Putting some scaffolding in place...

We've been here 4 months now. Wow. We're getting to the point where it's feeling a lot more like this is our life. I was told early on that it would take about 6 months to feel like this was home, and that seems right. But I'm a lot more at home than I was even a month ago.

I no longer wake up and wonder where I am. That's good, right? :)

As part of the settling in process, I got super sick with a virus and cough and couldn't get much energy back for about 3 weeks. It feels like it was a waste of a month, but now I know that it came at a normal trough point for expats anyway. Being sick made the trough worse, I'm sure, but I might have lost my enthusiasm for adventure anyway. So we didn't do any adventuring, despite having the van again and a driver to take us around Manila. I didn't have it in me.

BUT... I signed Seth up for a Makebot class for 4 Saturday afternoons at the local science museum. He LOVES it. When I pick him up, he's practically jumping out of his skin with enthusiasm, so excited to tell me what he programmed his bot to do. Big win for him.

We had our pictures put up on the walls. That made this place finally feel like a home to me. I should've asked to have it done before I did. I wish I hadn't waited.

We joined a local, mostly Filipino homeschooling co-op. We're going to give it a try for 8 weeks and see how it goes, but Seth loves the Filipino hip hop dance class, and he's made a friend who also loves coding. They're all taking a musical theater class that seems to be good, and the younger boys are taking an art class while Seth is in dance.

Baguio, part 3

The indigenous peoples of Baguio are the Cordillera people. We went to a little tourist village to find out how they lived. (This is probably our equivalent of going to a Native American historic site and seeing teepees and wigwams, if that helps ya any.)

This is a rice growing region. On our way to Baguio, we saw field upon field of rice paddies, marked into squares. Sometimes farmers were working them with plows, but they were mostly being worked with special tillers. All over Baguio there are small rice markets you can see as you drive through town.

The boys are sitting by an old Cordillera rice granary. The rice gods sit in the granary to protect the harvest.

Baguio, part 2...

Despite my Baguio illness, we got out and were touristy. There is a great park in the middle of Baguio called Burnham Park, and we headed there on a sunny morning. We rented a boat to take out on the little pond. For about $3 U.S., we got the boat for 30 minutes. You could also pay for someone to row the boat for you for $1 more.

I took that deal. 

The boys were singing and yelling piratey things like, "Take that, scurvy dogs!" at other people in boats. We got a lot of grins. At one point, I asked if they could take turns helping him row with one of the oars. Seth did well with it, and so did Evan, but Ben's attempt had us about to run into another boat. Everyone in their boat and even our serious looking rower were laughing about that one. He managed to keep us from collision, but it was a close call. :)

There was a place where you could rent riding toys, and a long, blocked off road for riding them. So  awesome for kids. Ben abandoned his riding toy in frustration after he couldn't keep up with his brothers, so I got to do the walk of shame down the middle of the road dragging a tantruming boy.

I'd read about a place where they make fresh pandesal, so we tried Cafe by the Ruins Dua. You could watch them rolling out the dough and then shaping it, and when it came to our table, it was steaming when we pulled it apart. Best pandesal I'll probably ever have, and at this point, I've become a pandesal fan. I buy it a lot of places that I see it now. We had it with mango jam here, which was masarap (delicious), but we just eat it with butter at home. :)

Baguio, part 1...

David had a work conference in Baguio, a town about 5-6 hours north of Manila, so we decided to tag along for part of it. He went up early in the week, and we followed on Wednesday.

We are so blessed to be able to stay at the U.S. Embassy property in Baguio. Nature and privacy are really hard to come by in the Philippines in my newbie experience, so it was so amazing to be able to just let the boys out of the house to catch bugs for hours and know that they were totally safe. It was like having a fantastic back yard to play in again. I'm not kidding when I say that they were out there for hours each day while we were there.

This was especially good because the really bad fever and cough virus that had already run through the rest of the family got me after we arrived. I'm thankful that I could just lay in the bed and cough and know that they were so well occupied.

One of their finds. This was the coolest moth.

Who says the Philippines are just tropical? These mountains look really volcanic to me. I suspect Hawaii looks a lot like this, though I've never been.