As for the "defining" moment in my life. It is true- I am now an "official" american citizen. Woohoo! But you know the interesting part was that it didn't really hit me till the judge who helped us take our oath gave his speech. As he was talking he mentioned that this is a defining moment in our life. After he said that, only then did I realized the oath I just took and the decision I've made to (somewhat) turn my back from the country I've called home all my life. I vow to still keep the ties I have to my philippine roots but at the same time I'm excited to experience what true americans can do and that is to vote! I've never voted before, not even when I was in the Philippines so this would be a first for me.
this is a pic from Gem's camera phone so it's small.
I was so blessed to have my mom, sister Gem, Mitch, Amanda, Marcus, Maddie and even my in-laws come support me at the LA convention center to take my oath. There were 3,525 people sworn in at the session I was in. According to the officiator, we were the third batch of that day and the previous two groups had about the same number as we had. So on that day there were about 10,000 people that officially became US citizens. That's some crazy numbers.
Here's a pic of me being hugged by my mom-in-law. I didn't really get great pics. We were not allowed to bring a camera to the oath taking so no close up pics from me. After the ceremony we all went to Don Jose's for a late lunch/ early dinner celebration. We celebrated my success and also for Amanda's birthday. The waiters even sang happy birthday to Amanda and gave her a small plate of flan. We love mexican food. Yummy!
On saturday we decided to go on a bike ride. This was our second bike ride as a family. We started at the El Dorado nature center and rode the bike path along the san gabriel river to Wilderness park in Downey. At first Mitch said it was 15 miles (roundtrip) but after we came back he checked his book again at it was close to 20 miles. No wonder I was struggling at the end to try to finish the ride. It kicked my butt! I haven't ridden my bike in a long time (since I was about 12 yrs. old) and I found out that it takes a while to get back into the groove of riding again. I had a slight injury with this ride though. There was a part of the path were we go under a bridge tunnel and I was going down in a pretty fast pace (or so I thought), I was concentrating on staying in my lane when I hit some puddle of water and it scared be. Before I knew it, I was going straight onto the wall, I quickly lifted my right arm to block the hit to the wall and went right into the other side, almost hitting that wall. It all went fast and I knew I was hurt but didn't really now how bad it was till I was out of the tunnel and into the light. When I finally looked at the damage, I saw a big scrape wound on the back of my right arm and a blood coming out of my leg. I got hit by the sprockets of my bike. It went pretty dip into my leg causing some flesh to come out. Yucky stuff and painful too. Good thing Mitch is a scoutmaster and had brought a first aid kit. Oh man! this was definitely a hard and scary ride for me.
After the ride we went and had lunch at Carl's Jr. Mitch asked me if this would be my last ride since I got hurt. I thought about my answer for a little bit and all I said was, I'm not gonna hop on the bike for a while. hehehehe!
Even with my injury, we're still very grateful that nothing major happened.
That night we went to our ward's social/fundraiser for the youth to go to summer camp. Cool entertainment of mexican folkdance and Amanda got some high bids for her to do some cleaning at some member's houses. She will be busy this week. I also got a lot of good compliments with my hair. So funny one of my girlfriends cut her hair this week too. Hey we're starting a trend.
Yesterday we had our ward conference and everything went ok. I don't think there's any day in primary that's just smooth sailing but we survived another week.
So that's our weekend.
Have a great day!
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