I’m the first of my mother's children and she had six. Only
four of us are alive now though. I lost two of my sisters. One of them would
have been Twenty years old on Wednesday. So now I have one sister. She’s twelve
years old. She came to the family at the very right time and brought with her
all the joy, beauty and laughter. She was the baby of the house. Considering I
was already in my teens when she was born, I was like her second mother. She
was my ‘hand bag’ at a time. I did not have a choice. I could not go anywhere
without her, when I was home on holidays. My mom could go about her business freely;
I was there to baby sit.
She was an adorable baby. All my siblings were beautiful
babies. I keep saying that they’ve set the standard for my babies. They just
have to be cute o J.
My sister was one of those babies everyone ‘ooed and aaahed over. Everyone
wanted to hold her. Whenever I went out with her, I had strangers talking to me
because of her.
She was a singing baby. She still sings too. But she started
singing before she could talk. One of her favourites, I remember was ‘ paw-paw
is a kind of fruit, sweet like sugar, yellow like fanta, everybody likes
paw-paw’. We sang that to her so often that she started to sing along, even
before she could talk. And then when she got a little older, she would sing
along to any song that played. Whether she knew it or not. She would mumble the
words if she had to. When you asked her if she knew the song, she would laugh.
She was a vain little girl. Yes o. She would spend hours in
front of the mirror combing her hair or just touching it over and over. She
would sing to her reflection in the mirror as she applied powder on her face
and Vaseline on her lips. One time when she was about three, I went into my room to see her standing
beside my opened anti-perspirant, with a naughty smile on her face. I asked
what she was doing with it and she touched her lips, still smiling. She had
thought it was lip gloss, having seen me use mine, she wanted to emulate. Only,
this was no lip gloss but Sure roll-on. I had to point out to her what it was
used for.
Ahhh, she was also a dancer. Invite her to your kid's
birthday party and be ready to give her the prizes. She could do it all. These
days however, she gets shy. She has a younger brother now. They are like cat
and rat. They could be the best of buddies at times too. Although she has grown
shy, she talks like a parrot when she’s with him. My little brother? Story for
another day.
I remember those days when they would come to me and say ‘I
want to poo’. When I would almost scream is exasperation, ‘two of you should do
and grow up o’, or something like that. To think that those days will be back
soon. At least, I’ve had plenty of practice. Ha! How time flies. While I am
glad they are no longer babies, I look back on the days when they were, with a certain
amount of nostalgia.