Category Archives: Updates

Wait! What? Really?

Oh my goodness it’s been 2 years since I last posted! Two long years! 😮

How time flies, even when we sometimes feel like one single day can be dragging on forever. That’s probably how things go with a lingering pandemic — I thought working from home would give me more time to be with my family and do more of what I like to do. Turned out I was completely wrong with this. I thought going back to in person would make a change. But I was wrong again… We seem to be perpetually in need of more time, more time to learn, more time to work, more time to play, more time to sleep, more time to prep for food, more time to eat… It just feels like there’s never enough time to do anything.

At the beginning of the pandemic, we thought if we’d just quarantine for 2 weeks, our life would go back to normal. Then, it became after this year’s working from home and e-learning, after this next year’s go back in person with masks and social distancing, after this and that… And it’s still going.

What if life as we know has changed forever? What if we’ll never go back to where we were before? Actually, there is NO what-if’s. It has already happened and is still happening. Kiddo had e-learning for almost a year and missed a year of socializing with friends in person (although we did arrange FaceTime for her and her friends). We rarely traveled or went to parties. We missed out on life in order to live.

Would I have done differently? Probably not, ’cause without life and health, there is no social life or traveling anywhere, or anything. But still, part of me laments the time we lost when we could grow in a more natural way and enjoy it, as well as the numerous blog posts that I/we would have made. I still have the travel photos that she took when she was 6 years old waiting to be posted. But time has changed and the pandemic has stolen away the impulse to post…

I’m not even sure after this post, when my next post will be. Maybe soon. Maybe a while from now. But definitely not never. I will. I promise to myself.

Blog Makeover

Long waited mother-daughter weekend finally came. Today, S and I talked about her creative plans and her aspirations. We decided to give this blog a makeover — it needs a new name, first and foremost. So, we decided to call it whimsical moon (as her name means “moon”). Voila! Now, please bookmark whimsical-moon.com 🙂

We are also going to use whimsical moon as our YouTube channel name as well. 😀 This name came to me this afternoon wben we drew a picture together. I realized how precious her ability is to make all her drawings look whimsical. She is not me who draws everything like computer work. She has her own style. Everything looks so vividly alive and vibrantly moving in her drawings. S loves this new name!

Then I started making the necessary changes on the blog and realized how sweet my old posts used to be and how desperate sounding my recent posts were. They sound like the desperate attempts of a busy working mom who wrote a few posts to “turn in homework”… So, I’ve decided to also rewrite those recent posts, so that they are sweet and loving, as our mother-daughter blog is intended to be. I am on it! 😉

What a semester!

Or… What an academic year! Totally planned to update as much as possible, and then I (mommy) got a new teaching position at another university, spent last summer prepping lessons and the whole entire academic year busy teaching. As a result… our blog became slower than these turtles. LOL.

And on top a busy schedule working for two universities and a weekend program for little kids, Covid-19 happened. We had to switch everything online for the rest of the semester. It wasn’t too difficult on the technology front. However, it did take a much longer time — everything had to be uploaded to Canvas; simple things that could be done quickly face-to-face took much longer to accomplish electronically. I did enjoy using Zoom, though. Can’t imagine if this happened 10 or 20 years ago. We would have all been much more lost than now.

S started e-learning via her school Canvas roughly the same time that I started teaching exclusively online. We are so thankful to her teacher. She has been doing an amazing job, as amazing as her face-to-face classes. In fact, all the rest of her teachers, including her library teacher, are simply just amazing!

My semester has ended (I’ve got good reviews from students despite everything that’s happening) and S’s is going to end in a few days. So, now I have a bit of time (finally) to get on our blog again and start putting the long promised posts up here. There’s so much I’ve got to do together with S (we were not able to have much mommy-daughter time, given the circumstances; and she has been so reasonable and patient with us as far as a 6 yo goes). So… we’re still taking baby steps here, but we are definitely moving forward (just like everything else).

Hope everyone is well! Stay healthy and safe,

Ally