Family Fridays #21 Lana
This week Lana Jelenjev is joining us from Smart Tinker. Be sure to check her out over on Facebook and see what she's up to! I am Lana Jelenjev, a Filipina who is now living in the Netherlands. Ours is a multicultural family, my husband who is born and raised in the Netherlands does not exactly affiliate himself as Dutch, but with his family's country of origin, Serbia. He grew up appreciating the Serbian culture and also has Russian roots. I on the other hand has never thought of bringing up children and having a family with multicultural roots, not until I met Boris. Having grown up all my life in the Philippines, my first foray into living abroad was when I decided to work abroad and went to Indonesia as a staff development specialist for Tutor Time Kindergarten. It was when I was working in Indonesia that my husband met up with me. At that time we were already chatting and getting to know each other online for more than 3 years before finally meeting up in Indonesia.
From that time on, things went relatively quick, we got married the year after while I was still in Indonesia, surrounded by Indonesia friends and church members and with only my brother as family to represent us. Our daughter was born a year after and it was during that period that we decided for me to move to the Netherlands and for us to be together as a family. At the time that I was pregnant, I was still working in Indonesia trying to finish my contract and was still contemplating on whether it is advisable for me to move ot for my husband to be the one to move out of the country to be with me. What made me finally decide to move was the thought of finally settling down to one's roots.
It was in this transition to a new country that I saw the similarities and differences that my husband and I have. Differences that are rooted to cultural differences. The same quality of him being open and easy to talk to that I so love was also something that I saw in a different context here in the Netherlands where people (and even children) speak their minds so quickly. Sometimes to my judgment of it being too brutally honest. I was not used to such means of communicating.
My husband and I found common ground in our parenting. Being the early childhood development specialist, I took it upon myself to keep abreast with parenting tools and strategies that my husband easily took in as well. We found solidarity in our parenting philosophies and this is what I can say that makes our family unique apart from the obvious multicultural aspect. What I see as our strength in identifying our values and communicating deeply with each other is a big part of our family culture. We value the connection that we have and the means of connecting that we use as partners and as a family.
With connection to each other and to ourselves a big part of our family culture, we have birthday traditions and holiday traditions that welcome friends and family in our homes to connect with them. We love hosting friends in our home and with it sharing a big part of our lives and our aspirations for our family with them. Such is the openness that we would like to promote that we have rituals of connection throughout our days and ending it with a connecting ritual in the evening after saying our prayers. We also do family conferences to get us reflecting on the activities that we did for the week, what went well, what can be improved on and what we can move forward with for the coming week.
This is how our family culture has merged and grown as a reflection of how we as individuals has also grown as couples and as parents. Would I change what we are doing now? Yes, I would change it to even more connecting rituals, to an emphasis on documenting our lives (which is why I have started Smart Tinker) and the focus on encouraging more families to also look at their own family cultures and how they bring their values and strengths in it.