This year is Aya’s third year at the daycare, but this is the first time for her (and for us) to participate in the annual “undoukai” or sportsfest organized by the Takezono daycare. When she was in the “Tulip” class, or zero-old class, they as babies were of course exempted from participating. Last year, when she was in the “Bara” class or one-year-old class, we were in Florida the first week of October, so she also missed it. This year, we had no choice but to participate in the event – although begrudgingly so at first. The teachers had initially scheduled the event for October 5, and the children even had rehearsals weeks before the event. Alas, it rained on that day, so they postponed it for the following day – as long as it didn’t rain again. Well, the following day was a bit cloudy, and the ground was still wet from the previous day’s rains, but they decided to go ahead with it. So that means that we had to wake up very early for two consecutive days, because they make the decision about whether to hold the sportsfest or not on the day itself, quite very early in the morning. We had to wait for their call, at 6 am! Waking up early was also necessary, because we had to prepare Aya’s packed lunch for the day as well. At any rate, last October 6, I was really not in the mood for any sportsfest, and with such a gloomy weather outside, I couldn’t imagine how the kids would be able to enjoy it. I thought it was so cruel of them to subject the kids to some silly sportsfest. I mean, really, now! In this kind of weather?!! Bah, humbug. Call me the Mrs. Scrooge of sportsfest. This is not the olympics, baby, this is just the daycare sportsfest.

Aya and Baggy working hard to finish the relay. Prior to this basket-pulling Aya had to go through a “tunnel” first. That’s parent-child teamwork for you!

I was wrong on all counts. The weather sort of cooperated, with a bit of sunshine every now and then, and it even got quite warm sometime during 11 am or so. And oh boy, the kids had fun – their faces were beaming as they ran around the mini-oval. And the little kids in Aya’s class (2-3 year olds) were so AWFULLY CUTE while running like mini-athletes. The happy looks on their faces was worth every effort. It was the first time for me to participate in such an event – and so beforehand I couldn’t quite understand why we really have to bother with it, especially with kids at such a young age. I don’t recall having something like this when I was in preschool! Actually, I don’t think we have sportsfests for elementary children in the Philippines. Well, at least that goes for my experience in public schools. I reckon the private schools might organize something like this.

Twice I watched the video we took, and each time I could see how this sportsfest was worth every parent’s time and effort. I took a day’s leave from the office, and Baggy had to sacrifice four hours of his attendance to work. In my opinion, every dad of every kid there should try their darndest to attend it – sadly, about 70% of the parents there were “okaasans” (moms). The “otoosans” (dads) were obviously too busy with their work or whatever else.

The children not only had fun – they learned about teamwork and performing with one’s best. The parents constantly shouted, “Gambare!” (do your best) while their little ones romped around the field. I particularly liked the “track-and-field” game. Sometimes a kid would skid or stumble. But he/she would be cheered on by parents and teachers and would be encouraged to still finish the game by all means. I don’t know, I was just so moved by all of it.

All classes had games were the children were able to participate with their parents. Take note, there were no losers and winners. No individual was honored because he/she finished first, or ran the fastest. It was no place for individual recognitions, just friendly games of sorts where everybody could have a good time. Everybody got a medal. The five-year-olds got the real gold medals, though, while the other classes got these cute paper medals prepared by their teachers. They get the real ones because they will be graduating at the end of this fiscal year and will be moving on to kindergarten the following year. Also, all children were also rewarded with “Shabon dama” or bubble-making contraptions after the games.

Can’t wait till next year’s sportsfest!

Heartfelt congratulations to my batchmate and very good friend, Jon Co, and Cathy, who were married last September 12, 2005. Sorry I missed it! At least some of my family members were able to attend it. I kind of emphatize with Jon because of the long-distance “marital” affair that they had to put up with for the meantime. Well, at least you don’t have to wait for four long years like we did! 🙂

Congratulations and best wishes, Jon and Cathy!

Enough of the serious side for now. I have the wackiest sisters on earth; whenever I’m with them I can let down my guard and just be plain old me. We still sneeze at each other’s faces whenever we could. We still dry our wet hands on each other’s unsuspecting backs. We still observe other people and laugh about their appearances. We still communicate in our special language and sisters-only words. Baggy sometimes couldn’t understand what in the world we are talking about. We are all Daddy’s girls.

Miss you both, you wicked sisters.

Lai, hindi balanced. Karen and I still need an additional little head to insert between us 😛

Excerpts from an article written by Raj Persaud in September 10/11 issue of Financial Times (highlights are mine):

Winning Mental Ways

What is it that determines your sense of well-being? Is it the events in your life or your perception of what might have been?

An example of such thinking, referred to by psychologists as “counterfactuals,” is what takes place when you run to catch a train. If you almost make it, before the doors close on your face, you are often more upset than if you had arrived half an hour late for the train.

One of the most intriguing and controversial studies found that at the Olympic games in Barcelona 13 years ago, bronze medallists appeared happier than silver medallists. The finding was surprising not least because winning silver is by definition a better outcome than winning bronze. Why, then, the relatively long faces of runner-ups?

Why is it that silver medallists don’t look down rather than up when comparing themselves with fellow athletes? If a downward comparison makes us feel better in life, what drives some of us to incessantly compare ourselves with those doing better than us and, as a result, ensure we feel inadequate?

Both academic psychologists and economists have noticed that substantial increases in wealth are not accompanied by similar rises in well-being, and have explained this paradox by a human tendency to compare themselves asymetrically – in other words, we focus on those doing better than us.

Study after study on wealth and income finds that it is who we compare ourselves with rather than what we objectively have that determines our overall well-being, so it is the CHOICE of reference group that now becomes crucial in determining our happiness.

An intriguing exception to this thinking has been found in a study by Claudia Senik, an economist at the University of Paris at Sorbonne, and published in the Journal of Public Economics. She discovered that in unstable economies such as Russia’s, individuals take the reference income of the wealthy not as a discontented comparison but as an indication of their possible future. Senik argues that in certain economies individuals observing richer people around them take this as a sign that their own income may soon increase, which then adds to their happiness.

If it is what could be that determines our happiness, rather than what is, the good news is that we can seize control of our well-being by becoming more aware of what conspires in our environment to direct our attention to particular comparisons, expectations and alternative outcomes, and what moulds our thinking.

Yesterday we went around the block near our hotel, and to our surprise, found that most of the interesting sights could really be found practically around the corner. We went to see the famous Capuchin vault (foundation stone laid in 1622), the place where they kept the Imperial crypt. Crypt, you ask? Yes, a bunch of old bones of the Habsburgs imperial household. Surprisingly, it was not creepy at all. There were actually many visitors to the vault. We had to pay 4.00 Euro each to get inside.

The double sarcophagus holding Empress Maria Theresa (1717-1780) and her husband Franz Stephan (1708-1765).

Well, it’s all in the packaging (as in my title above). The double sarcophagus was so enormous, so elaborately done that it would be almost difficult to imagine that it was holding the bones of some dead persons inside. Well, not just any “ordinary” person. I guess even in death they want that to be known. They lived no ordinary lives. But then again, they’re no deader than the commoner buried in an unknown cemetery elsewhere. Death is humbling, the great equalizer. No doubt about that.

This is the last entry here while in Vienna. We will be leaving today for Japan. That’s an 11-hr, 30-min flight for us.

For the record, I would like to say that this is probably the most educational trip for me. Probably for Baggy too. We’d been to so many churches in a span of one week (and that’s many times more than we had ever been to in any given year, hehe). I will be posting more interesting pictures in our photo album later.

Plague column at the Graben square, high baroque built 1682-1693. Originally wooden, it was erected in 1679 and dedicated to the Holy Trinity to commemorate the plague which hit Vienna.

So what does it feel like to be in this amazingly vibrant, old but progressive city? Never mind the exhaustion and the jet lag, this is the place to be! We are currently lodging at Astoria Hotel, right smack in the middle of Karntner Strasse avenue, the haven of tourists and shoppers alike. The first night we spent here, we were treated to a piano solo-concert by some lady playing just across the street. Because there is no airconditioner in our room, we usually have to open the windows to let in the cool, fresh air from the outside. Thus we are usually treated to all sorts of sounds streaming in through our window, ranging from soothing music to outright annoying noise. Walking along this avenue, one can find all sorts of musicians and other performers doing their stuff for the amusement of passersby and gawking tourists like us. Walking along this avenue, we saw live performance by string musicians, a puppet show, a colorful native dance, and a number of young men doing breakdancing. So much vigor, sights, and sounds in one place.

It was pretty weird to actually visit the renowned Belvedere palace, after seeing the miniature replica in Tobu World Square. I can assure you that it is the real thing that was photographed here (hehe).

St. Stephen’s cathedral, undoubtedly by far the largest Gothic cathedral I’ve ever seen, is a few hundred meters away from our hotel. This cathedral is the city’s symbol, and is actually incorporated into the logo of this year’s conference. In fact, I agree with the president of the Vienna University of Technology when, during his welcome speech, he told everyone that Vienna is probably the most “culturally dense” city in the world. In our hotel room we have this large replica painting of Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss.” Albertina, which houses a large collection of paintings, is right next block. We have already visited it and were treated to a visually enthralling collection of Rudolf von Alt’s works. Within a 2-km radius, one can access museums, theatres and operas, churches. Most shops are closed on Sundays, so we were told, because Viennese people are so religious that they all go to church. But then again maybe not everyone goes to church, really, as evidenced by the hordes of people walking along Karntner Strasse last Sunday when we went out.

At Schonbrunn Palace

Ah yes, the conference. The main reason why we’re here in the first place. Tried to absorb as much as I could, hoping to scavenge for new ideas in relation to my work. For some reason I feel as if this year’s Eucas doesn’t possess the same oomph as it had in the previous years. The largest delegation, as usual, comes from Japan. Well, that is not surprising at all.

Unfortunately, Aya has been sick since yesterday, and so we couldn’t go around as much as we normally could. Too many tourists in one place, I tell you – it is just the perfect brew for catching viruses and such. We really have to be choosy about where to take our little precious next time. We have learned our lesson the hard way. Still…the thought of spending all that time away from your loved ones…it could get pretty lonely and depressing when traveling alone. In the long run, it is really not the place where you go to that matters, but whom you go with. It is heartbreaking to think of our little trio not being able to go places together again.

Get well, Aya. We’re going home soon.

Been too busy to blog lately. No time for dillydallying and other trivial matters. Finally, my poster is finished and ready to go to the EUCAS conference next week. Before we leave, I thought I’d put here a preview of our poster.

When Baggy saw it, he could only utter one word. “Colorful.” 🙂

This is just one third of the total area of my poster.

We tried to postpone planning for our homecoming this Christmas for as long as possible – in hopes of avoiding the usual headaches that goes with it. Tried anyway. We couldn’t proscrastinate for too long. It is the end of August – we would be lucky to find cheap airfares this time of year.

Last year, we took the 10-day ticket offered by Northwest, which was valued at almost half the price of the other available tickets. Since Aya was already two years old, she had to have a seat of her own, and so we have to buy tickets for all of three of us. We chose to go home on December 19, then went back to Japan ten days later, two days shy of New Year’s Day.

Belatedly, we realized that the vacation was too short, and the New Year’s eve we spent here at home ogling each other for lack of something to do was enough for us to carefully plan our vacation the following year. Not again, we promised.

We tried to exhaust the options available for us, including booking for a one-way flight using reward miles accumulated in our Northwest card (not a chance, we learned), and booking for a roundtrip ticket in the Philippines. The cheapest flight we could find is worth 100k plus – multiply that by three – this adds up to a rather hefty sum. Argh. 🙁

We could go to the US on that price alone. (Surprisingly, flights to the US are quite cheap that time of year.) Or visit some place we’ve never been before. Heck, even to Europe if we had enough guts to endure winter there. Why spend all that money going back to the same place we’ve been to many times already? Why go back and endure the heat, traffic, stressful Christmas shopping at the malls? And consider this – it’s the one single vacation that wins the honor of being the grandest spending of the year. Everything goes out, nothing comes in. No thanks to the commercialization of Christmas. If there’s one thing we hate doing in January, it’s looking at the credit card transactions of the month before.

Well,the answer is simple: our family. How many times in a year do we get to see them, anyway?

Since Daddy died, I have viewed homecoming in an entirely different light. I could have been home that last December (the year before he died) – and we could have spent one more Christmas together as a family. But I decided to forego our supposed trip in December because we had already gone home three months earlier to attend my sister’s wedding. Little did I know that he would be gone in five months’ time. What makes me think that my family will always be there when I go home? What assurance do I have that every time we go home everybody else would be present? If I knew that this particular meeting would be our last, wouldn’t it be worth any effort, time and money? Money can be earned in the coming days. The opportunity, if not seized, is lost forever.

For us, Christmas is more than just a holiday or celebration. It has, and always will be, family time. Try putting a price tag on that.

Last Friday night, I was able to watch a special documentary at NHK channel regarding the “world’s worst single-aircraft accident in history,” which happened 20 years ago (read more about the story here). That incident involved a Boeing 747 operated by JAL. The aircraft crashed somewhere in Gunma prefecture. Five hundred and twenty persons perished on that ill-fated day. I have harbored such a high regard of JAL all these years – making the erroneous judgment that the more expensive airline usually implies better service. Pity. I didn’t know about the accident until now. In that TV feature, there were at least two surviving relatives whose stories made such an impression on me. One of them was a lady who lost her 9-yr old son. The other one was another lady who lost her husband. She was pregnant at the time of the crash. Her now full-grown 19-year old son remains as the only living remembrance of her husband.

My heart goes out to those people who are still clearly in pain after all these years. I do emphatize with them. Such is the lot that is assigned to us, those who survive after the death of a loved one.

This heartbreaking story has barely begun sinking in (though quite belatedly, given that it has been 20 years since the accident) when just last Sunday, another plane crash grabbed the headlines. A Boeing 737 operated by Helios Airways crashed in Greece, killing all 121 persons aboard. Among the casualties was a yet undetermined number of children. Being a parent, I couldn’t begin to imagine the pain their parents (if not with them inside the plane) are currently going through. No parent ever deserved to see their children die.

While checking for related stories to this recent incident at CNN, to my horror, yet another plane crashed somewhere in Venezuela today, this time with 152 souls aboard the aircraft.

Why so many fatal errors in aircraft safety lately?

Flying is always risky business, but it is usually the only means to get to wonderful, exotic places in the world.

Aya has already flown so many times with us. As soon as she is buckled up on her seat, she would lean forward and grab the safety instruction card inserted at the back of the front seat. Together, we would go through each illustration and I would explain to her the meaning of each one. Like what to do when the aircraft lands on water. What to do when the oxygen masks drop down. Where to find the emergency exits. It is a habit which started the first time during a long-haul flight to Hungary. She was getting restless and was making a lot of noises. Quite unprepared, and not having anything else of interest to divert her attention, I grabbed the safety instruction card and explained it to her. Apparently, she never forgot about it, and every time we flew she always remembered to take out the card out of the seat. How could I ever make her understand that it’s no fun to actually see oxygen masks dangling in front of our noses, if and when such a situation ever happens? How can I tell her that for the life of me, I could never, ever be so enthusiastic about having to pull out that life vest under my seat? What good will a life vest do if the plane crashes on a mountain?!!

It seems to me that every parent who flies is fearful of only one thing: that of actually having their children aboard with them. It takes courage to move out of the home’s comfort zone. It takes sheer determination and patience to put them on a flight, especially on long-haul ones. There’s always a risk in everything, transportation certainly one of them. We have never traveled anywhere without travel insurance, not since Aya began her globetrotting with us. It’s such a helpless feeling, to be at the mercy of the pilot’s skills and training, the maintenance crew, the weather, the aircraft itself. The check-in counter is not just a place to check-in your luggage. You are practically checking in your life as well. What happens henceforth is out of your control. I think it’s no coincidence that we use the same word – departure – to refer to both airplane flights and, well, the one we all take: the trip of no return.

If it’s your time, then it’s your time. Any adult would probably have no qualms about that. But for a child…it is simply unacceptable; it runs counter to any human reasoning. Any loving, caring parent will forget about self-preservation in a heartbeat when their child is in the slightest of danger. For the slightest turbulence we experience while flying, I always find myself reaching out to Aya in panic and grabbing her hand in desperation. Talk about being a paranoid mother.

We will be leaving in four weeks’ time. Aboard an aircraft which, hopefully, would safely make the trip, as with all the previous ones we’ve taken. In the meantime, even in the light of the recent aircraft disasters, I would try to convince myself that the probability of the plane crashing is ridiculously small. For the safety of my daughter, I would very much like to believe that to be true.

What else is there to do? Que sera sera.

This past week, we were on our own again. After being pampered like small kids for almost six months, we are back to the juggling act again. The so-called juggling act between domestic and work affairs, that is. If you asked me why I’ve been so productive at work, I would tell you that it’s because my mother was around all this time to help me take care of my daughter, and that she had practically managed all of our household affairs. For instance we didn’t have to worry about taking our daughter to the daycare in the morning and picking her up in the afternoon. Mom took care of that for us. We didn’t have to worry about what to eat for dinner. Again, Mom made sure that there was always something hot and delicious waiting for us when we get home. She took care of logistics, food, and cleaning. Aya is the litterbug of our home, as any toddler is I suppose, but Mom made sure to clean up after her, every time. What more could you ask for? Indeed, life was a bed of roses. 🙂

Sayonara for now Lola. Aya gave her Lola a goodbye kiss at Narita.

Well, all that has changed. Since last week we were back to cleaning our own mess, making our own meals, and taking care of our daughter. As it should be, right? It’s going to be a difficult adjustment for us, but in time I’m sure we’ll be humming along with the rhythm just fine.

That’s the downside of living here in Japan. In absence of household help, you have to do everything from housekeeping to taking care of the children. That’s no easy task – just ask any homemaker or stay-at-home wife and mother. If both parents are working, then at least it’s possible for them to put the kids in the daycare while they are at work. The good news is that at least the daycare system here is efficient and trustworthy, and they still involve parents in various ways and organized activities. I mean, you just don’t haul your children to the daycare and leave them there like that. There is a daily checklist of things to provide and submit. Everyday involves bringing clean, dry towels, bibs and clothes, and taking the same used items back home at the end of the day. There are monthly height and weight measurements, and occasional health and dental checkups. Everything is recorded in the kid’s health booklet, which is submitted to the parents for signing as with a student’s report card. There are dozens of handouts written in Japanese – enough to give you a headache if you didn’t know enough Japanese. And before I forget to mention, everyday I have to write in Japanese in Aya’s “renraku no-to” – a some sort of written form of communication between parents and daycare teachers. It’s like forced writing in Japanese, everyday – argh! If it’s any consolation for me, the daycare teachers probably have a more difficult time making sense of my bad Japanese grammar and childlike scrawlings of kanji characters. Hey, at least I try to write something. The very first few days when Aya attended daycare, I left my portion of the page blank – until I was reprimanded for it. So now I write whatever comes to mind. Mundane things like if Aya’s pooping fine or not. 😛 No, seriously. It makes them feel better that I am paying attention to my child’s condition.

For working parents, it is inevitable for “work” to continue all the way home, and parents don’t “clock out” until their kids are fast asleep. I don’t know that it’s more advantageous, in the long run, for a child to grow up under 100% parenting at home. At any rate, this is not a possible option for us, with both of us working. Aya has been attending daycare since she was 10 months old. The advantage is that she is growing up to be quite a sociable kid, and even bilingual at that (Nihongo and Tagalog). Years from now she would probably be speaking Japanese much better than us. Already she is picking up a lot of English words from the cartoons she watches on tv. I’ve also started communicating to her in English. Her learning rate is tremendous.

Tomorrow is Monday. We will be waking up early in the morning to prepare breakfast, Aya’s things for the daycare, ourselves, and everything else to start another working week. Oh yes, tomorrow is also “obento no hi” at the daycare, so that means that we also have to prepare Aya’s packed lunch.

Time to buckle up, indeed.