Life, Day by Day

It seems that  all those 'lemons' thrown at me and my family in 2016 aren't quite done yet.   Take my younger brother, for instance...

Last Sunday, December 4, 2016, through SM Kids and SM Accessories , the Princess Academy came to the Kingdom of SM City Bacolod. We got an invitation to attend as guest and this will be the first time that Preemie girl will be attending, so you can imagine our excitement!   But with the school intramural just finished, the  on-going practices for her First H oly Communion, and as a full-time working mom nursing a bad cough, I simply had very little time and energy left to prepare. In fact by the end of the working week, I was trying to convince Preemie girl not to attend anymore.  However, unlike in the past where my little girl was not that interested, this time she really wanted to go.

Kinship and bloodlines used to be so significant for me.  Ever since my college days, I was always interested in genealogy and how my family was related to who or whom. I used to spend hours looking over family trees and tracing my ascendants, even to the point of  reaching out to people who had the same last names as mine or any of my ascendants. I have created family trees on websites and shared this with relatives, near and far, old and new.  Then I found myself becoming a mother to two children, a boy who just turned 25 and a girl, now 7.  They may not be of my blood but they have all of my heart.  Suddenly, bloodlines became irrelevant when it concerned my relationship with my children. 

An Advent wreath is a wreath made up of various evergreen leaves with four candles that are lighted in the weeks of Advent to symbolize the light that the birth of Christ brought into the world. The four candles represent the four weeks of Advent.  Traditionally three of the candles are purple, the color of kings and symbolizes prayer, penance, preparatory sacrifices and good works undertaken at this time. A rose-colored candle is used to mark the Third Sunday of Advent (Gaudete Sunday) as a time to rejoice over the closeness of Christmas and the coming of Christ. The successive lighting of the candles symbolizes the expectation and hope surrounding our Lord’s first coming into the world and the anticipation of His second coming in the final judgment.

Aging is an inevitable fact of life , but it does not have to be burdensome or problematic. Just because a person is aged does not make him or her useless. My mother turned 80 years old in May but she continues to live a purposeful life. She has been suffering from osteoarthritis for the last 8 years or so, but it was not until 3 years ago that she began using a walker due to my insistence, primarily for her safety and my peace of mind. Last year, she developed adverse drug reactions resulting in gastrointestinal complications and lately, she gets tired more easily.  And so, as much as she would like to remain as active as she used to be, it is no longer possible and she has "retired" from most of her parish volunteer work and advocacy.  And rightly so because I believe that our elderly parents and relatives deserve to be worry-free, to be taken cared of, and comfortable in the remaining years of their lives. In 2011 I wrote an essay for EzineArticles on how to ...

Mother's Day has come and gone, but the day before that a little girl asked me a question that needed an answer.  She asked me, "are you Preemie Girl's real mother?" Now, I don't know why little girls would even think to ask such questions, but I would make a smart guess that they learn about these words and ideas from the adults around them.  I don't think an innocent child would know that there is such a thing as a "real" mom (or dad, for that matter), if they are not made aware of the difference or this was not pointed out to them by...yes, adults. But that is another story.

A friend posted on Facebook that they for the first time, will be spending Christmas in the hospital. It brought to mind our own hospital Christmas experience in 1976.   My brother Ted who survived a freak airgun shooting accident in July had been in the Iloilo Doctor's Hospital for the past 5 and a half months, slowly recovering from 6 major operations.  My brother and I who were both studying in Manila would be spending the holidays with him, our parents and Culing, my Lola's ever loyal cook cum helper. 

The year 2013 will soon end...and I suddenly think, where did all that time go?  In fact, it's more like...where did all those years go?  Like the song Sunrise, Sunset in the musical Fiddler on the Roof (with a little twist)..."I don't remember growing older...when did I? Wasn't it yesterday, When I was small?"

I love comics. In fact I used to have a huge collection in high school up until my first year in college, so that my mother eventually had them all bookbound and categorized from classics to action to comedy. Unfortunately, I have very little talent in drawing, so whatever ambition I had in that field never materialized. But when my nephew started drawing short comic strips in grade school, I thought, "hey this kid got talent". The illustrations were good and the stories were imaginative, but I did not pay much attention thinking it is hobby he would outgrow.  Then last year he started a comic blog which he calls, The Sharpiest . 

June 6, 2013 was a pretty busy day since it was the first day of Prep school for my little girl.  My mom who does volunteer work as the parochial pre-school administrator was also busy getting ready to come along with us.   It was only after I brought them to school and leaving for work that she casually said, "today is Papa's birthday".   "Papa" was my grandfather, Lolo Bitong and it was his 109th birth anniversary. 

My children Big Brother and Preemie Girl had their graduations this year.  Big Brother finished his Bachelor of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies last October 2012 yet, but he is included in the 2012-2013 annual yearbook since there are no semestral graduations at the University of St. La Salle.  He no longer joined the graduation ceremonies last March because he has started working last January and could not get time off. I am very proud of him and so grateful that God has blessed him with a well paying first job :) And my daughter Preemie Girl?  Well, she also had her culmination ceremony, with a recognition award.......from Kindergarten! Hahaha!

It's funny that despite the fact that I have been a parish volunteer for several years now, I never really wondered why we call the commemoration of the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ, a Good Friday?  I just took it for granted that it is the way it is...up until I listened to the Society of the Divine Word televison presentation of the Seven Last Words this afternoon.  I am embarrassed to say that maybe because this is also the first time that I am giving it my 100% attention, it is only now that I understand why in spite of the terrible events of this day, it is indeed a Good Friday .  The Second Word says it all.

The weather this past week tells me that summer has arrived albeit a little late.  I was up and about early in spite of the fact that it was Sunday, because of the sweltering heat.  And to add to everyone's discomfort, there were several blackouts ranging from 15 to 30 minutes duration that went on the whole day.  As the day went by, I saw my son getting the inflatable pool out. The fact that he was too big for it did not discourage him from having a cool dip together with my daughter and niece. I was very tempted to join them but as you can see, there isn't much space left...hahahah.  It was a fun thing to do on a really hot summer day.  

All my life I have known how it is to have a family member with special needs.  My aunt (my mom's younger sister) was born normal but when she was three years old she had measles together with the rest of her siblings.  She was the first to "recover" only to develop seizures about 3 days later.  This was in 1940 and there was no measles vaccine then, nor was measles a well understood disease.  She was brought to the best doctors but at that time the complications from measles were not yet completely known so they thought she developed poliomyelitis and treated her as such. My grandparents placed her on therapy to treat her flaccid paralysis but, she did not improve.  Her condition was aggravated by the onset of WWII when accessibility to health services was not readily available.  From then on, my aunt needed full-time caregiving in order to feed, bathe and clothed.  Although she can walk wobbly, she cannot use her hands and eventually learned to fe...

To be or not to be...concerned, worried, bothered, involved on one hand, or indifferent, detached, uninterested, uncaring on the other.  That is the dilemma I face now-a-days with regards to my brother's almost 15 year old daughter.  My brother who is a single parent lives next door with his two kids, a son and a daughter.  The son started college last year and comes home only during breaks while the daughter is still in high school. My brother works in another city four days a week. He goes every Friday afternoon and comes home early Tuesday morning, leaving my niece whom I shall call Aloof Girl with their househelp cum nanny during those days. Her mom usually comes to pick her up on Saturdays unless something comes up and brings her back on Sunday afternoon. Her relationship with us has been good until last year when her brother left. Since her dad and brother weren't around, I would watch out for her and she did not like it. She felt it was enough that her father knew...

If only I could hold it off a little bit longer but Preemie girl is turning 4 in July and yes, I know...she needs to start school now. So it's off to summer classes for our little girl, in preparation for the regular school year this June. I enrolled her in our local parochial pre-school which has been putting out graduates who easily get accepted into the first grade of the big schools. I am hoping that if she does well, she can get accelerated to Prep school by the time she is 5 years old since the government's primary and secondary levels will now be 12 years all in all (K12), as compared to the old curriculum which took only 10 years. That means Preemie girl will graduate from high school at 17 years of age (I was only 15 when I graduated from high school) and if she takes up medicine, that will be another 10 years!. It's been 2 days now and so far, so good. She seems to be enjoying herself in the 2 hours that she is in class and made friends with another ...

Last week, I wrote about Preemie girl and now it's Big brother's turn. My son whom I raised since he was 5 months old is now 21 and hopefully will be graduating from college this year. Unlike my daughter, I had no behavior issues with him when he was growing up. He was such an obedient child that it was easy to bring him along with me to public places because he was very behaved. It was when he started school that problems started. Although he was a sensitive and intelligent boy, he did not like studying. Unfortunately, I did not have the skill nor the inclination to instill in him good study habits because I too did not like to "study". Therefore, I could not teach him what I did not have, which is weird because I was and still am an avid reader and a life-long learner. It is not the learning part that I hated about school but the process of teaching of what must be learned that was being used by traditional schools. I was the type that needed teachers who ...

My old family home was a one and a half structure with rooms on the second floor, built on a 1000 square meters corner lot. The stairs had about 10 steps and as young kids we would slide down the long balustrade. We lived here for 26 years but unfortunately due to circumstances beyond our control, the possibility that we would lose this house was looming after 1985 and so, looking at our options, we could either build a new house or move into my father's ancestral home which was no longer occupied by then since my grandmother stayed in Manila most of the time. My family home in 1962 just before we bought it from it's original owners My father's ancestral home was even bigger. It was a two story structure with rooms and living areas both in the first and second floors. My grandmother as she grew older found it hard to stay in her second story room, so we had to move her downstairs. It was during this time that I saw how hard it was to maintain a large house and how ...

I used to think that bringing up kids wasn't all that hard. My parents raised us their 3 children (1 girl and 2 boys), fairly and without biases. We all had the same privileges and got the same kind of punishment when we did wrong. I never felt any more special than my 2 brothers. But when I became a mother to a 3 month old baby boy in 1991, I realized that it was not easy at all and that parenting is the hardest job in the world where there is no retirement ever. And so when I took home a 5 month old baby girl (who was born severely premature) for Christmas in 2008, it was an act of faith and trust that this too is God's will for me and my family. You see, raising my son was a relatively fun task for me, maybe because as the eldest in my family and the oldest grandchild, I grew up looking out for my brothers and playing with my cousins, majority of whom were male. I have always been partial to boys, even as a child. I remember each time my mom became pregnant, I would al...

I love weddings. It always reminds me of a fairytale.  Of course, a wedding is not to be confused with a marriage because not all have happy endings but I know that these two I attended in a week's span will be the happily ever-after kind of marriage. A Blogger's Wedding Last Tuesday was my blogger friend's wedding.  They had a seven year relationship that culminated in a beautiful sunset ceremony in one of the prettiest chapels in the city. The wedding was basically a family affair with  close and good friends in attendance.  What was unique were the give-aways.  The bride being a chemical engineer and environmentally conscious thought of giving different plants as their wedding remembrance.  I got a jackfruit, a rambutan, and a bignay tree.  I will be planting these in my yard and may these trees be a constant reminder of their celebration of love. God's blessings and happiness always to dear Glady and Levy! God's Miracle and A Weddi...