First published in Tulay Fortnightly, Chinese-Filipino Digest 27, no. 6 (August 19-September 8, 2014): 13. Last February, the family was out with a friend. My girls, as usual, asked to run off as soon as we were seated at a restaurant. There was an al fresco dining area with no other doors leading to other […]
First published in Tulay Fortnightly, Chinese-Filipino Digest 25, no. 3 (July 10-23, 2012): 11. I recently gave away a bagful of lampin (diapers) through an egroup where members give and get things for free. I told the recipient some pieces are a decade old and have gone through four kids! She asked how my kids […]
Toward the end of 2011, the hubby said that he was going to buy an iPad, but I kept vetoing it. But at the close of 2011, someone gave my mom one. And it all went downhill from there. Early 2012, the husband started a comic strip line – iDad comics – just for our […]
Time is all we have. Time that solidifies into moments. Moments that are priceless. Moments that we can share throughout our lives. There are some things in life worth waking up early for: going to church, a long drive to Baguio, an early morning flight and so on. But bird watching at the University of […]
This past five-day weekend had been both a blast and a horror at home. When the Quezon City government announced on July 8 that classes were suspended until the 10th, I started having palpitations. The girls were going to be stuck in the house with nothing to do and, predictably, they started fighting over every […]
In one conversation with the husband, we noted how our neighborhood was sprouting more children every month. We’re often deathly scared of running over tiny toes whose owners were never taught to step aside when a car is coming along. In the afternoons, we see fathers or mothers dragging a child by the arm with […]
Say these in Hokkien: Di-si-di khong pue khong pue and di-si-di sam it di sam. Our long time staff, Tulay artist Liza Lopez, still has these numbers memorized. So does one former staff, Gemma Ubay, who now lives in Cavite but still visits Kaisa Para Sa Kaunlaran in Intramuros, Manila. I tried those Hokkien syllables […]
“Achi, put down the squash and eat the morcon.” My two girl friends and I were at a restaurant with all our children. They heard me say the words; I heard myself saying those words. We looked at each other and laughed. One commented, “Mali yata sinabi mo.” The incident sums up my family’s restaurant […]
Ever since I became a mother, I have received warnings from friends and family about the dangers of the world. There was that story about shoes or flip flops getting sucked into the steps of an escalator (this really happened to my cousin’s son in California). There’s also that true story about a stranger who […]
For the first time since Achi’s birth in 2007, the hubby and I are going on a long-overdue vacation. Since I am presenting a paper in the Asia Pacific Children’s Museums Conference on Oct. 19-21 in Hawaii, we decided to hit the beach as well. Who’s having the blues? Shobe is now experiencing a severe […]