Moo, Neigh, Bleat, Cock-a-doodle-doo

How many people are laying on their couch on a Sunday morning (OK, I am going to church later, don't judge) and see large animals walk by? Two weeks ago it was a herd of horses. Today it was cows. Sometimes it's chickens and roosters. On other blocks it's sheep or goats.

It wouldn't be strange if we lived out in the country or in the mountains. But we live in a large city, in a nice development. I'm trying to imagine my parents' reaction if a herd of cows walked past their front windows in their neighborhood in the U.S. I feel sure some kind of phone call to someone would need to happen. Here it is commonplace.

Living in the D.R. is a little bit like living with Mary Poppins. You never know what you might see. Expect the unexpected ...

My picture of the cows below is, as my son commented, anti-climactic, but I was not prepared for the photo and I assumed they were gone until I heard mooing from down the street. So you get to see some specks in the distance and trust me that it's a herd of cows.

Amoebic Prevention . . .

So I do not claim to be an underreactor.

My kids and husband would certainly not describe me as such; I am rarely accused of keeping calm and failing to take action when action was (or was not) warranted. There is a special look and tone used by my husband when he feels I am unnecessarily alarming the children by my response to something.

But every now and then . . . you're welcome!

Due to an intervention (albeit caused by a freak out, perhaps), usually triggered by a strong mommy instinct and some google searches, disaster is averted. Or may have been averted, because often "unnecessary" interventions can't really be proven unless no action is taken. For example, if a blog writer interrupts a blog post about overreacting in order to track down a mosquito for a longer time than one might usually bother, we would call him or her a hero if that mosquito is carrying Dengue or some other nasty virus. But since the only way we'd know is by letting it go and inevitably infecting an unsuspecting victim later, we would probably assume the hunt was just an overreaction. This is, naturally, a purely hypothetical speculation.

Anyway, Jesse was the beneficiary (or victim) of my overreacting today. And he insisted that I blog about it--he thinks my readers will be interested. He is, in fact, my overreactor-in-training.

While my children were scavenging for their lunches from the limited supplies in our refrigerator, I was hunting mosquitoes, coincidentally, in the garage. When I came back in and reports were given me of the various lunch items eaten in my absence, Jesse unwittingly shared that he had eaten some of the raw bok choi in the container he found.

Freak out.

In the sunny Dominican Republic, where palm trees and tropical fruits abound, we have some nasty parasites and amoebas to avoid in raw produce and water.

Veggies I expect us to eat raw, once they are cleaned by soaking them in a vinegar and filtered water solution for 20 minutes, I store in a tupperware or ziploc bag. However, when my maid helps me by cutting up green beans or bok choi or broccoli for me to cook for dinner, she also puts them in a tupperware. This system has served us well for seven years, but today my son went rogue and ate a new veggie raw.

Since my husband was at work, there was no one to say that it would all be fine and to give me that special look and voice tone.

I did try to backtrack after my initial response and tell Jesse that very likely he did, in fact, not pick up an amoeba or parasite from the raw produce he ate. It was more like playing a lottery no one wants to win and he just needed to avoid playing in future. But as the son of an overreactor, he did not find it all that comforting that he probably did not have one.

So I googled. And gave Jesse the following Dominican home remedies:

• garlic and carrot (this was supposed to be juiced, but I do not have a juicer and our blender is broken, so I made him a little salad with some vinegar, yum!)
• fresh oregano and clove tea (I have oregano growing in my garden)
• a ginger candy
• yogurt
• a drop of peppermint extract

OK, the last two aren't Dominican, they were just bonus. And I realized that probably all of the other stuff killed whatever good bacteria were living in the yogurt, but it can't have hurt. He told me all of that gave him some powerful breath and made his stomach churn a little.

I'm guessing that even if Jesse happened to have eaten something nasty, we killed it. If he didn't, well, then I guess all that was an overreaction. And I guess we'll never know which it was . . .

It's a Girl! (Garden News Only)

We had given up on getting fruit from our guava tree, which sprouted from a seed and after five years is now as high as our roof, assuming based on what a friend said that if it didn't bloom after three years it was "macho," a boy tree. Because it conveniently planted itself where I later had room for a compost pile—back when I was not working as much and had more free time for such endeavors in the Pre-"We-Got-a-Rat" Era of living in this house, when a compost heap seemed less like feeding rodents—it grew ridiculously large and robust quickly. Its fruitlessness seemed another ironic mockery of my failure as a tropical gardener—along with my stolen bags of topsoil, birds eating my tiny red beet shoots, aphids covering my kale (since the netting blocking out the birds offered them great protection), and my tomato plant which made one dime-sized (or, rather, five peso-sized) tomato. 

But this week Abigail noticed that the tree has some pretty amazing bright red flowers. So we're hopeful. The mother tree (our neighbors cut it down right after this tree sprout came up) had these amazing yellow guavas that you can't buy at the grocery store (they only sell the thicker, not as tasty green ones).

I should add that today Owen looked online and saw that a tree starting from seed should take eight to ten years to bear fruit, so we may actually be years ahead of schedule. Probably due to the former compost pile at the tree's base.

Here are some other spring blooms at our house:

The aloe flower is, frankly, a little ugly, but when it blooms (which happens once a year at most for just a day or two) in the next few days we'll get this cute little bird that comes to drink its nectar each time.

This wild orchid is deceptively flashy-looking in a picture. The blooms are so small, few, and subtle that they are almost unnoticeable.

And I don't know what this is called, but it is what is still thriving now that our super-hot spring weather is winning out over the flowers that thrived here all winter.