September 25, 2012

Our last full day in the Philippines.  There were things that we wanted to do in Manila, like visit the aquarium, while we were there, but we were pretty much out of energy and out of pesos at that point.

I had a little more shopping that I needed to finish in order to have all of the gifts that I wanted to have for Francis for future Family Days.  There was a mall directly across the street from the hotel that had a cultural store that would suit this shopping purpose, so I went over with my parents while Gregg stayed in and watched cartoons with Francis. 

At this point, we knew that television was a major trigger for Francis.  He didn’t care if you said no to the television, he found a way to get it back on.  And if you turned it off, he pitched a fit.  We had already made plans for our television to be “broken” when we got back home, so at this point we were just going with whatever he wanted when it came to watching cartoons.   The less we said no to, the fewer fits he threw.  And that was definitely the way to go.

When we came back from the store, we set Francis up with a Spider-Man puzzle.  It had about 100 pieces, and even though we gave him some help, he was able to knock out almost the entire thing by himself.  He really loved to figure things out and had a real knack for the puzzle.  We also played BINGO with him, and he got a kick out of calling the numbers. 

 

The other thing that Francis really enjoyed was paging through a Halloween circular from one of the stores at the mall.  He thought the costumes and pumpkins and decorations were very cool.  We were pretty sure this was the first time he had seen anything having to do with Halloween.  He decided after looking through the catalog that he wanted to be Spider-Man for Halloween.  Gregg was in his glory, since Halloween is his absolute-favorite holiday.

Later in the afternoon, we had one last meeting with our agency’s liaison over some babingka and tea.  At one point during our meeting, Francis came out wearing my shirt and his backpack. 

One Cool Dude.

 After saying goodbye, we started to make sure that everything was totally packed.  We had a very early wake-up call the next morning.  We planned on an early dinner and a very early bedtime.  It was just about time to say goodbye to the Philippines and head back to the United States. 

To Be Continued…