Our 18-year wedding anniversary and some family pictures

My lovely wife and I celebrated our 18th wedding anniversary yesterday.  Well, we didn't actually celebrate it yesterday, since yesterday was a Monday and a busy work and school day for our family... not the best for scheduling an evening out.   So my wife and our 8-year-old daughter and I instead celebrated our wedding anniversary as a family on the weekend immediately preceding.   On Saturday, we all went to a special performance geared for kids, and on Sunday, we had a really nice Sunday-only brunch buffet at a very nice and historic restaurant, complete with some really awesome Bananas Foster for dessert. 

Reflecting back on the past 18 years, we're truly grateful for all of the blessings we've had, especially our daughter.  Although we've had our share of hardship and struggle along with all of the wonderful times, love truly overcomes all.  Those 18 years have gone by very quickly, and it's hard to believe that at the half-way point of our 18 years, on March 5, 2003, my wife was less than 4 months pregnant with our daughter.  

We didn't take any photos for our anniversary (too busy enjoying the Bananas Foster I guess), but I've posted a relatively recent photo below of the three of us together during our trip to the Philippines in July/August 2011.    This was an early birthday party for our daughter at her Lolo and Lola's house.   Also, I've included a recent picture of our smiling little bundle of joy, now a third-grader.

Halo-halo: our daughter's 3rd grade essay about diversity

Our 8-year-old daughter's elementary school has an annual contest in which the students write an essay about diversity, which roughly coincides with the timing of the Martin Luther King Day holiday in the U.S.  The U.S. is quite a heterogeneous "melting pot" of people, and is comprised of immigrants and descendants of immigrants from many races and ethnicities, cultures, and religions.  That is something that has always fascinated my wife and me, and of which we are proud. 

Our daughter's entry is as follows (her top-down viewpoint drawing of the halo-halo dessert is shown first), and uses an analogy comparing diversity to a traditional Filipino shaved or crushed ice-based dessert called "halo-halo".   I would explain halo-halo a little further for those who have never experienced it, but I don't want to detract from  her essay.  So here it is... the actual photos of her handwritten essay are first (her name and the name of her school have been blocked out for privacy), and then the transcribed text is below it:

Halo-Halo

By: ________

     I am an American girl and I am part Caucasian and part Asian. My mother is Asian, she is from the Philippines, and my dad is Caucasian. I am here to tell you about my favorite dessert in the Philippines. Philippines is a very warm and humid country because it’s close to the equator. Whenever I go there, it is so hot and humid. Sweat from my body sticks to my clothing. Just then, I feel that it is nice to cool down with a nice cold snack, “halo-halo” (pronounced “hollow-hollow”). Halo-Halo is a famous treat from the Philippines. It’s like ice cream but has many different ingredients mixed together. Each ingredient is different. Well, some of the ingredients I wanted to talk to you about are the different kinds of beans. Each bean is different in its own way, size, shape, and color just like everyone. That’s why it is important. Each ingredient is also different; coconut gel, coconut string, sweet “ube” (which is a purple sweet yam), banana foster, ice cream, sweet beans, flan, jackfruit, sweet corn, milk, and crushed ice. Each of these has different colors, size, shapes, texture, and even taste. And that’s what makes us and halo-halo similar, not even one little person or ingredient are the same and all combine together to make a wonderful mixture or “treat.” If you get all the ingredients of halo-halo and mixed them together it would make a cold creamy treat. Just as if we all got mixed together, we could all get along well, much like all of the different ingredients of halo-halo blend together to form one great taste.

Students here in ________ School come from many different families to make a wonderful school. If we all work hard together, the world would be a better place, and we could have peace and good-natured people. We could be one big well blended community, working no matter how different we are from each other. It’s the thought and the heart that counts. Just like the dessert halo-halo, ________ School is like one big melting pot because many students from different places come here, and we all get mixed together to make one awesome treat!

Prior to submitting this contest, our daughter showed her essay to one of her teachers, who thought that our daughter had a good chance at winning.  In the end, our daughter didn't win the contest,  (we had of course told her that she might not win), but yet she handled it gracefully and did not get disappointed.  The teacher who liked our daughter's essay so much was a bit sad to hear our daughter had not won, but  she was impressed about our daughter's positive attitude and that she remained a good sport about the contest even though she didn't win.   All in all, it was a nice writing composition exercise for her, and she now has the satisfaction that although she didn't win, she put a lot of effort into this and made us  all proud by doing her best.

My family ties to our "home away from home": the Philippines

In an earlier post I mentioned that within this blog I would discuss traveling in the Philippines.  Just to take a little break from posting about early U.S. coins and American/Ohio history for a bit, and as a prelude to actually writing about my experiences and travels within the Philippines, I'd like to give a bit of background about how I came to visit the Philippines in the first place.

At the age of 24, I met my lovely Filipina wife-to-be back in early 1993, while she was traveling with her parents visiting family in the United States.  It just so happened that her cousin grew up in the U.S. and is married to my older brother, so of course my brother and sister-in-law introduced us.  The rest, as they say, is history.  We hit it off right away, and have been married nearly 18 years, with one child.

After two years of marriage, we took our first trip to the Philippines in 1996. I thoroughly enjoyed my visit, but had much to learn about the culture, traditions, infrastructure, and daily rhythms of life in the Philippines.  As an American of primarily German and small amount of Irish ancestry, I admittedly experienced some culture shock, one could say, but also a very profound respect and affection for the hospitality, warmth, and traditions of the people of the Philippines.   The latter was not entirely a new concept to me, as I had quite some experience since childhood interacting with Filipino families mainly from Northern Mindanao and Cebu, who had immigrated to my home town in the early 1970's during the Marcos administration.  Having Filipino friends and classmates introduced me to many of the concepts of the Filipino nuclear family and respect for elders, various Philippine foods such as cassava cake, bud-bud, lumpia Shanghai, and gave me some opportunities to learn a few vocabulary words in the Cebuano or Visayan dialect.   My brother's ties to his future wife's family, starting in 1982, gave me further opportunity to visit and interact frequently, so that by the time I asked my wife's father for her hand in marriage (according to Filipino tradition), I had the full endorsement of my wife's uncle, who knew me since I was 13 years old back 1982.   That being said, observing a microcosm of Filipino culture here in the United States amongst a small number of relatively Americanized Filipino families only gave me a slight clue of what life might possibly be like in the Philippines.

In upcoming posts, I'll detail many of the adventures we've had as a family staying and traveling in the Philippines. I will attempt to provide some general information, tips and reviews about traveling in the Philippines, particularly in northern Mindanao and in and around Cebu, but also including Boracay, Baguio, and the Manila environs.  My family and I have a penchant for spectacular natural features (waterfalls, beaches, mountain vistas, etc.), historical sites, and even shopping malls, and I will try to highlight and discuss objectively many of these destinations.   During our visits, we also try to balance visits of luxury beach resorts and hotels with visits to dramatically more modest settings, particularly in the rural provinces.  There, in the provinces, lie arguably the most beautiful features of the Philippines and its people - verdant rice fields backdropped by hazy emerald volcanic mountains beneath billowing cumulus clouds with farmers using carabao (water buffalo); bamboo-thatched nipa huts as a primary  means of housing for many subsistence farmers, "multicab" trucks of amazingly narrow width carrying full loads of people or agricultural products, gorgeous coconut plantations with sweeping seaside vistas, mahogany groves interspersed with camote (root crop) in the foothills and mountains, and along almost every road every few hundred meters, the ubiquitous nipa or corrugated steel-fronted sari-sari roadside store with its ubiquitous Coca-Cola sign stating the family name of the shop owner.  Additionally, I will discuss aspects of Philippine culture and the Filipino people, as well as the joys and challenges of traveling as a family in the Philippines.