Does anyone else feel like we’re kind of one big set of adopted relatives for those little kids on the Pura Vida things that you put around your cup of coffee or mochachino or whatever you’re drinking in the morning? Seriously, I really feel like I’m practically related to those kids, since I see them so often. I definitely see them a lot more often than my two little cousins in Germany. It’s almost like they’re mine. Not that I’ve had much contact with the kind of girls who tend to give birth to caffeine dependent Costa Rican orphans lately, but maybe the kids have moved into my place while their mom is making huge heaps of money off of all that fair trade coffee or something like that.

Anyway, at the very least it sure seems a lot like I wind up baby-sitting these little tykes for about fifty minutes most mornings. We read the paper together, maybe do the crossword together. They learn a bit of physics, too, or sometimes economics, if they get dropped off on the earlier end of things. We laugh, and I bounce them on my knee, except really it’s much more like they’re sitting on my desk, and my leg is doing that leg bouncing thing under the desk.

When my turn watching the kids is over, I drop them off, pretty literally, but by the time I make it out of class I’ve already spotted someone else holding them. So basically, we should totally congratulate ourselves on helping to raise two such cute little guys, because kids are our future. Let me know if you can figure out their names, by the way, because I’ve been calling them Smelly and Wooly.