My multicultural baby

First of all, mestizo, as Filipinos have coined the term, typically means someone who is European-Filipino.
However, it's traditional Spanish meaning is used to define European-Native American people. Anyway, that's not the case for Filipinos so lets leave it at that and carry on.

My son has known for a very long time that he is Filipino. It's the only cultural/ethnic background he truly identifies with. He understands more of the Filipino dialects used at home by my parents than I do and he's growing up with the same cultural upbringing that I did.

He knows he's "half white" because ever since he was two years old, he was able to distinguish the difference in skin tone between him and me. In fact, if you look at all of our pictures together, it's clear to see that he's a good ten shades lighter than me which he used to ask about when he was younger. Now that he knows why he's white and I'm brown, it doesn't phase him so much to ask or even notice. However, he still gets so intrigued with cultures and different languages that it's frequently brought up in discussion.

When people ask him what his background is, he will tell you he's Filipinos though sometimes he will say he's Irish.
However, his dad is a mangia at something like seven generations of Canadian that define his ancestry, so despite the fact that his grandparents are Irish and he has flurries of Scottish, and randomly enough, Swedish spackled throughout his blood line - none of these cultures have ever had a distinguishing effect on who his dad is or where his ancestors came from.

Anyway, because my son is a little learner, he frequently asks questions about places he hears about in the news or in today's pop culture. China, Spain, Japan, Italy and France have been brought up by him within the last month or so just because he's heard of them somewhere and it piqued his curiosity to ask about them. It's hard to tell Matheson about things that I'm not personally familiar with, but thanks to our library at home, I have tons of books and magazines that have informational passages and articles on different traditions and practices of cultures around the world.

Lately, I've been familiarizing myself with different findings in countries all over the world and reading about traditions practiced by different cultures. I haven't relayed much to my son as of yet, but now when he asks, I have something to say. The best part about it is that he loves the conversation and he loves learning new things. When we learn about different cultural practices together, he's been asking all the right questions to understand the concepts better.

It might sound weird, but I'm raising my son to be my best friend. I love having someone to talk to about those things, and comparatively, I've found that I enjoy his intellectual level not because of how well he understands any of , but how willing he is to even understand it at all.

Anyway back to the mestizo thing. My son is trying to understand what Irish is. Its hard for me to explain to him because there isn't much I know about the Irish culture either. I mean other than the standard stereotypes like - all-day breakfast, Irish castles and green plains and hills, plus the fact that gaelic is cool, and a lot of people get celtic knots tattooed to their bodies without understanding why, I literally know nothing about Irish culture.

I want him to know a bit of his lineage and where he's from but only because he's expressed his own want to. His dad is not a part of his life, but even if he was, he wouldn't have much to contribute to the realm of cultural diversity in Matheson's upbringing. So I'm taking it upon myself to figure this out and maybe come up with some good findings about where Matheson's bloodline comes from.
The fact of the matter is, when I get older and have more children under the family structure that I still faithfully want to have for my home, I want all my children to identify with all the cultures that both their parents identify with. With varying cultural differences, its clear that definite culture may not define them, but whoever they are and wherever they are from, I want all my kids to be aware of what is inherently a part of them and of their family.

In Matheson's case, his dad didn't know anything about where he was from and had no cultural upbringing in that sense. He was very much Canadian as Canadian gets. But lately Matheson has clearly expressed the unfairness in being the only one in our family who is not full Filipino. He just didn't fully understand what the other half was and now he wants to know more. Although I have to start from the beginning with Irish culture and history, it made me a little bit glad to know that my son wanted to know. Being five years old, most kids don't really understand culture. I guess giving my son a globe as part of his Christmas gifts two years ago helped him define cultures based on the locations of certain countries and regions. However, my little learner has a taken a new step in his curiosity to figure out who he is and where he's from.

Anyway, I invite anyone with LEGITIMATE and VALID information about the Irish culture to talk to me/teach me about it because when I say I know nothing, I literally know nothing about Irish culture. At the end of the day, I just really don't want my son to see his mixed background as something that disables him from associating with different cultural groups - as we know through high school experiences - cliques are typically ethnic based.
I want his knowledge of his backgrounds and other people's backgrounds to enable him. I want him to understand that just because his bloodline is composed of two radically different ethnic groups that are defined through different practicing cultures, it is not something that should ever separate who he is into two different parts. Race and ethnicity are always difficult to teach a child. Culture has a huge role in defining who you are as a person, but it should never deter anyone's ability to respect someone else.

I want my son to embrace who he is for everything that makes him him. But I also want him to respect everyone for who they are and if they choose to identify themselves by their ethnic brackgrounds then I want him to want to know more about them. I want him to learn and assess before passing judgement. I don't want him to be afraid of what's different, I want him to understand why it's different and learn about it until what was once different becomes familiar. But most importantly, I want him to appreciate the fact that no matter how many questions he asks, how much information he comes by, and how much he learns, people, things, places, will always be different, and though no one is expecting him to change for them or to be different with them, he needs to respect them despite what he doesn't understand of them.

Planning Matty's Party! Pt. I

For those of you who aren't entirely aware of my business, I'm basically the person you go to when you want anything party/event-related done. I literally cover anything that involves parties and events - including the planning.
Anyway, it's not that I'm looking to advertise myself on my personal blog, but for those of you who want to see a little more of what I do, over the next couple of weeks until July 19th, I'll be writing blog posts with updates of how I'm putting my son's birthday party together.

Although this also means that many of the guests won't be surprised with how it all comes together, it'll be a little helpful to anyone out there planning a 5 year old birthday party.

Anyway first thing is first: my son's party!

This year, we jumped through 20 different themes, but we both finally settled on a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle theme. For those of you who haven't watched the modern adaptations of the show that first introduced itself in 1987, this newer version is actually pretty good - definitely not the same, but pretty good. The turtles kept the same character traits and roles. However, they gave new faces to the enemies and old familiar faces like April and Casey, but it's still really good. Not to mention that the voice actors include two bigger names in pop culture: Sean Astin and Jason Biggs aka Sam Wise and The Pie Fucker (I never said my blog posts were rated G).

Moving on, I have a lot of things planned, but I'll reveal all of them gradually throughout the next month.
I think the first thing on the list would be invitations.

So if you haven't already ordered invitations from me, or know that I design and make them, well I made my son's invitations.
Staying consistent with the theme, I chose to make ninja turtle silhouette cut outs in green with the ninja masks. They turned out really well.

I designed the typography because that's also something I enjoy doing. Let me tell you, it's bloody murder to one's creative ability when you're limited to two design options - green turtles, and juvenile. However, I had a lot of fun making them and even though I developed an aneurysm because I couldn't stick to the "pretty" designs I'm used to creating, my son was very pleased and that was what mattered the most.

Anyway, after making roughly 50 of these invitations, they are now ready to be handed out and mailed to our friends and family. Yay for us!

The next on the list was planning out the decor. Why? Because I don't need to wait for the RSVPs to determine how I plan to decorate for the party.
That however brings me to the "Planning Matty's Party! Pt. II" topic for next week.
The perks about having an event planning business is that I can go all out without spending a buttload because I'm my own vendor. For those of you who also don't know, I also make dried foliage and faux floral arrangements for home decor - at special request.
Anyway, I proposed the question on facebook asking whether it was appropriate to have fresh florals for my son's birthday party and obviously many people were against the idea because he's five and he's a boy and it's teenage mutant ninja turtles.
Instead, I went to my distributor warehouse and picked up a bunch of knick knacks, including black canna bamboo, green-dyed asian bamboo, black kambol springs and cane springs, moss balls and olive stemmed-jhinga and faux satin hydrangea bunches in mojito green. With those, I made arrangements in a clear vase stuffed with black sizzle fill.

Anyway, I picked up a lot of other materials- from green, black, grey, brown, purple, red, blue and orange. However, the purpose for those won't be explained until after I've made them. I have a very busy evening ahead of me so I think this is all I have time for now anyway.
Again, for those of you who want me to write about something more specific, feel free to share your thoughts, suggestions, opinions, etc. I'd love to hear what you want me to write about. And I'm also taking down suggestions for my Throwback Thursday post this week.

What to write about...

I'm having a wee bit of a writer's block and brain fart combo. If anyone has any topic suggestions for me, I'd like to hear it. Maybe I'll just do a Q&A post for once?

Anyway shoot the suggestions my way, I want to know what you want to read.
And that concludes the interactive portion of today's exercise, folks!

Please and Thank You

I'm pretty sure we can all agree that one of the very first things we try to teach our children are manners.

If there's one thing that has stuck around in "parenting" through the ages, it's the level of regard we hold for basic propriety.

The moment our children are able to verbalize a request for "more" we immediately start teaching them how to make requests with "please" and how to accept generosities with "thank you". At this point, if you're not teaching your child how to simply say those two phrases at the time their speech advances from complete jibber jabber to semi-articulated words, then society might say you're just doing it wrong.

The thing about please and thank you and the scope of manners in general is that it's taught to our children very black and white. You simply tell them what they have to say and scold them when they don't say it.
Countless times, I have seen children being scolded because they demanded some request or another without saying please first or received a gift or compliment without saying thank you. There's rarely ever an explanation why they have to say it, you simply know you have to say it.... or else.

The funny thing is, the vast majority of us grew up under the impression that this was something you did simply to be polite. No questions asked.
Nowadays, please and thanks are being used in passive aggressive sarcasm and rhetoric.

Like, if you don't give it to me, then I will emphasize "please" when I ask because maybe manners will change your mind? No.

I went to the park with my son yesterday and he was playing with a little boy in the sand because most of the equipment at the park was too hot to play on. The little boy had some toy cars, but Matheson didn't bother to ask him if he could play with them. Some time later, the little boy threw his cars and one happened to land in front of Matheson. My son picked them up and handed them back to the boy, and mechanically, his mother said "say thank you to the boy for giving your car back."
They boy looked at Matheson for a few seconds and finally said thank you. Matheson said "You're welcome. You should be more careful with your toys though." and then went to play on the jungle gym.

It got me thinking. Ever since Matheson could form logical arguments and reason with some validity (though sometimes he is still very nonsensical) I've been teaching Matheson about appreciation. That is, why we say thank you and why we request please.

It goes far beyond being polite. You say please because you understand that in a situation that demands please from you, you are in a position where the person with whom you are making a request must calculate the decision to determine you worthy of granting you whatever it is you're requesting. Even if you are asking for something as simple as the permission to go to the bathroom, what you are really saying when you say please is "might you consider my request in such a way that you may grant me permission based on the merit of being polite and asking you kindly."
Under many circumstances, please may get you nothing. My son has made very ridiculous requests and believed that saying please might get him what he asked for. But in many instances, I can't grant him these requests because not everyone can find the logic in letting their child eat chocolate before bed just because they asked nicely.
You get to that point where you need to teach your children that please isn't really a magic word that makes all things happen your way. If I was granted the occurrences of scornful mishaps upon my former enemies simply by asking politely and saying please, I'd be responsible for a very long list of terrible things. And I cannot say I would be grateful for causing any mental or bodily harm onto others no matter what scale it may fall upon.

But just the same, we then have thank you. I don't care how old you are or how comfortable you are with anyone, "forgetting" to be grateful for the generosities that others bestow upon you is something I will not tolerate in raising my son. Nor is it something I can tolerate in the people with whom I associate.

With everything that has happened to me in my life, I am not one for being ignorant towards the good of others and generous gestures that come my way - either directly to me or to my own.

Yet, here we are, spitting out please and thank you, not because we mean it, but because the consequence of our "rudeness" will remain a lasting impression on those we neglect to say it to.

I see it all the time, we think we must be doing a great job because our one year old is saying "peash" and "tankoo" on their own. When they get the routine down pat, we leave it at that and are pleased with our efforts to instil a formal propriety in our children. But we forget to teach them, later on, that there is actually a strong meaning behind the words that we use to represent our appreciation of someone else's generosity. And then you end up with goofs in their twenties who still don't understand how to appreciate what they have and how to be thankful to those who help them get what they want.

So to anyone who hasn't gotten themselves caught up in teaching their child only the mechanical delivery of manners yet, I encourage you to teach your children the essence behind propriety when you enforce their use of "please" and "thank you".

So many PEOPLE - adults and children alike - feel self-entitled to the luxuries of today to the point where the concept of please and thanks are out of sight and out of mind. But I think if you really want the best for your children and the best FROM them, you would make it a very regular practice to explain to your children why they should be grateful for having their requests considered and for being the recipient of another's kind gesture.

I may not be an amazing parent, hell, I may not even qualify as a good one, but I do know that my position as a parent will be reduced to nothing if I can only add material value to my son's life and neglect to contribute essence to the moral, ethical, and virtuous value (relative to what I consider moral, ethical, and virtuous) in his life.