Similar to last year, I celebrated the New Year with the family in our good-ol’ family grocery in Bulacan. In the land of firecrackers, fireworks aren’t necessarily those beautiful fiery explosions in the sky that one would normally imagine, but they’re definitely heart-thumping and loud. Just when the year was about to change, the bomb-like explosions of the strong firecrackers went off and it went on for a quarter of an hour, with no half a second of silence.

A little past twelve, I went up to our top floor and watched the landscape flicker in chaos. Tens of thousands of mini rockets exploding everywhere across the Bulacan landscape. It was quite amusing–I imagined it as a scene from a war, with thousands of anti-aircraft missiles flying in the air to fend off a foreign invasion.

We went back home to Quezon City at around 1 in the morning. It was an interesting sight. There were no other vehicles in the expressway except ours, seriously. It felt like we owned it. Or we were the only survivors of my imagined New Year’s war.

I miss being a kid during Christmas. Sure, it still brings that warm snug feeling whenever you’re with your extended family. Perhaps its our consciousness that has been contaminated with the ugly realities of this world, that makes it feel less, um, exciting or magical.

We went to Amadeo and Indang in Cavite today and spent Christmas with the paternal relatives.

My mother, my brother and I were in Cebu City last Saturday to attend my mother’s college best friend’s dad’s death anniversary affair. My mom and I were also in Cebu the same time last year to pay respects when her friend’s father died. This college best friend of hers was her three-year roommate when they were students at the University of the Philippines. She now lives in Iowa so, I guess my mom takes on every opportunity there is whenever her friend is in the Philippines, even if it takes us all the way to Cebu.

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We held a birthday party last September 30 for Tisay’s second birthday. It was a buffet lunch in our place in Sta. Maria, Bulacan for our relatives and my parents’ friends and neighbors. During her first birthday, we held two gatherings. One in Bulacan and a KFC kiddie party in our relatives’ place in Amadeo, Cavite. You may see pictures from her first birthday here.

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We finally regained our regular internet connection at home. The only way I was able to get online the past few days (aside from hanging out in school to avail of our wifi service) was to sit out at our garage and pick up our neighbor’s wifi signal.

Yesterday, my mom and I took Tisay to Trinoma to buy her some clothes for her second birthday tomorrow. It was Tisay’s second time in a mall–the first time was months ago in nearby SM North EDSA. (It was, by the way, also my first time in Trinoma). We went to a few shops to look at things for her. While my mom picked out the clothes, I took care of running around the baby, which can be quite tiring. Tisay was obviously very amused with everything that she was seeing, running around the way curious and playful babies usually are.

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Tisay will be turning two years in a little more than a month. We’ve already trained her to say her name and her age. She says “two,” however, whenever she’s asked “how old are you?” We’ve prepared her a month early, see. Hehe. She can now verbally express a few words and can now answer formula questions among other such tricks for babies. It’s adorable.

I attended the regular family lunch at Emerald Garden last Saturday. I’m not a talker within the extended family, as I rarely engage in the elders’ conversations, nor with my female cousins’ affairs, nor with my nieces and my younger cousin’s conversations. I have, however, come to look forward to this gatherings. The company of the family itself is something I’ve just recently learned to appreciate and value. It gives me that unique and warm feeling of security and comfort.

May 27, 2007. It was Memorial Day weekend. My aunt and her family brought us and saw us off from Hartfield Jackson Airport in the morning, a few hours before noon. At the security check, our boarding passes were marked with special markers, and we were brought into these special glass cubicles. It’s “SOP,” I suppose, for suspicious-looking people like us, however subjective their standards are. I don’t know. For certain, most of the other domestic passengers didn’t go through all that hassle. Anyway. By this time, I’ve come to particularly enjoy loitering around airports while waiting for boarding time. There’s this certain leisure in watching other passengers and looking through the shops.

Our Delta Airlines flight to New York took around five hours. New York and Atlanta are on the same time zone, so there’s no additional jet lag, though I did get to catch a few hours of sleep on the plane.

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It’s been quite a while since I mentioned or wrote about Tisay here in my blog.

When my parents, my younger brother and I left for the US for a vacation weeks ago, we left our foster baby, Tisay, to our relatives in Bulacan. For three weeks, we weren’t able to see her, and vice versa. When we came back, she was expectedly a little disoriented. For an hour she was just staring at us, but soon enough, she was as noisy, as bratty yet as adorable as ever.

I wonder for how much longer she’s going to be with us. There’s even talk that we might be allowed to have her as our own. Who knows? [I took this photo of her on our way back home from spending Father's Day in Amadeo, Cavite.]