Hellobee

I thought I would share our expenses for the month of September to give you an idea of the cost of living in the Philippines. We don’t pay rent, but our property requires a lot of maintenance and a full-time maintenance person, with an occasional construction staff, because we have to manage our own water from […]

I just booked our flights for a three month trip to the US today. We’re scheduled to leave 2 weeks after we get our second dose of the Astra Zeneca vaccine because immunity is supposed to peak by then. We’d been largely spared from a huge outbreak thus far thanks to our remote location, a […]

Last we left off it was at the initial closure phase. Everything was closing for two weeks to bend the curve. I was following what was happening in Europe. I had a cousin in Italy who was in complete lock down and only one person could leave their house to get essential items. I kept […]

Overall I’m happy with the online homeschool program we’re using called Power Homeschool/Acellus (review here) because it’s a complete program for K-12 and makes homeschooling easy. The kids like it and start on their ipads as soon as they wake up, without needing any prodding from me. Their core classes are English, Math, Science and […]

More than a year and a half into the pandemic, we’ve been settled into our new normal for a while now. There was some hope earlier this year as vaccines were released and positive cases trended downward for months. But then Delta hit and the optimism we might have felt earlier this year has waned. […]

I got a new 3-week-old rescue kitten last Sunday, so I’ve been exhausted all week trying to adjust to waking up for middle of the night feedings. My insomnia makes it hard to go back to sleep once I wake up, so it totally throws off my sleep. Newborn kittens can be harder than newborn humans! […]

Since the pandemic started, we haven’t been able to buy books as there are no bookstores here. The kids vastly prefer paper books to the Kindle, and I do too because they tend to read more and reread their favorites over and over again when they have physical copies. Still I am eternally grateful for the […]