Here's my new year letter addressed to myself, first of all, our family, as well as ...
To all our family
members, relatives, friends (particularly, those who for some reason we don’t
communicate with that regularly),
From our family to you and your loved ones: we hope
that you had a good holiday season and that the new year that has
just begun be one filled with happiness and fruitfulness for each and every one
of you!
Let me
share some highlights of the past year. 2014 was a year of significant changes
for our family.
In January, Del began her new job in earnest
as a Personal Support Worker (PSW) at Henley Place, a nursing home near our
place. She is employed there full-time with the afternoon and evening shift
(from 2:30 to 10:30 pm). She usually comes home before 11 pm on work
days. She has a regular schedule that involves working every other weekend. In
her free time, Del maintains our household in the best condition. Hajime
and I are really grateful for that! She enjoys cooking and keeping in
touch with events in the Philippines through the Filipino Channel!
Keitlyn-Hajime turned 6 years old last June. She graduated from
Senior Kindergarten at the end of June and started going to a new
school in September, Louise Arbour School, a French Immersion
Public School. In practice, that means that she is "immersed" in
French at school 70% of the time with the remaining 30% in English. We decided
to send her to French Immersion because French is Canada's other official language
(with English of course) and a fluency in French still opens many
doors for one in Canada. Hopefully, Hajime will become functional in both
English and French during her school years and that she can be given more
opportunities in life through that.
Happily, she
likes her new school and has shown a skill in learning a new
language. Maybe her early exposure to both Filipino/Tagalog and
Japanese has helped her in this. One morning as soon she woke up she even told
me, "I want to know many languages like daddy." Of course, daddy's
heart was bursting with pride. She continues to be a stellar student,
earning high praises from her teacher. Outside school, Hajime is
quite a busy little girl, regularly engaged in activities such as
piano lessons, swimming and skating. She did ballet up to June. She wants to
take up Karate in the near future, saying, "I want to learn 'our'
(Japan's) martial arts." In her play time, she enjoys drawing and making
crafts. This year, I noticed that she is particularly into "Monster
High" stuff (if you don’t know that, you don’t have a little girl).
As for me,
on the work front, I continue to enjoy immensely my work of teaching
and research at King's College-Western University. In addition to teaching my
regular biblical studies and religious studies courses, this past year, I
developed three new courses: (1) a course on 'Spiritual Quests and Popular
Culture', where I focused primarily on the Harry Potter Saga and tried to show
students how Harry Potter contains many Christian elements that still form the
cultural stream of Western culture; (2) Religious Pluralism - This is a course
I inherited from King's former principal, Phil Muller. We study the meaning and
significance of having many and diverse religious traditions in the world and
how we can understand each other better; (3) a new course entitled 'Spiritual
but not Religious' - In this course, we studied the relation between
religion and spirituality and how many people nowadays feel moved to look for a
meaningful spirituality outside the boundaries of institutional religion.
On the home
front, Del's new routine means that, on most days, I am in-charge of Hajime
during the crucial after school and bedtime hours. At first, I had doubts and
felt tense about whether I could handle this on my own without Del. After all,
for the first 6 years of Hajime's life, I was only the assistant to Del in
caring for her. Now, after one year of doing this, I can say that I've really
gained new skills and confidence in being able to take care of Hajime even
though mommy isn't around. Of course, I'm so grateful that Del still prepares a
wonderful dinner for us before she leaves for work and we just have to heat it
up but on the odd occasion such as when Hajime can't eat what was
prepared, I've reached the point where I can truly manage to prepare
something for her!
More
significantly, because Hajime and I spend so much time together now because of
mommy's schedule, I've also noticed that the bond between her and me has really
grown strong this past year. 6 years old is a fun age. Moreover, Hajime is a
kid who is sensitive to her surroundings and wonderfully kind-hearted. She is
still basically a very good kid who likes to do well at school and likes to be
happy with her daddy and mommy. After one year of spending a lot of time with
her in this new set-up, I find that I am really really enjoying this
"parenting thing" more than ever although it is not an
easy job. Doing things such as preparing her dinner or snack, helping her
with homework, giving her a bath, reading her books in English and even French
now, writing and drawing with her, just goofing around or snuggled up in front
of the TV ... all these things have become such a part of who I am and,
looking at myself now, I think I have grown significantly in the past year
as a daddy.
Of course,
when Del is off, we try to enjoy our time as a family at home or going out on
short outings such as fruit-picking, maple-syrup observing, skating, skiing
(even), and so forth. These are the happiest times for all of us.
Another significant happening of course is
that on July 31 of last year, we left our townhouse where we lived for 6 years
and moved to a new detached house with 4 bedrooms not far from where we used to
live. So far, we’ve found this new house a very nice place in a very nice
neighbourhood. We are slowly turning it into a true home where each of us can
find love and warmth, things that, we hope, we can extend to all who come to
visit us.
We pray and wish that
this year, 2015, may also be a good year for our family as well as for all of
you, in whatever circumstance you find yourselves!
Sincerely yours,
JKK
