of jonathan and gardening

jonathan = family fun = red overalls = rap???

dava helping to gather the weeds that "mister" pulls from the ground.

sorting the weeds.

clearing the weeds away.

these two pictures are my personal favorites...

dirty dirtiness

cousins wousins bousins

intense teach me time with dava

one on one and heart to heart

smush gushed by big sister alms balms

fat and lazy

fat and happy

oh my sleeping child...

hiding from the big bad world

yum scrum good for tum

luther's got the munchies

backtracking...

new and ugly...

sisters and distress

mowgli in the corner

trying to transform our jungle into a yard

luther buther and liney biney

oosh, goosh. squishies!


hair!" says the bald boy2. "gimme some!"
(yes! i finally got to use that "square". for the non-familiar-with-filipino-ways, that "boy2" means: boy boy!)

we are friends, we are friends, we are friends...we are friends to the bitter eeeeend. (yep, that would be jungle book.)

the whiner piners

a toy! get her!

bully wully!

naughtiness

"Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee." (Eze. 28:15)

her own pacifier

don't give up

i'm sorry. i know i posted pictures before, but i couldn't resist the video. lord love these little pooping machines. she was still brand new and learning about the ways of life. in the background meditation moments encourages her: "don't give up!"

the jet set is all wet

or not really (i don't actually even really know how that song goes actually kinda like you know really...whatever).
anyway...this was liney's first rainy adventure:
one afternoon when we were at the park, but started home earlier than planned because dava needed to do some business in the bathroom. and all in good timing, because it started raining. and it wasn't just any rain. it was chubby rain!
i forgot to bring a cover for the stroller. so mommy got wet, dava got wet and baby got wet. unfortunately, dava ditched her clothes as soon (and i mean, AS SOON) as we got to the door. so, i wasn't able to get a picture of all three of us.
speaking of adventures. this little one started early, much earlier than her older sister. her first bus and jeepney ride was when she was two months old...aaaaall the way up to antipolo. dava's first jeepney and trike ride was on her first birthday --and that was just from the house to shopwise to the house (in antipolo). the trike ride was courtesy of none other than chok (i have no idea how you spell his name), lord love him. liney got baby measles at 2 months. dava got it at 10. liney's already baby talking to herself (and the walls, and her hands, and the air, and the bed posts, and the bamboo chime, and dangly toys that never talk back to her). lord help her if she exceeds dava in her wild craziness! :)

vanity and folly

vanity

folly (--because sam had this headband with springy flowers and beaded animals on his head...which, thankfully, you can't see. okay, well you can see a bit of the orange beaded bumble bee in the upper left corner, but, whatever.)

of thrones and fashion

yep, i found her one day, sitting on the toilet with this red hat on...

miscellaneous shots

this was late one night, when she was awake, naughty and whiny. so sam decided to take a picture...the flash made her legs buckle and her head fly back like she got shot. it was quite funny, and terribly pathetic. i felt so bad for her.

just starting to hold her head up. 2 months and something days old.

wearing daddy's boxers.

at wit's end. life is just too hard.

that's her ho-hum-yes-everyone's-being-an-idiot-again-trying-to-make-me-smile face.

Happy Birthday Mama Maria

Celebrating the birthday of a true queen mother to many children (and grandchildren) around the world. This was Dava's video for her on behalf of all of us.

(And yes, I know I cut her hair waay too short...but it grows :)

of prayer and miracles...

This post is long overdue. But, like they always say -- "they" ALWAYS say...who are "they" anyway??? No matter...that's beside the point -- the point is prayer and miracles, and any post on that is better late than never <-- that's what they always say.
Anyway, on with it...

So, Liney (lie-nee: Dava's made up name that we definitely were NOT gonna call her, but which she ended up being called anyway)...so...Liney...her birth was quite the miracle in the first place. Any birth is. I do believe it's called the miracle of life. But a home delivery in 1 hour with no tearing is, as someone put it, "about as good as it gets".
There seemed to be no complications or problems except that for the first couple of days her eyes would get watery when she cried, but then they cleared up right away. Then after a week or so, it came back, just in one eye...all gucky and yucky and green and goopy, crying or no crying, just yucky and gucky.
We tried to keep it clean, but it didn't seem like it was going away. So, in started coming the "maybe you should take her to a pediatrician" suggestions. I could visualize the pediatrician predicting doom and destruction for her little baby eye. I definitely didn't wanna take her in to find out it was the symptoms of the beginning of some lifelong ailment. So that evening instead of singing in the shower (I don't sing in the shower, by the way) I thought about some way out of this pediatrician predicament, and then a light bulb turned on in my brain: "Put God on the spot."
Now, I had been praying for her eye. We had both (Sam and I) been praying for her eye. But we never really put God on the spot. And now I was gonna. I decided that the next day I would pray for her eye every hour, and then, if by the day after that it wasn't cleared, then we would go to the pediatrician. I told Sam, and he agreed to the idea.
"The next day" came, and by the end of it I was crestfallen. Not because her eye hadn't cleared up, but because I had forgotten to pray every hour. So I prayed with all the fervency and earnestness of all the previous hours I should've prayed...and then waited for "the day after".
By the end of "the day after" I realized I had, again, kinda forgotten about her eye situation. (We were very busy at this time, with a lot on our minds. It's not an excuse...it's just fact. Okay...it's a little bit of an excuse.) That evening I looked at Liney's eye and then asked Sam, "Have you cleaned her eye today?" He told me he hadn't. Neither had I. Her eye looked very much almost completely cleared up, except she had what looked like a tiny little bit of "sleep" in it.
The day after that...it was clear...and has been clear until now. The eye-guck is bye-bye and prayer came to stay. It is my first course of action for everything.
Prayer works. Miracles happen.