Some favorite X-mas photos

1) Giddyap, giddyap, giddyap let’s go! Someone built a sleigh and put it on his front yard for display.

2) Another guy went really OTT and turned his front yard into a disco winter wonderland, complete with music, disco lights, and a snowblower. WOAH! The wonders of suburbia.

3) Baby Jesus went missing from the creche this year, so we had to improvise last-minute.

4) Can you spot the bad sheep?

5) Singing a Stevie Wonder song while my dad plays the piano. I don’t think I’ve ever had a photo taken with my dad like this.

6) My brother joins the show!

sidewalk drawin’

The challenge of keeping my niece entertained on a sizzling, suburban December afternoon.

I drew the tree, she decorated it.

putting up the lights!

My bestfriend’s X-mas gift to me: Windex, Harpic, Pine O’ Clean, a bad-ass scourer glove, Chux, and a basket of wooden clothes pins and chocolate…. in short, absolutely everything I need! Only a true friend would think of this :-)

gratitude entry #1

This Christmas, instead of focusing on the things I want, I’d rather highlight the things I already have. I’ve decided to write a series of Gratitude Entries, each focusing on one thing I’m grateful for. Consider this to be the first of them:

He is probably the Paredes that people know the least about, owing to the fact that he doesn’t own a blog, isn’t in showbiz or publishing, and has never been on the front cover of a magazine. Not to say he wouldn’t be eligible to be in showbiz or on the cover of a glossy. As a baby, he was the cutest kid ever and nobody was surprised when he grew up to be quite the heart-throb. 

When I was 4-years old and still mortal enemies with my older sister, I remember begging my mom for another sibling . My sister, who never wanted a sibling to begin with was against the idea but was willing to accept if the new sibling was a girl. As an act of opposition, I declared I wanted a boy. Maybe it was just to piss her off, but that was my very first conscious act of defiance in my young life. 

The day my mother was rushed to the hospital in the throes of labor, my sister and I made a wager on the gender of our new sibling. I won but I never got paid my 5 pesos. 

And so we had a new boy sibling, a cute little dumpling that we sometimes dressed in skirts and ribbons much to my father’s chagrin. It was just harmless play and didn’t influence his choice of dress later on in life. We made him laugh, and sometimes we made him cry as a game, being the heartless older sisters we were.

But when my brother arrived into the world, red, wrinkly, and hairy, I was already waiting with open arms, ready to be big sister. During his first year of life, my mom was away overseas for several months, and by the time she came back, she recalled that he had forgotten who she was but in turn, was glued to my side. 

I read him storybooks when he was just 3 days old. I fed him chicken liver on a silver baby spoon.  I amused him with stories I read in school, ones he came to know by heart and ones that he made me repeat over and over again. I carried him around, balancing him on my spindly 5-year old frame. I would placed him on the billiards table and stuff the front of his shirt with billiard balls, which made him laugh. 

When he’d take his afternoon naps, I’d secretly wake him up (unknown to his nanny) so we could go play. When he started going to school and I was tasked with helping him with his homework, I’d secretly do half of it, deceitfully faking his child’s handwriting, so we could finish early and go play.  

I even taught him how to read, although nobody remembers this.

Gone are those days. 

I hit puberty while he was still into Pokemon. I wrestled with the worst of my teenage growing pains while he was just beginning to meet girls in soirees. And while I struggled with the demons of early adulthood, he was focused on his friends and his buzzing social life, as a young man should be. 

It must be hard growing up the youngest,and only boy in the family when your two older sisters have such domineering personalities, and your mother forever wants you to be her little prince. How does one assert his manhood when in the midst of such a dense thicket of femininity, always in danger of being engulfed?

When you live with your family, they become strangers. They’re so close by, it becomes difficult to really see them. The only time the picture becomes clear again is when you see them from a distance. 

Now that I’m leaving home, now that I know a phase in my life is ending I find that I’ve snapped out of the blindness of day to day living and that I’m actually seeing things for the first time in a long time. 

My brother is a young man now. He keeps his distance and I respect that for he must become who he is.  There is a natural order to things, new growth must overtake old growth, and I feel I must give way. 

I see in my brother a compassionate person. He has always been the most kind-hearted out of the 3 of us, so lacking in malice that I often fear that it is far too easy to take advantage of him. Growing up, he was the most affectionate, though manhood inevitably dictates  to young boys that there is a limit on how much affection may be shown. 

I am always so impressed by the patience and gentleness that flows from him so endlessly when he is teaching his guitar students, a patience that I have not acquired despite my being given a 5-year head start in life. 

He is such a naturally like-able person, always the central hub of his group of friends, never without anyone willing to be there by his side and hang out with him. He is a great friend, something I have always envied, being the more introspective and less social one. 

And yet, amongst us 3 siblings, he is probably also the most private, the most hesitant to express himself, content not to let most of his opinions ever be heard. 

He is also one of the funniest people I have ever known, possessing a wry, twisted sense of humor, so politically incorrect, and an irreverence that really, truly shocks me sometimes. And if there’s one person in the world who probably gets my humor most, it’s my brother. 

It is hard to see my brother objectively. How can I look at him and not think of him as a new born wrapped in a blanket, as a toddler learning how to walk, as a little boy with scraped knees, and as an awkward high-schooler. Sometimes I feel they all still exist in him, all rolled together into one. 

But he’s an adult now, and I must learn to see him as such. I think the distance will help. 

And as parting words before I leave the nest, I would like to say that I am grateful for my (not so) little brother. 

Christmas in Sydney!

The city of Sydney during Christmas! Sydney’s Town Hall is just a brown stone building by day. At night, it’s lit up with custom made light projections!

Beautiful.

The first Philippine Lantern and Cultural Festival

ltura