October has come and gone so quickly and it’s already the FIFTH day of November! 🙂 Oh my gosh! So much has happened and I haven’t even had the time to catch my breath, nor catch up on pending blog posts and articles (both for work AND for my sideline writing projects! LOL!). Oh, the life of a multi-tasking, homeschooling (or at least trying hard to), semi-work-at-home preggy mom! 🙂 *sighs* You know, if I really, really could, I would be over-the-moon-happy with being a fulltime stay-at-home, homeschooling preggy mom who writes on the side (and gets paid for it!) just for fun! 🙂

With kids like these, who wouldn’t want to stay home fulltime ? 🙂 Tim is a little over three years old and Rysse around seven months in this photo — how fast time flies!

But anyway… I shouldn’t complain, right? Our family has been very blessed, despite the “lean” moments at times… And even if hubby and I “sacrificed” 10+ years of “the best years of our lives” for fulltime ministry work for our Catholic community, God still blessed us all those years! He allowed us to grow as people and learn new skills, brought us to different places locally and internationally for the missions, taught us to trust in Him more, led us to meet people from all walks of life and allowed us to be a blessing (at least, I hope so!) to others through giving talks, leading teams, organizing events, writing manuals and so on…

Me waaaay back in 2005 with some of the youth of Timor Leste 🙂

Later on, He helped us have a beautiful wedding despite a tight budget, blessed us with two-now-three wonderful children, allowed us to reach out to so many other people, inspired us to learn different languages and enabled us to connect with people of different cultures! 🙂

Being “sent off” for mission as newlyweds 🙂

With one of the Timorese sisters. 🙂 We are blessed to have worked together with so many inspiring priests, nuns and other lay missionaries. 🙂

On one of the mountains of Baucau, during a mission trip. 🙂 Baucau is a district of Timor Leste.  (This was taken on a different day — but notice my usual “mission trip attire”? LOL!)

With one of our Timorese host families. 🙂

At our farewell party organized by CFC Timor Leste in 2010 🙂 I cried buckets of tears!

Now, God has brought us to where we are at this particular stage of our lives where we can spend most of our time with our children, even homeschool them… and we can only look back and be amazed at His goodness! 🙂

Which leads me to realize again why I continue to write and blog. I was reading Frances Sales’s blog, Topaz Horizon, earlier and what she said in this post reminded me of something I had earlier realized during Martine’s WAHMderful Life Workshop: That whatever you do with your life, you need to be INTENTIONAL. 

Frances wrote about being true to one’s self when it comes to blogging, and I hope she doesn’t mind if I quote her verbatim here: “Blog for yourself, not for the money… Blog about what makes you happy… This will give your blog its own voice, its own personality—yours—and make it unique. After all, there is no one quite like you in the entire world.”

As a relatively “newbie” blogger, reading Frances’s words above just affirmed me that I must be doing something right with my blog somehow. I used to compare myself with other mom bloggers and I wrote a bit about how to deal with “comparisonitis” in this post. But then, I thought, “I should just be ‘me’! I should just write with my ‘higher purpose’ in mind and not be afraid to share my thoughts and feelings!” Reading my very first post (imported from WordPress, where I first started blogging on www.missionarymom.wordpress.com) also helped me go back to the “roots” of my blog.

So, starting this November, you all might be a bit surprised with some of my posts — where I will be sharing about my “past,” in the hope that you will be inspired and encouraged. I will be more open with how my pregnancy is really going, in the hope that I will be able to touch at least one other mom’s life. I will be real. Well, more real than I have ever been on this blog, I guess. 🙂 And I hope that you AND I will be more blessed because of it! 🙂

Here’s to a wonderful month ahead for all of us! 🙂

P.S.
As you may already know, I contribute regularly to Smart Parenting’s website and, occasionally, to Smart Parenting in print. 🙂 For the November issue, I wrote an article on raising spoiled kids (it’s on page 50). 🙂 Please do grab a copy and let me know what you think about it! 🙂 Thanks to all the people who helped me with the article! 🙂