To answer the question, “Where is Papa?” I had to say, “Papa is not here. You know he doesn’t live in Lolo’s house. Papa lives in Papa’s house.”

While hanging out in the balcony, where she chose to join me after seeing me sitting in the dark on a little step and after putting on her favorite pair of shoes from the shoe rack that now holds almost all of her shoes and almost ALL of mine, she looked up at the sky, held her arms over her head and said, “It’s raining on a starry night.”

Looking at her shoes, and remembering mine, I am reminded of what her Papa said this morning, as he was packing my shoes in a big box, “You’re bringing all of these shoes? Now, you don’t have any shoes here.” I said I still have about six to eight pairs of footwear in the shoe rack. He said, “But these are the shoes that you don’t wear anymore.”

Lia went up to me, holding a little doll dressed in pink that she found in my sister’s bedroom’s display cabinet and that she fondly calls Princess, asking me, “Where are her shoes?” I said, “I don’t know. She doesn’t have any shoes.” Then she picked up another doll, a doll from my childhood, a United Nations costume doll from Denmark, and looked at its feet. Seeing that the Danish doll is also barefoot, she told me, “Her shoes are also missing.”

A few minutes later, she came back to me, holding a little black piece of something that upon closer inspection was revealed to be a tiny shoe. “Look mama, it’s a shoe.” And she tried to fit it onto the Danish doll’s foot and lo and behold, it fit! I heard her exclaim, “Yaaan!”

Coming back to Princess and her bare feet, Lia held it up and said, “Her shoes are missing. I’ll go and find it?” To which I could only nod. Speechless.

I am writing this as I play Lenka’s self-titled album and Lia is playing with her blocks, reading her books, all the while singing along with every single song.

I can hold entire conversations now with Lia. It’s quite amazing, the things she says and all the things she does.

This afternoon at the airport, I felt like she wasn’t just my daughter, but my friend. We had lunch at Pancake House because she said she wanted fries and Jollibee did not have any. We took turns drinking iced tea and biting off the lemon.

I had a backpack, a camera bag, a Dora play-and-sing-along book, and we had to have some of the fries and corn dogs to go as we were running out of time, and she had Tutu on her shoulders. People we were passing by couldn’t help but smile – Tutu on her shoulders like it was her on my own.

I didn’t have to carry her anymore at all. She lined up wherever we needed to, she took off her own shoes and got them back on all on her own. She was solely responsible for Tutu. She got on and off the bus all by herself, and even the plane. She left the seat belt on when it needed to be left on and read all the magazines the entire time while I napped.

I can still remember all those trips we took when she was younger. The trips to Bohol, Boracay, Palawan, Bicol, Batanes, Hong Kong, where I had to carry her everywhere in addition to having a backpack, a camera bag, a stroller for her and more often than not, a big luggage. Those were really…. quite hard times.

The plane ride took so much longer than we expected. The plane was delayed. In fact, all the planes at the airport were delayed. There was traffic on the runway and our departure was delayed for another twenty to thirty minutes. As we were approaching Naga-Pili airport, the pilot informed us that visibility was only 5 kilometers, that the airport was closed and we should be prepared for anything. That to me meant any of the following: 1. Rerouting to Legazpi City, making our travel time two hours or so longer. 2. Turning back and landing back at NAIA Terminal 3, where nobody was waiting, and I didn’t have any keys to the house in Rizal. Everyone got anxious.

All we could see were clouds and rain on the window panes. The plane looked like it was going to land after all, as the wheels were lowered right outside our window, and I looked at Lia, looking back at me, and I held her in my arms. I kept telling her, “Keep your seat belt on okay? I love you.” and Lia did not take her eyes off me the entire time, muttering softly, “Mama… mama” over and over again. Darn, I nearly cried.

The plane did land, amidst claps from almost all of the passengers. Damn it. I can only remember two instances when I felt that happy to land – the other one on that plane from Korea after a grueling four-day trip around the world. I remember being probably happier than all the OFWs on that plane combined.

When we got home, the box of shoes was all wet. Lia and I were sitting in front of the TV and Lia said, “Mama, don’t sit on the box. It’s wet.” I promptly moved off the box and onto a nearby chair and she said, “Ayaan.” I can’t believe that Lia, at two and a half, can already take care of me, somehow.

What ever it is I did wrong, whatever it is I am not doing right, I will make it right. Lia has always been my life. The decision to have her was the best decision I ever made in my damned life. I made a lot of mistakes, I made a lot of bad decisions, took a lot of wrong turns, invested a lot of time on all the wrong people and the wrong things – but as long as there is Lia, there is hope. I have been told to focus. I have been told to look at what I have and make the most and best out of it and surely, it has been staring at me in the face the entire time – holding out a puckered up lipsticked mouth, waiting for a kiss.

My friend and STS (Science, Technology and Society) favorite seat mate Miapurple tagged me in a post, saying, “See what I found circulating on facebook! This looks very familiar”

And lo and behold!

This photo originally appears in this blog post.

I can’t say I don’t agree. Motherhood is really more fun here in the Philippines…. but I wish, I wish… I wish, I thought of this meself! Hahaha!

I can’t also help but feel sad. I miss this. This is just one of the things I miss so much ever since I handled the bar.

That was a beautiful trip out in Caramoan and Lia was especially funny being a lizard in Manlawi. I hope Lia and I will get to go out more this year. I am already looking forward to it!

We usually hang out at various stores. The local department stores are so fun. They have a lot of cheap stuff that Lia and I just adore. We go home with either nothing or  just about the weirdest stuff, like a big orange strainer that she insisted on putting on my head, like a hat, and a salt shaker.

We’d walk down the streets hand in hand, buying little trinkets and munching on fruits and other food bought from sidewalk vendors. Sometimes its maruya or puto bucayo and sometimes its lollipop or gummy bears or popsicles.

Yesterday we went for a little walk in Naga and passed by a preschool. I have long thought about taking Lia to school but could not find one that accepted toddlers her age. She saw the slide and see-saw and insisted on coming in. I grabbed the opportunity to inquire at the office since we were already there. Lia would be spending half her time in Manila and half her time in the province so I needed to know the possible arrangements, and of course, costs.

The teacher showed Lia a huge alphabet book and asked to identify the objects. We made it all the way to letter O before she lost interest.

Then she was asked to identify shapes – circle, square, triangle, rectangle, oval, star, heart…

She also had a paper and pen on the desk in front of her and I saw her drawing while answering the teacher’s questions. Glancing up to answer every time she was asked “What’s this?” When the teacher pointed out the circle on the book, Lia said, “Here, circle, like this,” and I looked down to see what she had been drawing, and she had been drawing flowers and a swimming fish in the middle of a pond. In my head, I was like, “WOW.”

Then she was asked to identify colors. She knows red, yellow, blue, orange, green, violet, white and pink.

And lastly, she was asked to count. Lia can count from 1 to ten all on her own and she can also identify them when she sees them. She says, “Mama, number!” then proceeds to point out the number.

I sat there and felt like a real (and old!) parent, watching my daughter, beaming with pride. The teacher said, “Mukhang naturuan na pala to ni Mama. Kaya naman pala gusto nang ipasok sa school.”

I told the teacher I’d bring her back January.

I came home and went on the internet to look up what I should be watching out for in terms of Lia’s developmental milestones. I have not done that in what seems like ages.

Though Lia speaks gibberish half the time, she talks A LOT. She uses a lot of ME, MINE, you and yours BUT still refuses to answer to the question, “What is your name?” Sometimes she answers, “Me, baby!” Pangasar, I think. Just like she refused to learn the game “Close Open” when she was younger. She’d just look at us then look away in what seemed like her version of rolling her eyes.

She not only draws vertical lines and circles, from the picture I saw her draw at the school, she was making flowers, trees, and fish on a pond!

She’s also learned big and small. Like when she’s putting on a shirt and it can’t get through her head, she says, “Mama, its small! Big me!”

She sings a lot too. She sings “Twinkle, Twinkle”, “Mary Had A Little Lamb” and “The More We Get Together” all on her own. Sometimes she makes up the lyrics but the tune is intact. When I try to sing with her, she shushes me and says, “Me sing! Me!” She sings a LOT, and dances a lot. And plays the piano a lot. I often see her holding her hand to her ear and then humming tunes. It’s really quite enough to make me roll my eyes.

There’s not a lot of things that make me happy these days. Only Lia. I guess that’s how it’s going to be for a long time.

We took a pedicab to we didn’t know where…. until I had this funtastic idea!

“Is that store in the old Benjie cinema still open at this time?” I asked the pedicab driver. He said it closed at eight.

When we got there, the guard was already closing some of the display windows. Apparently, they close at seven thirty, and Lia and I barely made it!

We walked in and Lia and I went silly crazy! Coz we’re silly crazy like that!

By the entrance was a row of colorful plastic flowers! Lia loves flowers. Actually, she only loves them because she loves giving them to me. Flashback to that fight she and her cousin Marielle had over these plastic flowers on a vase at my dad’s house. Lia has made a habit out of taking the flowers out of the vase and giving them to me. She wants to see me holding them with my hands, and preferably near my chest, if not on top of it when I am lying down.

So on this one afternoon when my eldest sister and her daughter were at my dad’s house, Lia took the flowers and gave them to me. Her cousin took the flowers, which were lying on top of my chest, and says, “This is mine!” Lia ran to her and tried to take the flowers back saying, “This is my Mama’s flowers! My Mama’s flowerrrrsssss!” and thus began a screaming, crying match with a tug-of-war for the beloved plastic flowers. I looked at my daughter’s eyes, her face streaming with tears and saw the struggle for “her Mama’s flowers” and I didn’t know whether to laugh or stay mum. Half of me wanted to just take the flowers away from my niece and tell her, “Yes this is MY flowers!” but I’d like to believe I’m the kind of mother that lets my daughter fight her own fights.

And that, goes down in history, as the day my daughter fought for me.

And I hope it would not be the last. In fact, I hope she would always do so…..

Anyway, going back to the store, it was crazzzzzy! Crazy in the way you go crazy over at Quiapo or Divisoria for all these funky cheap finds! There were cheap Christmas decorations, cheap rugs, cheap tables and cheap pretty little study tables for Lia!

At P1,600 I had soooo wanted to buy her one. *sad face goes here* because I did not have even P500. (Kahirapan for the win!)

So I led her away down aisles of cheap shirts, cheap pants, cheap bags, cheap shades, cheap trinkets, everything there was cheap! I was laughing the entire time! Then Lia got her hands on some pink and purple markers and called out to me. She then led me back to the study tables. Uh-oh, I murmured to myself.

I led her back to the counter with her markers and a Disney Princess notebook, which she gave herself to the cashier, and paid for them. She led me back to one of the pink study tables and sat down. Oh my, how I wished I could buy the cheap pretty pink study table…

I left her there to go roaming down the aisles once more and I found myself in the aisle with the kinky huge brassieres. Hahahaha! And the kinky panties! Oh la-la-la… hahaha! I thought, shall I buy some just for kicks? See, I have never been into kinky underwear. I was always the grandmother’s-underwear kind of girl, if you know what I mean. Hahahahaha! Oh my God, I was laughing like crazy the whole time!

And then, I go and check on some of the more normal-looking panties and see this!

One silly panty - design on the back

One silly panty - design in front

And I laugh like crazy because I remember the Elephanty! The panty with the elephant design, complete with a little tail at the back! Oh la-la-la-la!

And then that reminds me of this time when H and I were going through a particular Christmas bazaar in Eastwood, and there were these panties, and we were, for some reason, going through them and he had said, “Oh this looks nice!” holding one and I take one and say too, “Oh this looks nice! Except that it looks quite dirty.” Like you know, when you’re at a bazaar, people go through the stuff with their hands and all, but this particular panty, I happened to turn over and it was really dirty! Like dirty as if someone had already worn it! And we drop the panty, and hurriedly walk away, laughing like maniacs. Damn dirty panty in the Christmas bazaar! Hahaha.

Oh I wish I had taken photos of all these silly little stuff at that silly store but all of the staff were looking at me because they were already mopping, cleaning and basically closing for the night and I was there maniacally laughing at every little thing while my daughter owned the study table out in front, making drawings on her Disney princess notebook worth P10 and pink and purple markers worth P5 each.

Schooling at the silly store

I think I will make it a habit to visit this silly store just to check out what’s new. Besides, in the absence of playgrounds or long quiet streets where we can take a little stroll together, it’s a really good bonding activity for Lia and me.

Its at times like these when I love living the provincial life. Oh the simple joys! And hoorah to silly panties!

Lia and I amused each other, dancing to MTV, singing along to Disney Junior shows, and then, I had this brilliant idea of using an application on my mac that I have never used before – the Photo Booth.

These are what Lia and I came up with:

Kissy kissy

Tonguey tongue out

Pouty pout

Laugh out loud

Mama, this is sooo fun!

How do I do this?

Baby you're soooo cute! Nail polish courtesy of Lias-nail-services-while-you-sleep

Lia has this habit of painting my nails while I sleep. I just wake up the next morning with pink nail polish on my toes on one foot and blue nail polish on the other. Some days she paints them all with designs, like blue dots on pink background, or swish swashes of pink and blue and black all in one. She’s quite good too, and getting better everyday! Click here for a photo. (Warning: this is a photo of my foot! )

Huggy hug a.k.a. "Mama, huggggg!"

Duck face!

Smiley smile

Smiley smile part 2

Ta daaaa!

Cozy cozy

Yeaaaah!

Yiiiiii!

And finally, a parting sweet smile.

Big smile

**This album currently has 30 likes on Facebook. LOL

..

…

Okay lang yan, masaya naman siya eh. Ansaya-saya!

No matter how much you prepare for it, parenting will blow your mind.

Your kids will challenge you, bring you to tears, crack you up, and make you forget what you urgently had to do. They’ll shatter the life you knew into a million pieces. Then they’ll put it back together, like a stained-glass window, into something infinitely more complicated and beautiful.

While every parent’s biggest surprises are different, there are common themes to the ways that kids revolutionize our lives…

This article was lifted directly from another site.

You can read the whole text in full here.

***

Fighting during the first year of the baby is, I have found out, very common. One Sunday, Father’s Day it actually was, I took off to get some refuge at my friends’ house like I always do after Ryan and I had a fight. I called my eldest sister to talk and cried on the phone with her for hours. I could not talk to my friends about my issues since none of them are married. I was one of the first ones in all my many groups of friends to get married and for a time longed the company of married women like myself for some good talk about married life; and all the more did I look for mothers after I had the baby. Now I even join online groups for moms just so I would have an outlet for the myriad of issues I come across with and, sometimes, just to know that I am not doing so bad as a mother. My sister told me there will be a lot of fights as exhaustion and stress build up. It happens. It’s normal. We’re all just humans anyway and taking care of a baby is just really hard. That was just one of the many times I am thankful that I have sisters and that they are mothers like me too; and even more that they were mothers before I was.

Though most of my friends say I look the same, I know I don’t. Some of them say I am prettier. I think only because I have gained weight and this added weight looks good on me. At 95 lbs, I am still actually 5 lbs off from my ideal weight and 10 lbs off from the standard ideal weight for my height class. I have always wanted more weight on my frame, it just was so difficult to meet the 6,000 calories per day my nutritionist-dietitian recommended. More than the added weight, my body shape is different. Aside from a fuller chest, I now have wider hips and bigger thighs. It came as a surprise to me when two months after I had the baby, I took out the box of shirts I stored last January and found that eighty percent of my shirts did not fit me anymore. My body shape is different, but I love it.

I was never a party girl and thus did not have friends who were all about partying. I had different sets of friends, some of them drink a lot, some of them drink socially and some of them don’t drink at all. I stopped drinking beer back in 2005 and only had cocktails thereafter. I stopped having cocktails too in 2007. (I still smoke though, because it really is a hard habit to break.) I still see most of my friends. We still have good times together. I try not to talk too much about babies though, only when they ask, so as to avoid making my friends uncomfortable. Most of them do not have kids and some of them do not even have boyfriends. It’s a girl thing. I am happy though that at twenty-seven, I have friends (few they may be) who are now planning to get married or are planning to have kids of their own. It means our friendship will grow stronger. I am excited for them and excited at being able to possibly help them out too.  People evolve and it is only natural that friendships do too. Friendships are still relationships and like all other relationships, it has to be nurtured. Nurturing relationships come from a common desire to maintain communications or in other words, simply not let each other go. I am very grateful that I have managed to, so far, make such wonderful friendships. My friends are one of the things I think about when I am down, and that never fails to make me smile.

I had my first Mother’s Day a month after I had the baby and though there weren’t any gifts or even a hint of a celebration, just simple text greetings on the phone, I felt every minute of it. I got teary-eyed at every Mother’s Day commercial I saw on TV. I was even crying at the opening scene of Star Trek. I have always been such a cry-baby, but now that I am a mother, I am even more so.

Surprisingly, even if they said it would, my relationship with my own mother did not change at all. My mother and I never got along and we have always had a strained relationship. She almost never goes anywhere with just me. For a long time I dreaded having a child of my own because I was so afraid of what my own relationship with my own daughter was going to turn out. When I was pregnant, I even prayed the child I was carrying inside me was not a girl. As a child, I made my mother cry one too many times, perhaps even as an adult and, perhaps even now, and that made my mother say, “You made your mother cry. Your own daughter will too.” So afraid was I of this curse my mother put on me that I was not too happy when we confirmed, a week before I gave birth, that the child I was carrying inside me was indeed a girl. Now that I think about it, my daughter’s making her mother cry, was one inevitable fact.

We will always make our mothers cry. Be it out of sorrow or joy.

I cried and cried when I left my baby on top of the pillow and found her moments later, crying face down on the bed. When I first saw her face down on the bed like that, my first thought was, “Oh God I hope she is not dead!”, but she was crying and therefore was very much alive. I cried and cried because I felt so guilty for leaving her on top of the pillow like that and because I realized that the fear of losing my child is very real. It used to be that my biggest fear in life is losing everything in a fire but now that has been undeniably and understandably surpassed by the fear of losing one’s child. Material things are just material things but people, especially one you carried inside for thirty eight weeks, went through hours of labor for and made the center of your life, are worth more than any material thing I have, ever had and will ever have.

I have only been a mother for three months and have already shed a lot of tears. I know there will be more but it’s something I am prepared to have. Only because I love. I will cry buckets if I have to, and maybe, I even want to.