This Rugged JoyFull Home

In my recent blog posts, I briefly shared my insights on the seasons of togetherness and separateness . It's a process, an ongoing journey that I embrace wholeheartedly, as underscored by what's going on in the world now. Every country is on a preventive COVID-19 lockdown. It is important to mention that as I labor and pounce on the keyboard, my husband, my children, and I are in three different geographic locations, namely Moscow, Batangas, and Mindoro. What a way to illustrate "separateness" and "growth" when you are actually living it! I think that I will never be the same once this pandemic is over. Businesses were closed and millions of jobs were lost. Then, suddenly, we found every student homeschooling and most workers at home — working. Words like "social distancing," "quarantine," "hoarding," "panic buying," "flattening the curve," and "lockdown" have become just a few of the operative wor...

  "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 of togetherness and 50 points of 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 2 The Season of Separateness As quoted above, Dr. Henry Cloud described a healthy togetherness and separateness in marriage. But it is interesting to note that this also holds true for a healthy parent-child 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 prepare for what would inevitably happen in the future as your daughter...

Part 1  The Season of Togetherness How do you wrap your mama-heart around the thought of your daughter leaving home for college in Manila, Philippines? From nursery, kinder 1, and kinder 2, to grades 1 through 12—we are 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 leash" was a joke that somehow felt like reality. But would those 15 years be enough to train her to overcome the challenges of university life, and eventually, the real world for which she was called for a purpose? Yes. You think so. You will worry and you will be scared naturally, thinking about how she will survive living mostly on her own in the big city. But that is not how you're going to take this season of your life. It's not about worrying or doubting, although you can't deny that this struggle is real. What is this all about, then? This is all about your posture—how you're going to welcome the ine...

"Consider it all JOY, brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing." James 1:2-4 Consider it all JOY, my brethren, when you encounter various trials... such as the tragedy that struck my family last October 3, when two gun-wielding criminals riding a motorbike fired multiple shots at my eldest brother and his 15-year-old son. It happened so fast—in a split second—that both of them died on the spot in broad daylight, right in the driveway of their own home. It was difficult watching the news on national TV and on the internet in the following days. It was a double-murder tragedy. I've seen hundreds of news stories like this before. But this day was different. This was my brother. This was my nephew. You and I both know that a tragedy is a tragedy; it is unthinkable, it cuts so deep, and the shards of glass feel perma...

Last year, during the same month of July, our family went to a dinosaur museum in Moscow to celebrate our Noah's 10th birthday. It was a dream come true for him; a decade-long wait was over. How time flies around here, and now he turns 21 11! He is our boy from the wild, and below is a poem to prove it, just in case you can't tell. He's been into poems lately. And I guess too much rain in the Philippines lately has been making him write poems to curtail the boredom that's starting to seep in. The Ocean By Noah Isaiah The deep, deep ocean, Dark and blue, Is teeming with life You never knew. Underneath this world, You will hear The call of a Whale That is near. Its scars, visible From the fight with a Squid, And it is gone; In its stomach, it is hid. Millions of plankton Lurking around Is one of the most beautiful things You have ever found. As you ascend, you see a fin— A Shark! Its face, a dreadful grin. As you swim away, you see a fleet; This made the hungry Shark fe...