June 13, 2007
Happy birthday, mahal!
The husband turns 34 today! "I feel exactly the same way I felt when I turned 32," he said while relaxing in bed. "What's that?" I asked. "Sleepy," he said, then proceeds to snore. Haha! He had put in 15 hours of work Tuesday so he could turn over certain tasks before going on vacation. Once he got to bed, he was out like a light. We will be celebrating his birthday on the road as we head for Illinois. Around the same time last year, we were whining about not being together to celebrate special occasions like birthdays. So this year is our year of firsts. I just want the rest of the world to know that I've married an amazing person. Crazy, sexy, cool. He is a wonderful father to Re'Sean. "I am the epitome of perfection. In fact, I've decided to share that perfection with you," he would often say. "I was more than perfect before I met you and you ruined it," I'd fire back. He claims he owns the air that I breathe. You'd have to know us to get our brand of humor. Happy birthday, mahal! I'm sorry we can't have the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders over for a hot tub party. Bada-bing!
Curly crowning glory?
I am sporting a new hairstyle. I’d been wanting to get a haircut since I got here. My hair had grown up to a few inches above my waist and I was apprehensive that if allowed to grow for a few more weeks people would start suspecting I’m a affiliated with some kind of cult. So I went to get a haircut (Good grief! That was two months’ worth of apartment rent in the Philippines!) and pushed beyond my parameters. I went to get a perm as well. I have decided to embrace the natural, and by that I meant my annoying, uneven wavy hair which has been declared passé since the start of the hair-straightening mania. Re’Sean said I look different, “in a good way.” The husband said he didn’t recognize me at first when he went to pick me up and a friend after our trip to the hair cuttery. “It’s nice. I like it!” said he. Insert funny smile. I asked him the same question ten more times after that. He maintains it is nice. I couldn’t even trick him into comparing the before and after hairstyles.
This is probably weird to most, but I have very little patience sitting in beauty salons. It takes forever! I’m always tempted to kick the hairdresser whenever he/she starts pulling on the small hairs near my nape. I get sleepy. Going to a hairdresser is like seeing a shrink. You sit there and almost as soon as they start snipping at your hair, they start asking you about your life. It just amazes me how we feel at ease telling the hairdresser bits and pieces of who we are. The gentleman seated behind me was getting a haircut to celebrate his 7th wedding anniversary with the wife over dinner. Then proceeds to share how great the marriage has been going. The woman to my left was extolling motherhood, then continued to yammer about the challenges and pains of having a newborn. My hairdresser and I happened to be both Asians. “Are you from Thailand?” she asked.
Lazy summer days
All right, so much for laziness. My apologies for the short break from blogging. It’s been more than a couple of weeks since my last post and I offer no excuses. The author feels she is entitled to being a sloth once in a while. So how is everyone doing?
The family has been enjoying the summer heat. We try to do something different at the end of each week and on June 2, we rented pedal boats and put our legs to good use while pedaling about in Washington, DC’s Tidal Basin. The boy took charge of the steering wheel while husband and I provided the foot power. When the first wave of muscle pain set in, the breaks in between pedaling became more and more frequent. The weather was excellent and quite a lot of people were out and about, generally basking in the sun. For some reason, I thought of my beach adventures in the Philippines when my friends and I would rent a small banca so we could go further out to sea, which also reminded me of those childhood years when we would ride a banana trunk down the river. That was ingenious.
On the same week, we attended Unprom at Re’Sean’s school. Husband and I had a vague idea of what the night was going to be about but the boy insisted that we go. Well, think of the anti-thesis of Prom Night. Now imagine dozens of kids let loose in a gym, free to do whatever they want. Yes, you got that right – chaos. Not a single inch of the gym's floor was left unexplored. While some dance music was blasting from the speaker system, the boys were running around like dogs unleashed and the girls were screaming their lungs out while chasing each other. It was like Gladiator third-grade version. In the middle of this bedlam was a toddler who wanted to do a headspin. I was going to post a video so you can bear witness to the disorder but neither Youtube nor Google was working in my favor as of this writing.
With Threese’s help, I finally finished writing the article on Noraida Abdullah-Karim, a social worker from Mindanao who won the prestigious “Voice of Courage” award for her peace advocacy and humanitarian work in that region’s war-torn communities. My editor, Jacqui, drew me out of hiatus, otherwise known as laziness. It’s amazing what deadlines, imposed on short notice, can do. Her subtle reminder put my butt to work right away.
This week, we’re off to Illinois to visit the in-laws. Packing up for three people is no easy work. The last two days consisted of marathon laundry and ironing, capped by a rundown of what to bring and what not to stuff in our luggage. Of course, the most daunting part was my stuff. You know how we women are. If allowed to, we’d bring the entire bathroom with us. My OC-ness is kicking in. Let me go over the checklist again.