orphan in Spanish. For a short we call her Güera (which means “fair skined”). She healed up very quickly and got to have the cone around her neck removed last weekend. Now she can roam around our courtyard, climb the lime tree and generally be very cute.
For the last few weeks Megan and I have been living in a very nice hotel room at (no joke) The Hotel California in Guadalajara. It was a very nice hotel, but like all hotel rooms, it had its limitations (no kitchen, one room, etc.).
That all changed on Wednesday when we recieved the keys to the house we will be renting while we are living in Mexico. It is a great old Mexican house in the classic style. It has three bedrooms, a large kitchen/dining room area and a huge courtyard in the center with a lime tree that aparently is always bearing fruit. It is only about a 30 min. bus ride from my job (which hopefully I’ll be able to write about more in the future) in a pretty quiet neighborhood.
When we recieved the keys and moved in on Wednesday we had our first “Gringo moment” in our new house. As we walked in to the courtyard we noticed white paint from the newly painted walls all over the cement in the courtyard. Megan and I both started freaking out a bit and worrying about how hard it would be to get the paint out of the cement. Then the guy who was doing all the repair work simply mopped up all the “paint” (which turned out to be easily cleanable whitewash). Well, we felt pretty stupid about that and vowed to try and take a bit more relaxed attitude towards these kind of things. We’ll see how that goes and how many more “Gringo moments” we have over the next couple years.
I have posted a small gallery of photos of our new house, and the last image is a rough floor plan so you can get a better idea of the layout of the place. The place has so much potential and we just can’t wait to start painting, fixing up and filling it with furniture.
