Filipino vs. American

I can't believe it's been almost a month since I blogged last! I feel so sick constantly with this pregnancy, but hopefully all the nausea goes away soon cause I'm headed into my 2nd trimester next week! My house is a mess, to say the least. I powered through to have it clean for our Thanksgiving party, but since then, I have not been able to keep up. Tommy and I both work, and he's pretty much been helping to do everything around the house. He's such a great husband.

On another note, I can't wait for Christmas! We set up our Christmas tree last week. It's a little fake one that we got when we still lived in an apartment. The other day while I was making lasagna in the kitchen, I heard a huge clash of ornaments hitting the floor... Lucy pulled on an ornament and took the tree down. She didn't even cry or anything, just ran to me scared! haha She got a scratch on her cheek, but no real harm done. Good thing we still have carpet in the living room, or some of our ornaments would not have made it.

Ornaments. Which brings me to why the title of my blog today is. Or maybe I should have titled it California vs. Michigan. While growing up, we didn't collect ornaments. We didn't get a new ornament as a stocking stuffer every Christmas. Ornaments, at least in my parents house, weren't really part of our Filipino traditions.  I'm not talking about the regular red or silver ball kind, but like the Hallmark special kinds. Now, I'm sure that there are some Filipinos out there that do this, but seriously, every Filipino mom I know would probably say, "Ornament? Ha, Wat's da need op dat?" or something like that. [Maybe my Taglish is a little rusty from being so far from Filipinos for so long] Anyways, here, Tommy has had an ornament pretty much every year since he's been born. It's kind of intimidating for me to have people over now cause our Christmas tree just has the regular ornaments kind and there's like 3 "Hallmark" ones that stick out. Compared to everyone else's tree, our's is a noob, like lost-new-kid-Freshman-on-the-first-day-of-school status.

But what I can say is, there's one ornament that my Mother-in-law got for us last year for Lucy. It's a pink rocking horse with a little baby on it and says, "Lucy's 1st Christmas" and when I put it up this year, I just took some time to look at it and remember how Lucy was only 2 months old last Christmas. She was so tiny! And now, within just a year, I have an active toddler who drinks Yoohoo and pulls down Christmas trees!

There's a lot of differences between cultures from just where you live, and then try adding the differences of cultures from a another ethnicity. Sometimes Tommy and I have a hard time compromising between things, but I'm just so glad that we have the same FAITH. Jesus is the foundation of our marriage and we know that without Him, I really don't know how we could do anything. If you're reading this and don't know Jesus as your own Savior, ask me about Him. I'd be glad to share Him with you! =]