Friday, April 04, 2008

Cultural Pride!


I cannot tell you how humbled we are by all the wonderful gifts that friends have sent to our son. Toys, clothes, even diapers (nappies for you Brits)! We cannot thank you enough.

As Ruben is 1 month short of celebrating his 1 year birthday, two dear friends, Gloria and Sky from NY went to swirlz.net website and had a shirt made just for Ruben. It couldn't have made me happier! I LOOOOOOVE IT! It captures my son's mixed heritage and proudly displays it right on his "wee" chest for all to see. Normally, I'm not a fan of merchandise advertising but I'm a sucker for this. Because Gloria and Sky are also two people who are biracial and bi-cultural, they know how important it is to stress cultural, racial and ethnic pride in who you are...especially when no one else around you falls into those categories. I naturally have worries about my son becoming confused about who he is; worried that he'll feel the need to "fit in" and downplay his uniqueness. But I can breathe easily, I have great folks already looking after my son.

Course, the bad side of all of this is: I want more shirts!! We need to get ones with "Haitian Highlander", "Kreyol Caledonian", and "Toussaint Wallace" made.
In the meantime, we'll keep thinking of crazy combinations to demonstrate Ruben's Haitian and Scottish heritage.

Anyone else wanna offer up some good titles?