Mateo has adjusted beautifully to going to school everyday. He now knows the names of a lot of students, some of them I don’t even know. Haha!

He already has his group of friends of varying ages. From the youngest to the oldest, he knows them. During the morning he’d join the youngest level of 2- to 3-year-olds in their class with Teacher ‘Del’. During lunch time and dismissal time he’d mingle with the grade schoolers while the high schoolers would joke around with him. Some high school boys introduced themselves as ‘idol’ and ‘boss’ so that Mateo would enthusiastically call out ‘idol’ and ‘boss’ whenever he sees them.

His biggest fan in school is a Korean male student named June in the grade three level. He’d follow Mateo around whenever he’s not in class and sometimes he’d wait for Mateo to wake up before eating lunch. Mateo has also become the resident ‘library assistant’, Sir Myke’s (the librarian) companion, and does things in the library no one else could. Since he’s a tambay in the library and Sir Myke loves taking pictures of him, we now have a good number of pictures of Mateo in the library.

Mateo with Joshua, a grade one student in HEdCen whom they say looks so much like him.

goofing around in the library

with another library regular, ate Gaby

Mateo’s barkada

library boy

More pictures here.

Aside from not being able to spend as much time with him, I’m pretty much happy with our set-up right now. Mateo is absorbing a lot of information in school and other kids are also teaching him a lot.  He has acquired some weird skills like he can now point to the Philippines (and other countries) given any map or globe, he ‘sings’ the song ‘I’m yours’ by Jason Mraz, he puts his hand on his chest and sings ‘ayaaaa iliw’ whenever he sees a flag, he knows the internal parts of the human body like the lungs, heart, liver, stomach, brain, and ‘isaw’ (intestines) because of a human anatomical model in the library, and so much more.

Our little boy is not so little anymore. He’s fast growing up and sometimes Ramil and I would discuss hypothetical scenarios about Mateo. Questions like what if he’s gay, what if he’s a slow learner, what if he has ADHD, etc. It can be pretty scary for parents not knowing what and how their kid would turn out to be. I’m sure no one wanted their child to be a criminal or someone who has to get drug rehabilitation especially since going to a drug rehab can be pretty expensive. We just hope we bring up Mateo being the best person he can be. While thoughts of having another one are always on our minds these days, Mateo seems to be too much to handle right now and he’s more than enough for us.