I woke up this morning to silence and an empty apartment. An hour later Nick and Millie returned with a breakfast sandwich, coffee, and delicious pastries. Millie ate most of my pastries even though she already had her own, but wouldn’t have it any other way.

She played for a while and we did more laundry. One of her games was setting up her room as a “party area” with lots of intense rules. We danced around and Nick kept coming in and purposefully breaking the rules, which made her laugh hysterically. It was a great Mother’s Day morning.

Finally at about 1 we were going stir crazy. We walked out to the nearby boardwalk along the coast. We found a playground and Mille befriended a 10 year old from LA. They ran around for a while until her friend had to go and got cotton candy from a street vendor.

Millie was overcome by jealousy and anger that we wouldn’t let her have any. We spent about 20 minutes walking around this outdoor mall while she screamed “I want cotton candy! NOW!” I thought we had graduated from the meltdowns but we’ve had a few in the last week. Even though we’re all excited to go home, I’m wondering if she can feel the big change coming, and this is how she is expressing it.

She calmed down (eventually) and we walked to have a late lunch / early dinner. We keep seeing and hearing about a chain called “Tanta” and decided to try it. The food was great, as all Peruvian food has been.

We walked back and saw so many people celebrating Mother’s Day. It was very heartwarming. Lots of multi-generational groups. I started to notice that most moms were walking around with a single rose, maybe that is the tradition here?

On our way back we stopped for snacks ahead of our ungodly early morning flight tomorrow.

Sunday movie night was The Boss Baby. While they watched that, I checked us into the flight for tomorrow. The airline tacked on an additional tax and I had to spend $88 for each carry-on, making it an additional $450 just to get boarding passes. I had a bit of a crash out with anger at the airlines and unease at our year of hemorrhaging money. I’m also just so sick and tired of the daily friction we have with traveling. Millie isn’t the only one having meltdowns, I guess.