It´s my birthday, I can jump in mud if I want to...

Aside from one dirty mishap, we spent a fabulous day celebrating Max´s second birthday.

It´s hard to tell from the hasty photo I took but he was covered in mud from his knees to his eyebrows.  There was a puddle in the middle of this thrift store we were checking out (many buildings here have sections with open cielings) and he was running around and tripped falling face down right in the puddle. Exasperated, I scooped him up, threw him in the stroller and raced the 2 blocks to our hotel to throw him in the shower before he could touch anything. By the time we got back to the store not even 25 minutes later it was closed, bummer, since we had aleady picked out some stuff we wanted.

But like I said other than that we had a wonderful day.  After breakfast we took the ´microbus´ to La Laguna de Apollo.  I have nostalgic memories of a beautiful restaurant on the shore of crystal clear lake formed inside a crater.  While the hotel restaurant has lost some of the luster and quality of former days, the laguna is still as magical as ever with clear warm water surrounded by lush forest and volcanic rock

Then we headed back to Granada, the lovely city we are staying in (much more about that later) walked around a little, and had previously mentioned mud mishap.  Eventually it was time to stuff ourselves with helado, and let me tell you, the icecream here is GOOD. And like most things in Nicaragua it is also cheap $.50 for a cone of the best coconut icecream you ever tasted (as well as many other tasty flavors) After finishing off 2 sundays with much help from mom and dad, max said ´mas helado´ and we couldn´t argue with that logic so we ordered 2 more cones!

We finished off the night with a horse carriage ride around the town.  Max loved it! He yelled ´caballos!´ the entire time, kept randomly turning to us and saying ´fun!´ with a huge grin on his face, and was very disappointed when we had to say goodbye to his new 4-legged friends.  I don´t know that I´ve seen him enjoy himself qiute so thoroughly.  A perfect ending to a lovely day.

Fun!