Baldwin first visited Spain with his parents when he was a baby, she said, and has been at least once since then. She declined to explain in detail how often they traveled there or how long they stayed. “I think it would be maddening to have such a tight schedule of everything. You know, sometimes school was involved. Sometimes it was a vacation. It was a mix, a mess, is that the right word? Like a mix of different things. “
When the family visited Spain, they spent much of their time in Madrid, Seville and Valencia, she said.
When they were at home in Boston, Baldwin said, the family spoke Spanish and cooked Spanish food. Family friends from Spain used to live with the Hayward-Thomases for extended stays when visiting the United States. “When we weren’t in Spain, we called it ‘we brought Spain home’,” she said.
Baldwin’s older brother, Jeremy, moved to Majorca, a Spanish island in the Mediterranean. Mr. Thomas and Dr. Hayward also moved there in 2011.
These experiences explain why Spanish language, culture, food and traditional dance are so important to their identity, she said, and she and Mr. Baldwin are working to recreate this for their children. “I send them to a bilingual school where they have Spanish at school and I speak to them in Spanish at home.” After the pandemic, she said, she and Baldwin plan to spend more time with their children in Mallorca.
“My family, this is where they decided to spend their lives,” she said. “I guarantee that they will live there and die there. This is their home and this is because this is not something new, no one put a map on the wall and threw a javelin at it and said, ‘Oh, Spain looks good.’ “