Good morning! Today has been a bit of a mix of "bad news" and big progress. Our little man, Liam, woke up feeling a bit under the weather with a runny nose and a slight fever. Because of that, we’ve decided to head back home today, but not before finishing our errands in the city and making a very important trip to the mountains to visit Jessa's family.
This trip is all about getting ready for the holidays and making sure the family is taken care of. We’re bringing another care package—this time worth about 2,500 pesos—plus 10,000 pesos in cash: 5,000 for Jessa’s dad to use however he likes and 5,000 for her mom to stock up on food. We even found a cool radio with a built-in flashlight for her dad, which I know he’s going to love.
We also had some "late birthday" shopping to do. We recently got a phone for Jessa's brother, and her other brother really wanted wireless headphones. We found a pair for about 700 pesos that sounds amazing—great quality for such a low price. It’s the same model Jessa and I use, so I know they’re solid.
The day was a bit of a "divide and conquer" mission. Jessa headed off to handle some paperwork—specifically, birth certificates needed to register our marriage back in Norway. Meanwhile, Liam and I took the car for its annual registration. It was a One-Stop Shop where they handled the testing and insurance all in one go. We did run into a small snag with the marriage papers—we were a bit late for the cutoff—but we’ll just handle that on our next trip when I have to renew our business registration anyway.
Jessa has been wanting a better camera for her videos, so we got her a new Samsung A73 5G. It was about 30,000 pesos, but the camera is a huge upgrade over her old A22. Liam is actually the one who wins here because he’s now the proud owner of Jessa's old phone!
After all the shopping, we had to figure out how to fit everything—the huge oven, the care packages, and all our gear—into our small car. It was a bit like a game of Tetris, but I’m a pro at packing.
We finally reached the mountains around 2:30 AM. Despite the late hour, it was great to see the family and hand over the food and cash. I had to explain that we’ve had a lot of big bills this month—including a 120,000 peso loan payment—so they need to make this help last until Christmas. The good news is we’re almost debt-free, with only 50,000 pesos left to pay off next month.
It started pouring rain just as we were finishing up, and with Liam already feeling sick, we had to make a run for it. I’ve got a mountain of work to catch up on for the rest of December so we can truly enjoy our island-hopping road trip in January.
Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one!
