This Rugged JoyFull Home

Domodedovo Airport, Moscow, The Russian Federation— I got off my seat and dragged my weary body outside of the plane where I sat for almost five hours of peaceful flight from Dubai. I paced myself and walked straight to the long tube that led to the long queues that led to the immigration officers that will stamp my PILIPINAS passport that will give me access to enter this  bolshoi nation, sometimes I fondly call this, Mother Russia. Moscow that evening had a welcoming temperature of -3 centigrade and I thought that it was not so bad coming from a +27 centigrade back home in Manila. As I stood there acclimatizing myself with the weather, I realized that the temperature inside the airport was actually rather toasty, as always. I stared at the people's expressionless, perfectly contoured faces and I tried to mentally rehearse what to do next when my turn comes. First, I will remove my eyeglasses; second, I will approach the immigration officer forward and then give her a polite but...

I think that I will never be the same once this pandemic is over. B usinesses where closed, millions of jobs were lost. Then, suddenly, we find every student homeschooling and most workers are home — working. Words like social-distancing, quarantine, hoarding, panic-buying, flattening the bell curve, and lockdown have become just a few of the operative words that the media would use to describe the daily news updates.  This crisis is unprecedented in history. It has put everything to a halt.  All of us are confined to our own homes now and I'm assuming that most days, people are watching from outside of their windows. 'When will this all end?'   My sister who works as a nurse in the Middle East earlier shared a poem to my siblings' social media group chat. I was amazed at how simple yet timelessly written it was. Originally written in  1869 by an unknown writer, it was  reprinted during the 1919 Pandemic that recorded 50,000,000 deaths all over the world a...

"Every marriage is made up of two ingredients, togetherness and separateness. In good marriages, the partners carry equal loads of those. Let's say there are 100 points of togetherness and 100 points of separateness. In a good relationship, one partner expresses 50 points togetherness and 50 points separateness, and the other does the same. They both do things on their own, and that creates some mutual longing for the other, and the togetherness creates some need for separateness."   BOUNDARIES By Dr. Henry Cloud  Part 1 The Season of Togetherness Part 2 The Season of Separateness As quoted above, Dr. Henry Cloud described a  healthy  togetherness and separateness in marriage. But it's interesting to note that this also holds true for  a healthy parent-children relationship especially for  home-educating  families, presuming that they have a close relationship with each other. This is the kind of perspective that helped you process and...

Part 1 The Season of Togetherness Part 2 The Season of Separateness How to wrap around your mama-heart, the thought of your daughter leaving home for college in Manila, Philippines? It's nursery, kinder 1, kinder 2, and then grades 1 to 12, we're talking about 15 wonderful years of preparing her for this season of going to college. 'She's finally on her own now and away from your leashes' was a joke that somehow felt like a reality. But would those 15 years be enough to train her to overcome the challenges of university life and eventually the real life for which she was called for a purpose? Yes. You thought so.  You will worry and you will be scared naturally, thinking about how she will survive mostly living on her own in the big city. But that is not how you're going to take this season in your life. It's not about the worrying or the doubting, although you can't deny that this struggle is real. Now what is this all about, then? This is all about yo...