Spring-time fun in the backyard and neighborhood

March 20th marked the first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, and we've been enjoying unusually warm weather in most of the northern part of the U.S.  The past week in particular has been awesome, a glorious early spring that has seen some really nice high temperatures in the low 80s Fahrenheit (nearly 28 degrees C).  These are temperatures we usually don't see in our area until perhaps sometime in April, and it is not unusual to get snow in March.  In the summertime, however, it can get hotter here than it does in the Philippines (but with less humidity).   Although we really encourage our daughter to do well in school, have a love for reading and creative writing, do homework, practice math and piano etc., we think it is also really important for a kid (and us adults!!) to just be a kid and have fun and unstructured play time while getting some good, healthy fresh air, exercise, and sunshine outdoors.  

This last week, since the temperatures were so nice, after school our daughter got out and rode around in our back yard on her trusty Peg Perego jeep.  We picked it up for a song on Craigslist a couple of years ago, and it has proven to be one of her very favorite toys for outdoor use.  It runs on a motorcycle battery and is very powerful, and we have a back yard away from any cars so it's very safe.  As you can see in the photos below, she likes to take our dog as a passenger and ride around.  Her neighborhood friends like to ride it too, but now that they're 8, having a driver and a passenger brings the weight limit about up to the maximum in terms of draining the battery pretty quickly.  So probably it's best to stick with a 10-pound dog as passenger for now!   Additionally, there's one photo of her and our dog on her swing set.

Hitting the ground running on the Peg Perego Jeep

Posing on the jeep

Man's best friend on the swing set

This past Friday (March 23), we started off the weekend after I got home from work with our typical dinner together as a family, followed by a little outdoor outing until sundown.  We enjoyed a nice walk around the neighborhood and a chance for our daughter to put in a little more riding practice on her new Kickboard Maxi Kick scooter.   It's a pretty cool looking scooter, which has three wheels and a lean-and-steer design like a surfboard, so it seems like she's having a really fun time learning how to maneuver the scooter and work on some simple little hops over bumps and cracks in the sidewalk.   She had a scooter before this, but it was more simple in design and didn't have the 3-wheel design and lean-and-steer capability of the Maxi Kick.   There is a nice little cul-de-sac just down the street that provides a smoothly paved circular surface for her to ride, with virtually no car traffic (and we can hear and see any cars coming, which would be moving slow)... a good, safe place to ride. 

We let her go through her paces for awhile, and before it started getting dark I mentioned to my wife "this would be fun to take some photos", so she ran back to our house quickly to get her camera.  The photos below are some random shots, all by my wife, of our daughter in action having fun on her scooter, as well as a few photos of some of the beautiful blossoming trees we saw.   As you can see from our daughter's legs (bruises, mud), our daughter is a fairly rough-and-tumble kid (climbing trees and wrestling as well as any of the boys her age) and is pretty tough when it comes to getting bumps and bruises etc.  We had a nice evening, and we could catch a glimpse of the planets Venus and Jupiter in the western sky high above the setting sun at the time we made the short walk back home. 

Scooter girl - my wife added a slight sepia tone effect to this photo

Piloting the Kickboard Maxi Kick around the cul-de-sac... bruised shins!

Weeping cherry tree in full blossom 

Weeping cherry tree blossoms (don't know species of trees behind)

Checking out the beautiful tree blossoms

For those who are reading my blog who live outside the U.S., where we live, we have a true 4 seasons: spring, summer, autumn (fall), and winter, and right now the plant life is just starting to sprout and blossom again after being dormant all winter.   The  warmth and blossoming of flowers and trees this spring is probably running ahead of schedule by about 2 or 3 weeks compared to usual springtimes in the past.  So what you will see in the photos above are trees mainly bare of leaves, but which are starting to grow their leaves and flowers anew.   When summer comes, everything will be fully green again, although usually here where we live the most quantity of flowers and the most beautiful flowers on the trees can be seen in April and May.  Also, in the most all parts of the U.S. we observe daylight saving time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time) starting March 12, which allows us to have extra daylight in the evenings... it's really nice at the height of the summer, when the daylight hours are very long and it typically gets dark at about 9:30 PM, allowing you to more thoroughly enjoy the day outside and really feel like you can accomplish something during the day.  

The mysterious case of the moving Santo Niño statue

Over 80% of Filipinos are Roman Catholics, and nearly all Roman Catholic homes and businesses in the Philippines own and display a statue of Santo Niño, a representation of the Christ Child.  The Santo Niño de Cebu ("Holy Child of Cebu") is a celebrated statue of the Christ Child venerated by Filipino Roman Catholics.  Similar to the Infant of Prague, it is claimed to be the oldest religious image in the Philippines, originally given by Ferdinand Magellan to Rajah Humabon and his wife Humamay in 1521, along with statues of Our Lady of Guidance and Ecce Homo.  The statue is clothed in expensive textile robes and a gold crown,  and gained renown when it miraculously survived a devastating parish fire in 1565. The Santo Niño de Cebu statue is permanently housed under bulletproof glass at the Basilica Minore del Santo Niño in Cebu City, and is one of the most recognizable cultural images in the Philippines found in many secular and religious areas.  The Basilica is a major site of religious importance to Roman Catholics as well as a significant historical site and international tourist destination. 

Before we left Cebu in August 2011 on our last trip to the Philippines, my wife purchased a Santo Niño statue molded of light-weight fiberglass (for easier air transport back to the U.S.) from a vendor outside the Basilica Minore del Santo Niño, which is immediately adjacent to Magellan's Cross.  This statue was clothed in a red tunic of thin nylon material which was slit down the sides of the legs, covering the back and front of the statue.  The statue also happened to be an "anatomically correct" representation of the toddler Jesus.   When we arrived back at our home in the U.S., my wife displayed the Santo Niño statue on an end table in the entry foyer of our house, positioning it near a floral bouquet facing our main entrance door.

A few weeks after positioning the Santo Niño statue, my wife noticed that the statue had moved its position.  She asked me whether I had moved it, and I told her that I hadn't.  She confronted our 8-year-old daughter about this, and she said that she hadn't moved it.   "Well, we must be having a miracle then, if no one is moving the Santo Niño!" my wife replied.  

A few days later, she found that the Santo Niño statue had moved again, and then again another day or so later.  The movement seemed to coincide with the timing of visits from our daughter's friend, a neighbor girl who is about the same age.  My wife questioned our daughter a little bit further, and found that apparently the first time this movement happened was when our daughter was using the bathroom and her friend was waiting outside the bathroom door, which is immediately adjacent to the end table with the Santo Niño statue.  Aha!  Finally a clue.  Our daughter then divulged to my wife that she had seen her friend these two most recent times picking up the Santo Niño statue to take a peek underneath his tunic, getting a look at his anatomically correct "pikoy"!  Our daughter told my wife that she had told her friend "that's not appropriate". My wife just advised our daughter to tell her neighbor friend not to move the Santo Niño anymore.   Then, she put in a request with my mother-in-law to have a new set of clothes made for Santo Niño, this one complete with a pair of underwear!  So, now our Santo Niño  has a beautiful white silk gown with red trim and sequins rather than a simple red nylon tunic... and a proper pair of underwear to prevent little neighbor girls from peeping at his pikoy!

Our loyal and loving (but intellectually challenged) little mutt

Here are a couple of photos my wife took early this summer of our daughter with our mutt, a Shih-tzu and Maltese mix.   He's truly not the sharpest tool in the shed - it took him literally a month of training sessions to learn how to shake hands, when other dogs I have owned picked up this trick in about 5 minutes of training.  Often he'll come bounding upstairs into our bedroom searching absent-mindedly for my wife when in fact he just passed her in our kitchen downstairs.  Let me be frank - he is very often dumb as a rock!   

However, he is a very sweet and loving dog, and is really good with children, even if neighbor kids come to our house and pick him up like a rag doll, smothering him with affection.   He truly craves getting attention and affection and being held on the lap, especially when it comes to my wife, and he is a true "Mama's Boy".  He shadows my wife constantly around the house, watching her every move and guarding her.   He seems to have an innate sense of when one of us in "the pack" are not feeling well, and in particular he was on a heightened sense of awareness, empathy, and affection when my wife was recovering from her mastectomy surgery earlier this year.  

As a typical 8-year-old, our daughter is into fantasy play, and she has no other brothers and sisters, so you can just imagine the rigors of play and make-believe our little mutt has to go through with her and her friends.  He has of course been dressed up numerous times, plays the role of co-pilot on different ride-on jeep-type toys in the backyard, and gets hugged, squeezed, and carried about by her and all of her friends (we of course monitor to make sure he's being handled gently). 

So, while he's by no means a genius, we're pretty happy with him in the three years we've owned him (we got him as a pup of about 7 months old) and he has been a good and loyal companion for us.  At times he can be frustrating, but in the end he loves unconditionally and really just wants to be loved in return. 

Our little bookworm - an 8-year-old and after-bedtime reading by flashlight under the covers

Secret contraband stored under the pillow.   An 8-year-old bookworm with an unquenchable passion for reading and storytelling.  A compact and sturdy source of illumination fit for wilderness survival.  What do these all have in common?    Well, if it's true what they say that "a picture's worth a thousand words",  then let's examine the evidence:

Exhibit A:  Our 8-year-old daughter's secret stash

This collection (not including the American Girl doll and the teddy bear) was recently discovered by my wife under our daughter's pillow.   Take note of the blue object in the middle - an LED flashlight, which our daughter has been using to get in some secret after-lights-out reading time.   Since we of course encourage a love for reading, (even though sometimes too much of any good thing becomes a bit of a problem, we'd already set up a nice fluorescent reading lamp next to her bed. We could therefore monitor the lamp through the crack under her bedroom door to see if she closed her books and went to sleep at the agreed upon time (we usually give her an extra 10 or 15 minutes past her mandated bed time)... or so we thought.   Her top blanket/comforter is unfortunately pretty much opaque to the LED flashlight, so the crack beneath the door is no longer informative to us.  

As her father, I will give our daughter an A+ for ingenuity and passion for reading, but in terms of originality, I think I just might have seen this "Under Cover of the Night" reading trick before -- a chip off the old block!  And those LED bulbs are so much more battery-conserving in comparison to the incandescents we had...