My eldest son, Bryan, and I finally got to see the movie "Inception" last night at the THX theatre of Greenbelt. For over two hours we were glued to the screen. I was just bowled over by this masterpiece by Christopher Nolan. The guy is a true creative genius. Even the ending leaves one wondering whether Di Caprio's character finally made it to the real world or to what's just real in his own mind. Wow! But more than the movie was the opportunity to bond with Bryan.
But before the main feature was shown, we were treated to the future attractions. What caught our interest is the next attraction movie "The Expendables". This one promises to be the action movie of the year or rather the action stars movie of the year. Consider: Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren, Mickey Rourke, Jet Li, Eric Roberts, etc., etc. in one movie. Bryan and I agreed that this Stallone-written movie will be a perfect movie date for us.
Another movie that caught our fancy is a coming attraction. The third movie of the Narnia series, "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" will not only be a movie date for Bryan and me, but also for the rest of the family as well. Monette, Niccolo and Jonathan are all Narnia movie fans.
This entry is not meant to talk about the story lines or plots of the selected movies. I just want to share with you some forthcoming feature films that are worth looking forward to and which you can watch with other members of your family. Family, movies, and popcorn. The perfect combination.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Beginner's Luck by Monette
Originally published in The Philippine Star.
He set the first dish before me with equal parts pride and anxiety. If one could go by appearance and aroma alone, he needn’t have worried. Seldom had I seen eggs cooked to such a moist and fluffy state, the golden mound redolent with the aromatic scents of butter, garlic, basil and thyme. Not bad for a first-timer. Not bad at all.
It was an epiphany for my eldest son when he realized he was interested in the culinary arts. Midway through his second year in college, he discovered that he enjoyed watching TV cooking shows with me. That he was fascinated by the endless possibilities in pasta sauces and the various combinations of herbs, spices and sundry other flavorings. So he asked me to teach him and I said we’d start with the basics.
One of the basics was egg cookery. I told him so many cooks ruined perfectly good eggs by frying them over much too high heat or boiling them too long. He also wanted to know how to make fried rice so he could whip up something for himself any time of the day. So we got into rice cookery as well.
I suppose it was inevitable. My father’s mother had been a wonderful cook and I recall spending many a lazy morning in her kitchen watching her cook.
Her kitchen wasn’t anything grand or fancy. It wasn’t even in the house. It looked like a three-sided shed lit by two fluorescent bulbs. It was made of concrete, had a corrugated metal roof and was situated in the back of the house across a cemented courtyard. It was what we called a “dirty kitchen,” something quite common in many homes, at the time.
Not that it was filthy or unsanitary. But placing the kitchen outside the house guaranteed that there would be a minimum of pests in the main living area and the smells of cooking would not end up clinging to everything and everyone. After all, this was in the days before stove top exhaust fans. Besides, preparing most meals in the dirty kitchen spared the indoor kitchen from excessive wear and tear and, therefore, guaranteed it would always be presentable especially when there were guests in the house.
My grandmother’s kitchen was long and narrow and very simple. She had a small two-burner table top gas stove, a recent concession to modernity; previously she had cooked over a kalan, a wood-burning stove. There was also a utilitarian sink, a weathered wooden table where the food was prepared, narrow shelves on which reposed various pots and pans and utensils, an old standing electric fan and a rattan chair in which she could rest while waiting for soups and stews to finish cooking. Strangely enough, the refrigerator and electric oven (she also loved to bake) remained in the house’s indoor kitchen, which was used more frequently as a breakfast nook than a place where food was actually cooked.
I associated my grandparents’ home with good food and boundless hospitality. There was never a visit that didn’t end with my grandfather sitting us, their grandchildren, around either the old Formica breakfast table or the more formal dining table of dark polished wood and my grandmother serving us mouth-watering dishes running the gamut from the simple to the lavish.
If it was a holiday there was sure to be her wonderful Pancit Molo. Or she would prepare our favorite chicken dish in which she marinated the bird in calamansi juice and Japanese soy sauce then baked it, basting the chicken once in a while with butter and drippings. Another favorite was Lumpiang Sariwa. And we could never resist her Halayang Ube, which was never too sweet, had a rich buttery flavor and retained a few whole bits just to keep it interesting.
(Her house was a favorite destination during the annual town fiesta. Her neighbors, discerning folk, knew a good thing when they saw it. Or in this case, tasted it.)
But even her everyday dishes were enough to make us linger at the table. Her Sinigang was neither too sour nor bland. Her Chicken and Pork Adobo would ensnare my hamburger loving brothers without fail. And to satisfy my grandfather’s sweet tooth, she concocted her own version of bread pudding, using the lowly Pan de Sal instead of sliced white bread.
In my grandmother’s hands, even fried canned Vienna sausages tasted better than anyone else’s did. Especially when eaten with freshly baked bread that my grandfather bought from the bakery across the street from their house. To this day, I have never managed to fry Vienna sausages to that same state of perfection and neither has anyone else for that matter. Incredible how so apparently simple a result should prove so difficult to attain.
Looking back I realized that more than just skill and knowledge made my grandmother’s food memorable. It was also the atmosphere in her home. It was an atmosphere born of the great love and respect my grandparents had for each other. And they had so much of both that it naturally spilled over onto all their children and grandchildren. It may sound ridiculous but I think that’s the reason everything tasted so much better there than anything we’d try elsewhere.
Though she passed away when Bryan was only two years old, he must have inherited some of her cooking genes, as we would put it. My father did. So had I, the rest of my family claims. And now my son seemed to be following in our culinary footsteps.
So here it was one midnight in the middle of the week – the result of his initial lessons. Aside from the scrambled eggs, he’d also created a fried rice dish using leftovers he found in the refrigerator. Pork and chicken adobo bits, sautéed string beans and carrots, soy sauce and prepared teriyaki marinade, and just enough beaten eggs to bind the whole delicious mess together.
He was proud of his efforts. He did not just plop everything down on the table but ladled the eggs and rice onto individual plates for the two of us. He set the table and stirred up iced tea and then we sat down to a sumptuous midnight repast.
Who would have thought a meal of eggs and rice could be so utterly perfect? But as I sat back with a replete sigh, it occurred to me that my son had made good use of certain special ingredients not found on any shelf or bought in any store.
An instinct for combining flavors ranked high on the list. A knack for mixing colors and textures also counted. And pride in one’s craft, too. Now what else was lacking? Oh yes, the most precious spice of all had been mixed in with a lavish hand. Love.
Could there be a more perfect meal than the product of a genuine labor of love?
He set the first dish before me with equal parts pride and anxiety. If one could go by appearance and aroma alone, he needn’t have worried. Seldom had I seen eggs cooked to such a moist and fluffy state, the golden mound redolent with the aromatic scents of butter, garlic, basil and thyme. Not bad for a first-timer. Not bad at all.
It was an epiphany for my eldest son when he realized he was interested in the culinary arts. Midway through his second year in college, he discovered that he enjoyed watching TV cooking shows with me. That he was fascinated by the endless possibilities in pasta sauces and the various combinations of herbs, spices and sundry other flavorings. So he asked me to teach him and I said we’d start with the basics.
One of the basics was egg cookery. I told him so many cooks ruined perfectly good eggs by frying them over much too high heat or boiling them too long. He also wanted to know how to make fried rice so he could whip up something for himself any time of the day. So we got into rice cookery as well.
I suppose it was inevitable. My father’s mother had been a wonderful cook and I recall spending many a lazy morning in her kitchen watching her cook.
Her kitchen wasn’t anything grand or fancy. It wasn’t even in the house. It looked like a three-sided shed lit by two fluorescent bulbs. It was made of concrete, had a corrugated metal roof and was situated in the back of the house across a cemented courtyard. It was what we called a “dirty kitchen,” something quite common in many homes, at the time.
Not that it was filthy or unsanitary. But placing the kitchen outside the house guaranteed that there would be a minimum of pests in the main living area and the smells of cooking would not end up clinging to everything and everyone. After all, this was in the days before stove top exhaust fans. Besides, preparing most meals in the dirty kitchen spared the indoor kitchen from excessive wear and tear and, therefore, guaranteed it would always be presentable especially when there were guests in the house.
My grandmother’s kitchen was long and narrow and very simple. She had a small two-burner table top gas stove, a recent concession to modernity; previously she had cooked over a kalan, a wood-burning stove. There was also a utilitarian sink, a weathered wooden table where the food was prepared, narrow shelves on which reposed various pots and pans and utensils, an old standing electric fan and a rattan chair in which she could rest while waiting for soups and stews to finish cooking. Strangely enough, the refrigerator and electric oven (she also loved to bake) remained in the house’s indoor kitchen, which was used more frequently as a breakfast nook than a place where food was actually cooked.
I associated my grandparents’ home with good food and boundless hospitality. There was never a visit that didn’t end with my grandfather sitting us, their grandchildren, around either the old Formica breakfast table or the more formal dining table of dark polished wood and my grandmother serving us mouth-watering dishes running the gamut from the simple to the lavish.
If it was a holiday there was sure to be her wonderful Pancit Molo. Or she would prepare our favorite chicken dish in which she marinated the bird in calamansi juice and Japanese soy sauce then baked it, basting the chicken once in a while with butter and drippings. Another favorite was Lumpiang Sariwa. And we could never resist her Halayang Ube, which was never too sweet, had a rich buttery flavor and retained a few whole bits just to keep it interesting.
(Her house was a favorite destination during the annual town fiesta. Her neighbors, discerning folk, knew a good thing when they saw it. Or in this case, tasted it.)
But even her everyday dishes were enough to make us linger at the table. Her Sinigang was neither too sour nor bland. Her Chicken and Pork Adobo would ensnare my hamburger loving brothers without fail. And to satisfy my grandfather’s sweet tooth, she concocted her own version of bread pudding, using the lowly Pan de Sal instead of sliced white bread.
In my grandmother’s hands, even fried canned Vienna sausages tasted better than anyone else’s did. Especially when eaten with freshly baked bread that my grandfather bought from the bakery across the street from their house. To this day, I have never managed to fry Vienna sausages to that same state of perfection and neither has anyone else for that matter. Incredible how so apparently simple a result should prove so difficult to attain.
Looking back I realized that more than just skill and knowledge made my grandmother’s food memorable. It was also the atmosphere in her home. It was an atmosphere born of the great love and respect my grandparents had for each other. And they had so much of both that it naturally spilled over onto all their children and grandchildren. It may sound ridiculous but I think that’s the reason everything tasted so much better there than anything we’d try elsewhere.
Though she passed away when Bryan was only two years old, he must have inherited some of her cooking genes, as we would put it. My father did. So had I, the rest of my family claims. And now my son seemed to be following in our culinary footsteps.
So here it was one midnight in the middle of the week – the result of his initial lessons. Aside from the scrambled eggs, he’d also created a fried rice dish using leftovers he found in the refrigerator. Pork and chicken adobo bits, sautéed string beans and carrots, soy sauce and prepared teriyaki marinade, and just enough beaten eggs to bind the whole delicious mess together.
He was proud of his efforts. He did not just plop everything down on the table but ladled the eggs and rice onto individual plates for the two of us. He set the table and stirred up iced tea and then we sat down to a sumptuous midnight repast.
Who would have thought a meal of eggs and rice could be so utterly perfect? But as I sat back with a replete sigh, it occurred to me that my son had made good use of certain special ingredients not found on any shelf or bought in any store.
An instinct for combining flavors ranked high on the list. A knack for mixing colors and textures also counted. And pride in one’s craft, too. Now what else was lacking? Oh yes, the most precious spice of all had been mixed in with a lavish hand. Love.
Could there be a more perfect meal than the product of a genuine labor of love?
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Do I Have A Green Thumb?
About four weeks ago, I attended a meeting at the head office of Amici Restaurants. On my way to the car which was parked right outside the restaurant, I was approached by a man who must be in his sixties. He begged me to buy some of his herbal plants which he brought to Manila from Batangas. He looked weary and tired. His herbs were laid out near the parking lot. Each herb was gingerly planted in a temporary container made of black plastic bag material.
The man offered to sell me each herb for P100.00. I listened to his plea as I did not want to simply dismiss him. The question in my mind at that time was ‘What will I do with those herbs? Do I even have a green thumb?’ But I felt a gentle tug in my heart. The gentle voice told me that it’s not about whether the herbs will live or not. What’s important is that I help the poor man go home to Batangas with some money in his pocket.
Just a week before this encounter, my wife, Monette, and I gave a talk for a marriage retreat in Tagaytay for our Catholic renewal community (Brotherhood of Christian Businessmen and Professionals or BCBP). We were presented afterward with a tarragon plant as a token of appreciation. So I bought 1 tarragon, 2 rosemary and 2 basil plants from the man from Batangas.
So voila! The family now has herbs to take care of. Monette and I dutifully take turns watering them daily. And I get to brew some fresh tarragon or basil tea every morning.
After I write this blog piece, I will hie off to the nearest garden supply shop to buy some plastic pots for the herbs. Since I bought them 4 weeks ago, they have remained in their black plastic bags. I can almost hear you saying what a bad gardener I am. I plead guilty. But do understand my hesitancy to spend more money on garden materials when I was not even sure if I have a green thumb. But now that I have some sort of confidence that I may have a green thumb after all (though it may be a pale green in color), I can invest in some plastic pots.
Wish me luck as I will gladly share some herbal leaves with you when the time comes.
Just a week before this encounter, my wife, Monette, and I gave a talk for a marriage retreat in Tagaytay for our Catholic renewal community (Brotherhood of Christian Businessmen and Professionals or BCBP). We were presented afterward with a tarragon plant as a token of appreciation. So I bought 1 tarragon, 2 rosemary and 2 basil plants from the man from Batangas.
So voila! The family now has herbs to take care of. Monette and I dutifully take turns watering them daily. And I get to brew some fresh tarragon or basil tea every morning.
After I write this blog piece, I will hie off to the nearest garden supply shop to buy some plastic pots for the herbs. Since I bought them 4 weeks ago, they have remained in their black plastic bags. I can almost hear you saying what a bad gardener I am. I plead guilty. But do understand my hesitancy to spend more money on garden materials when I was not even sure if I have a green thumb. But now that I have some sort of confidence that I may have a green thumb after all (though it may be a pale green in color), I can invest in some plastic pots.
Wish me luck as I will gladly share some herbal leaves with you when the time comes.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Of Armchair Cooks and Clueless Chefs by Monette
Faced with fixing a cup of instant coffee, my husband PV will ask someone else to do it for him for fear of using the wrong proportions of hot water, coffee, cream and sugar. Small wonder he loves brewed coffee. He takes it black.
When asked to help assemble Sunday dinner’s salad, my sister asked how large did I want the lettuce pieces. To which I replied “Bite-sized.” A silent minute later, she followed up with a genuinely puzzled “How big is bite-sized?”
Then there’s a good friend of mine who’s idea of preparing a meal was to heat up canned sausage, corned beef or sardines. Fortunately, she’s learned how to whip up a few dishes that don’t require a can opener. But she struggles to repeat her successes and will balk at any recipe that requires more than five ingredients or two cooking steps: cutting up everything and throwing them into the pan.
As for my eldest son Bryan—he often comes home with stories of cooking disasters. An aspiring chef, he’s taking the culinary track of his hotel and restaurant management course and spends many hours in his school’s training kitchen. He is regularly dismayed by classmates who can’t tell a wok from a skillet, think folding is applicable only to fabric and paper and, if a recipe does not clearly describe the procedure, would separate eggs according to color and size.
Bryan still cringes at the memory of the classmate who dumped all the ingredients of the cake they were making into the mixing bowl in spite of step-by-step instructions to add them one at a time. The result was so heavy, he claims he could have used it in his weight-training program.
Welcome to the world of the culinarily challenged where the kitchen is a landmine-strewn battlefield, scorched pans and burnt toast are the rule and setting a kettle of water to boil can reduce a grown man to tears.
It seems cooking is an instinct that not all humans are born with. How else to explain the smiles on certain faces and the scowls on others when confronted with one of the most basic activities of daily life? I’ve known people to whom making a simple sandwich is a conundrum at best and torture at worst. And whipping up iced tea or lemonade from a mix should be a cinch yet I’ve watched a number of poor souls botch it even when they follow directions to the letter.
Maybe that’s the problem. Successful cooking does not always entail exact measurements. Hence the phrase “season to taste”. PV complains that when he follows the directions for mixing instant beverages, they seldom ever come out right. Yet when I do the exact same things, they almost never go wrong.
It’s all about balance, I guess; something that’s done on a case-to-case basis. And not everyone has the knack for it or even the capacity to learn how to achieve it. But if people did or could, there wouldn’t be a need for specialists in any profession, now would there?
Incredibly, we’ve employed supposed specialists who should never have been allowed into the kitchen, let alone near a frying pan. I recall one culinary wannabe who tried to whiten her broths not by using the water in which the rice had been washed but by adding evaporated milk. That was the first time I’d ever seen curdled sinigang.
This same “cook” served crispy pata with bottled sandwich spread, consistently ignored the directions on the back of the pancake mix box in favor of haphazardly throwing ingredients together and grilled an entire slab of tuna until it was as moist and tender as a plank of charred wood.
Another so-called cook cost us quite a bundle in erroneously prepared foodstuffs and mishandled appliances. For instance, she routinely overcrowded the frying pan in a bid to speed up the process and wound up boiling food in oil instead. Her pork chops were barely edible as a result. Her fried chicken was virtually unrecognizable. And my mother almost had a fit when the woman used the three kilos of rack of lamb she had bought for my dad’s birthday dinner for a regular lunchtime nilaga.
Our microwave oven did not survive her brief stint with us nor did our coffee maker or our turbo broiler. The last straw was when she set the kitchen on fire because she negligently left the gas on while chatting on the phone with a complete stranger who randomly dialled our number in his search for a phone pal.
Because we’ve always had cooks, my mother seldom prepared family meals. But she knew enough to come up with delicious dishes. My father was the expert in the kitchen, however, even if he didn’t spend that much time there. His skill had a little to do with hanging around his mother who’d been a wonderful cook but the greater reason was a discerning palate that was part inborn and part developed through exposure to good cooking. He could tell when there was too much or too little of anything or when everything was just right. And he was a stickler for true flavor whether a dish was in its pure form or fusion fare.
Not so a certain relative who goes by the popularity of a foreign cuisine restaurant among Filipinos to award it a badge of excellence while completely ignoring establishments that are heavily patronized by their respective nationals just because they aren’t as well known. Not surprisingly, her culinary know-how is rudimentary at most and a commendable meal at her home is usually a catered one.
Except when she’s been lucky enough to find a cook worth her salt. Then and only then can she make the claim of serving good homemade dishes. Whether she can recognize their authenticity however is a story for another time.
When asked to help assemble Sunday dinner’s salad, my sister asked how large did I want the lettuce pieces. To which I replied “Bite-sized.” A silent minute later, she followed up with a genuinely puzzled “How big is bite-sized?”
Then there’s a good friend of mine who’s idea of preparing a meal was to heat up canned sausage, corned beef or sardines. Fortunately, she’s learned how to whip up a few dishes that don’t require a can opener. But she struggles to repeat her successes and will balk at any recipe that requires more than five ingredients or two cooking steps: cutting up everything and throwing them into the pan.
As for my eldest son Bryan—he often comes home with stories of cooking disasters. An aspiring chef, he’s taking the culinary track of his hotel and restaurant management course and spends many hours in his school’s training kitchen. He is regularly dismayed by classmates who can’t tell a wok from a skillet, think folding is applicable only to fabric and paper and, if a recipe does not clearly describe the procedure, would separate eggs according to color and size.
Bryan still cringes at the memory of the classmate who dumped all the ingredients of the cake they were making into the mixing bowl in spite of step-by-step instructions to add them one at a time. The result was so heavy, he claims he could have used it in his weight-training program.
Welcome to the world of the culinarily challenged where the kitchen is a landmine-strewn battlefield, scorched pans and burnt toast are the rule and setting a kettle of water to boil can reduce a grown man to tears.
It seems cooking is an instinct that not all humans are born with. How else to explain the smiles on certain faces and the scowls on others when confronted with one of the most basic activities of daily life? I’ve known people to whom making a simple sandwich is a conundrum at best and torture at worst. And whipping up iced tea or lemonade from a mix should be a cinch yet I’ve watched a number of poor souls botch it even when they follow directions to the letter.
Maybe that’s the problem. Successful cooking does not always entail exact measurements. Hence the phrase “season to taste”. PV complains that when he follows the directions for mixing instant beverages, they seldom ever come out right. Yet when I do the exact same things, they almost never go wrong.
It’s all about balance, I guess; something that’s done on a case-to-case basis. And not everyone has the knack for it or even the capacity to learn how to achieve it. But if people did or could, there wouldn’t be a need for specialists in any profession, now would there?
Incredibly, we’ve employed supposed specialists who should never have been allowed into the kitchen, let alone near a frying pan. I recall one culinary wannabe who tried to whiten her broths not by using the water in which the rice had been washed but by adding evaporated milk. That was the first time I’d ever seen curdled sinigang.
This same “cook” served crispy pata with bottled sandwich spread, consistently ignored the directions on the back of the pancake mix box in favor of haphazardly throwing ingredients together and grilled an entire slab of tuna until it was as moist and tender as a plank of charred wood.
Another so-called cook cost us quite a bundle in erroneously prepared foodstuffs and mishandled appliances. For instance, she routinely overcrowded the frying pan in a bid to speed up the process and wound up boiling food in oil instead. Her pork chops were barely edible as a result. Her fried chicken was virtually unrecognizable. And my mother almost had a fit when the woman used the three kilos of rack of lamb she had bought for my dad’s birthday dinner for a regular lunchtime nilaga.
Our microwave oven did not survive her brief stint with us nor did our coffee maker or our turbo broiler. The last straw was when she set the kitchen on fire because she negligently left the gas on while chatting on the phone with a complete stranger who randomly dialled our number in his search for a phone pal.
Because we’ve always had cooks, my mother seldom prepared family meals. But she knew enough to come up with delicious dishes. My father was the expert in the kitchen, however, even if he didn’t spend that much time there. His skill had a little to do with hanging around his mother who’d been a wonderful cook but the greater reason was a discerning palate that was part inborn and part developed through exposure to good cooking. He could tell when there was too much or too little of anything or when everything was just right. And he was a stickler for true flavor whether a dish was in its pure form or fusion fare.
Not so a certain relative who goes by the popularity of a foreign cuisine restaurant among Filipinos to award it a badge of excellence while completely ignoring establishments that are heavily patronized by their respective nationals just because they aren’t as well known. Not surprisingly, her culinary know-how is rudimentary at most and a commendable meal at her home is usually a catered one.
Except when she’s been lucky enough to find a cook worth her salt. Then and only then can she make the claim of serving good homemade dishes. Whether she can recognize their authenticity however is a story for another time.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Raison d’être by Monette
I love food. To eat and to cook. It seems my eldest son Bryan took after me. He’s studying to be a chef. Jonathan, my youngest, told me a few months ago he’d also like to be one. He’s 12-years-old and the best fruit shake maker in the house. My middle son Niccolo has autism but he’s no laggard in the shake-making department, loves pasta and sinigang (talk about polar opposites) and knows a good French fry when he meets one. And my husband? PV loves food, too. Even if he can’t tell a tureen from a crock.
He’s the outdoorsy, try-just-about-any-sport type. Yang to my stay-indoors, bookworm yin. Bryan straddles the divide between our interests. He’ll wax philosophical at the oddest moments then take off with his friends for a spell at the gym or a cup of coffee or a late night at whatever passes for a party in that crowd. He’s certainly different from Jonathan who signed up for the Chess Club at school this year. And Niccolo? He recently learned how to surf the Internet. I don’t know if I’m proud or alarmed or a little of both. Yet despite these differences in our personalities and interests, we enjoy each other’s company. Especially if we keep company out of town. Or better yet, in another country. We just make sure that the bathrooms are clean.
Commonality. That’s what keeps the family together. We can have different likes and dislikes but somehow we always manage to find something in common that makes us happy to be with each other. It isn’t always easy. Sometimes we have to stretch quite a bit to find that commonality. The tie that binds. But find it we manage to do for the most part. And the rewards are well worth the extra effort.
Two years and three months ago, we gained a commonality of, shall we say, infatuation. We adopted a little girl and she’s been the apple of everyone’s eyes ever since. There are times I think the boys, my husband included, go overboard in their show of adoration for her. I admit I sometimes do so myself but, apparently, the male of the species can be reduced to a goo-goo eyed, puddle of mush when he goes into “cuddle and coddle the baby” overload. Not that I can blame any of them. Our girl is just too adorable for words. Especially when she blinks her innocent, button eyes, nuzzles us affectionately when we cradle her and sassily swishes her pert tail when she’s in the mood for love. Oh, did I mention she’s a Shih Tzu? No? Well then, allow me to introduce PV’s and my dogter Chibi. Our dogter, mind you, not our pet dog. Chibi is considered a part of the family and woe to anyone who suggests otherwise!
And now here’s another point in common for us. This will be our family’s shared blog. A journal of sorts chronicling our different thoughts on, well, anything. Vignettes. Slices of life. Food for thought (and also the edible kind). Something like that. And, oh yes, hello out there!
He’s the outdoorsy, try-just-about-any-sport type. Yang to my stay-indoors, bookworm yin. Bryan straddles the divide between our interests. He’ll wax philosophical at the oddest moments then take off with his friends for a spell at the gym or a cup of coffee or a late night at whatever passes for a party in that crowd. He’s certainly different from Jonathan who signed up for the Chess Club at school this year. And Niccolo? He recently learned how to surf the Internet. I don’t know if I’m proud or alarmed or a little of both. Yet despite these differences in our personalities and interests, we enjoy each other’s company. Especially if we keep company out of town. Or better yet, in another country. We just make sure that the bathrooms are clean.
Commonality. That’s what keeps the family together. We can have different likes and dislikes but somehow we always manage to find something in common that makes us happy to be with each other. It isn’t always easy. Sometimes we have to stretch quite a bit to find that commonality. The tie that binds. But find it we manage to do for the most part. And the rewards are well worth the extra effort.
Two years and three months ago, we gained a commonality of, shall we say, infatuation. We adopted a little girl and she’s been the apple of everyone’s eyes ever since. There are times I think the boys, my husband included, go overboard in their show of adoration for her. I admit I sometimes do so myself but, apparently, the male of the species can be reduced to a goo-goo eyed, puddle of mush when he goes into “cuddle and coddle the baby” overload. Not that I can blame any of them. Our girl is just too adorable for words. Especially when she blinks her innocent, button eyes, nuzzles us affectionately when we cradle her and sassily swishes her pert tail when she’s in the mood for love. Oh, did I mention she’s a Shih Tzu? No? Well then, allow me to introduce PV’s and my dogter Chibi. Our dogter, mind you, not our pet dog. Chibi is considered a part of the family and woe to anyone who suggests otherwise!
And now here’s another point in common for us. This will be our family’s shared blog. A journal of sorts chronicling our different thoughts on, well, anything. Vignettes. Slices of life. Food for thought (and also the edible kind). Something like that. And, oh yes, hello out there!
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)