As I’ve mentioned before, the kids and I will be staying with my parents in Sacramento for a couple of months instead of going directly to Manila with Jonathan. We are doing this because Jonathan and I are going on a trip to Jerusalem with my family at the end of March. And we leave from California. Plus, our kids are staying with Jonathan’s parents, in California. So. We all need to end up in California. And it would’ve been very expensive to fly our entire family out to Manila, only to return to California two months later so that Jonathan and I can go to Jerusalem. So, the little critters and I are staying with my parents until then.
One of our major concerns about doing things this way is the whole long distance relationship thing. And we are so grateful for things like Skype and FaceTime and email. But, obviously, it just isn’t quite the same. And I am so terrible at talking on the phone and doing video calls. It feels more like a book report, rather than a meaningful, relationship-building conversation: “This is what I did today” “Oh, how lovely. Here is what I did” “Gee. That’s swell.” So. This is definitely a major concern we have. And so, we know that we will need to be very purposeful and deliberate in how we handle this time of separation.
As part of this, Jonathan and I started our yearly planning. (We follow the basic process outlined here.) And while we had to adapt this quite a bit, we followed the same basic process. We use google calendars so we can see each other’s schedules. And we decided that we need to plan into our schedules weekly date nights and weekly Family Home Evening.
Now this is where things start to get tricky. We are currently located in Mountain time. In a couple of weeks, I will be inhabiting the Pacific time zone and Jonathan will be in the Manila time zone. This would be bad enough, but we have another layer of crazy to add. We also have to take into account that Jonathan is going to be working US Eastern time (which is the night shift in Manila). Because that’s when his team works. But we can’t completely discount local Manila time, because he will still need to go to church and be a human there.
Needless to say, it was/is very confusing. And we would have never been able to keep it straight but we had Google. Google knows what time it is everywhere. And we do have things tentatively planned out, but I think maybe we’ll wait until we can eliminate Mountain Time from the list of time zones to be considered before we finalize anything. And most of all, I’m just glad that it will only be for 2 months
