Friday 30 November 2012

My Sister and I


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.

1 comment:

  1. Awwww...adorable...I hp she sees this 20yrs 4rm now…...
    I wish I cud c a pic of her too

    ReplyDelete

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