You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January 2005.
Ryland in winter suit
Snowplow in action
Mama has mentioned to my aunt in Manila about the amount of snowfall we had here. Mama was explaining to my aunt how she had to take the bus to work for a couple of days after the blizzard since she couldn’t get her car out of the driveway. I guess it must be hard to have an idea of how snow affects our daily life if you haven’t lived in a place where it snows. So I decided to take these pictures and mail them to her. These pictures are taken just within this month.
Also, please scroll down to my previous entries as I have added a few pictures to my earlier posts. Pasensiya na. I don’t own a digital camera yet. I’m quite behind when it comes to technological gadgets.
Dr. Phil talked about children sucking their thumbs. One mother was worried that it would make her 4-year old daughter’s teeth crooked. Dr. Phil said that she shouldn’t worry about it because those are still baby teeth. By the time her permanent teeth come out, she probably would have given up thumbsucking.
I was also worried with Ryan, who sucked his thumb until five years old. During one of his dental check ups, we came across a book in the waiting room. It was about a boy who sucked his thumb. I read the book to Ryan and showed him the pictures. When we came home that night, I followed what the father did in the story. Before Ryan went to bed, I put a band-aid on his thumb. The first couple of nights, he continued sucking his thumb, including the band-aid. So I followed the next step. I covered his hand with a sock and taped it around so that he wouldn’t take it off. He was very cooperative because he saw the pictures in the book and he knew that it worked for the boy. And it did for Ryan as well. After two weeks, we got rid of the sock and he never sucked his thumb again.
The very handsome Ricky Martin was on Oprah. I loved him even back then during his Menudo days. And I gushed when I watched him shake his bonbons to “Cup of Life” in the 1999 Grammy Awards. The rest is, as they say, history. I have his poster in my workstation. When Ryland was just starting to talk, he would say mama (mommy) and dada (daddy). Sometimes he would point at Ricky’s picture and say, “Dada.” “Oh no, Ryland, that’s not daddy, that’s Ricky,” I would say.
Ricky slipped out of the limelight about two years ago. He did some soul searching. He put his career on hold because he wanted to go back to the beginning. “I needed to be a child again,” he said. "Life became too serious all of a sudden. It was all about a competition, about becoming the best and being the best, and that's not what life is all about.” He is now on a mission. He built a home for the disabled in his native land, Puerto Rico, and he is helping to rescue girls in India from prostitution. Recently, he went to Thailand to help the youngest victims of the tsunami. This just makes me admire him more.
My taxi driver today was very friendly…
Driver: Do you have work today?
Me: No, Saturday is shopping day, grocery shopping.
Driver: You’ll take the taxi, too, when you go home?
Me: Yeah, I have to. I don’t have a car.
Driver: Me, too. Cars are expensive. Taxi is better.
Me: I agree. I have gone through three babies without a car. I take my kids on the bus and they’re fine with it.
I think it was about a year and a half ago when Ryan used to ask me, “Why don’t we buy a car?” There was one particular afternoon when the kids and I had to wait for our bus for a long time after a weekend shopping. Well, you see, buses here don’t come that often on weekends.
Ryan: It’s too bad we don’t have a car.
Mom: You know what, if we have a car, we won’t be able to buy a whole lot of other things. I probably won’t be able to buy you PS games, toys, computer, nice clothes…
Ryan: Even a house, Mommy?
Mom: Yeah, we’ll probably live in a small apartment.
Ryan: Oh! A house is better than a car.
We had another blizzard the other day. Piles of snow have become higher. Some even as high as houses.
My niece A turned 17.
When A was born, I was jealous of sis. She was 2 ½ years younger than me and there she was married and a mother. When I first saw and held A, I thought, if I could have a baby even just as half as beautiful as her, I’d feel blessed. Seventeen years and three babies later, I feel more than blessed.
I learned the truth at 17…
…that love was not just for beauty queens
…that love hurts just as much as it excites
…that bad actions can have bad consequences
At 17, I ran away from my aunt’s house to reunite with my father. It had bad consequences but I didn’t regret it. I don’t recommend it though.
