Family

Happy Somebang Christmas!

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Merry Christmas! 🙂

Christmas in the Somebang Compound was very simple this year, but also very happy. Who can help being happy when there are kids around?

When I was little, we would sleep on the afternoon of the 24th so we could stay late for Christmas Eve. Papa used to dress up as Santa when it was time to hand us our gifts. There was a time that Lola dressed up as Santa too. Last night, it was my turn again to call out the names and hand over the gifts. No, I wasn’t wearing a Santa suit, but I was wearing a red shirt. Haha 🙂

The food table last night wasn’t as filled as Christmas 2007’s table was. But it was good food, and everyone had their fill. There were still some leftovers by the time the party was over.

The kids had a blast with the games we had all night long. As usual, I was game master, with help from cousin Ton. Apart from the games, they also enjoyed singing – even AJ was trying to hog one of the Magic Sing mics! 🙂

We brought down the TV from my parent’s room, and my brother also setup our stereo with the speakers, so we can have Magic Sing fun.  Like in previous years, we spent hours singing along! As a Christmas gift to my parents, I gave dad funds to buy a chip for additional  songs for the Magic Sing yesterday. They had been wanting to buy one soon after they got it, Christmas was a good time as any. It was perfectly timed because the songs that everyone wanted to sing were mostly found in that new chip. Although Adam (8) was quite disappointed that Evenascence’s Bring Me to Life was not on the list. 

In reality, the cash donations for the prices wasn’t huge,  I just had most of it changed to 5 peso coins so we could enjoy them longer. That was a great idea! 

Near the end of the evening, I was complaining because I did not get anything – having been the one facilitating the games and not joining any. At that point we passed along a cup for everyone to chip in for a raffle. We put everyone’s names and one lucky person would take home the pot. The donations came in coins, so there wasn’t much, but it was the spirit that more important. 

On the first draw, we found out that not everyone’s names were entered. Butchik would have one but we had to redo the whole thing. Guess who one eventually? I did! Hahaha. All 140 pesos of it was mine! Hehe. 

The last draw was strictly for the 8 kids. The funds were from Esban’s dad, who had won 300 USD from a raffle at a Christmas party. We had been teasing him all night to give away 10% of his cash. He gave away only 300 pesos though, hehe. I added a few more to the pot so all the kids would have a price, rather than just three. 3 received 10 pesos each, 2 got 20 pesos each, and three more received 100 pesos each. Again, that doesn’t sound much, but it shouldn’t take much to keep everyone happy 🙂

It was a great family night that ended at 5am for me. I am going to miss this on New Year’s Eve.

Guevara reunion banner

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Alfred’s family is hosting their annual reunion this New Year’s eve. It will be held in Bicol though, so there’s no chance of me being there. He did ask me to make their banner so I scrapped a layout using the Sunshine Girls original Winter Wonderland freebie from last year.

guevara

Most of the stuff I used are from Flergs, Ellie and Franziska Altman.

Christmas Presents

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I still have not picked out a gift for my agents. I want to give something to my former agents that I left back at the 7th floor (after all their wonderful performance this year has paved the way for my monthly bonuses for me), as well as something for my 16 new kids (who are seriously challenging my abilities at this point). But I don’t actually have a bayong full of cash to spend for this, you know? Last year, I got cute bear cellphone charms for each of my agents, I attached them to these cute Christmas cards I printed out.

When we were at Greenhills a few days ago, I saw some cute stuff that would be awesome to give away. There’s this item we saw in Quiapo too that would make a nice present.  Ijust don’t know when we could go back and finally make a choice. I’m tempted to get some small items that are normally used for promotional business gifts, but instead of having them stamped/printed with a business name, I’d have our team name and logo printed all over the stuff. That way, I’d be able to give them presents, and boost team spirit too!  Haha 🙂

I also don’t have anything for mom and dad yet. Dad showed me a pair of trainers he’d love to have. Only, I don’t want to indulge him. Hehe. I’d probably check with Kuya so we can just put our budget together for their presents.

Ma will take care of shopping for the rest of the kids in the family. If they don’t finish today, Alfred and I would probably shop for more on Tuesday/Wednesday.

 

Quality Coaching

For December Week 2 (which ended Saturday noon) I didn’t meet my monitoring allocation. Bummer. I’ve always been proud of the quality of my coaching sessions with my agents. For the past eight or nine months this year, I’ve had the perfect situation because I only had a handful of agents and I was always a hundred percent with getting them covered in terms of monitoring their sessions, and coaching them on all of the other things they should be aware of as employees of the company.

That’s what I sought out to do with my new team. The thing is, I have more than twice as much agents, and I need to monitor and upload about four times more than I used to. I also need to backtrack a lot to have the best picture of their performance as I could get. Many, if not all of them, are in dire need of some TM love and affection. Haha. Seriously, they have a lot of potential that’s just waiting to be released. 

I just can’t help but feel that I may not be focusing on the right things, at this point in time.

To be honest, I was so busy the past week I am disappointed that I still didn’t meet target. I don’t take breaks, and take my lunch so late in the shift already (or not at all). Still, I fell short. That’s not very encouraging.

But I can’t allow myself to dwell on that. I have to look and move forward. And you can bet your ass that I will.

 

Blue skies and Chocolate

That’s going to be the colors on our condo unit. We met with the designer again yesterday and that’s what we agreed on. Blue would be the main colour (a nice light and bright tone) and there would be chocolate accent walls.

Can’t wait to go back there on Wednesday to see the renderings and mock up 🙂

Christmas Shopping

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We only really started Christmas shopping yesterday, and it was crazy. I felt like I had already given every gift imaginable to the kids on our list in past Christmases, it was so difficult to find something I think they would like, would fit them, or would amaze them. 

Apart from the variety of items to choose from, it was really disheartening how much things cost now. For the amount we had on hand yesterday, we used to be able to buy gifts for all the kids in the family. Yesterday, we only found gifts for less than a third of our list, but we already halved the money! Crazy!

What’s even more crazy is that we found more things for Alfred and myself, than for my nieces and nephews! Alfred got an Adidas Japan jacket – something he has really wanted since the start of this year. I got a HUGE red Nike jacket. Haha.

Considering that I had already bought myself a present for Christmas – Frankie –  I really shouldn’t be buying anything more for me. So though I dreamt of buying an XboX 360 last night, I’m pretty sure I won’t be doing that anytime soon.

So we’re also shelving the idea of getting a TV for the room. Mine is the only room in the house (not counting the bathrooms of course) that doesn’t have a TV. Because the room is really tiny, there was initially the question of what size to get and where to put it. Then we thought we’d just get it it’s own TV stand that we can also use to store our other stuff.

Anyway, the TV will have to wait a few more months. 

We’ll still be squeezing in some more Christmas shopping between now and the 24th.  If I really can’t do it, then my Mom and Dad will. Maybe they have more patience for this. This used to be my thing, you know? Christmas shopping was something my brother and I did on behalf of my parents; then Alfred tookover the task with me. But since last year, I’ve just lost some of the energy for it. Bleh.

Peace and Serenity

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Because of my slow Internet connection, I have been staying away from my favorite digital scrapbooking digs to avoid frustration over the extremely slow download times. Today seemed as good a time as any to go visiting again, so I clicked on over to my Digital Scrapbooking Blogroll and went on a ride.

The order of  the links on my digiscrap blogroll randomly change each time you visit the page. On this visit, I went through about four or five of the links until I stopped, because I was led to an interesting blog that I felt compelled to read through, or I found one I haven’t visited in a loooong time and had so much downloads to catch up on. 🙂

Apart from the great finds from Lindsay Jane’s and KimB’s blogs, there was one blog whose threshold I felt blessed to have gone over today. Megan’s Rackety Scrappety. Her blog was one of those blogs that I used to visit almost on a daily basis. I always looked forward to her templates, and her layouts showcasing her kids. Templates have always been effective in giving me inspiration for my own layouts, though I almost never stick to exactly how they’re designed. On hindsight, though I must have downloaded every template I found on her blog, I don’t think they were really the primary reason I went there to visit – I truly enjoyed viewing her layouts, and the smiles of her kids.

As it turns out, Megan is indefinitely signing off from Rackety Scrappety to spend more of her time and energy with her family, and her newborn Crew. You have got to head on over to Crew’s Journey, I suggest you start reading it from the first post. Her entry about meeting Dex, one half of the twins who flew up to heaven even before he came out from mum’s tummy, was so peaceful and serene. I’ve never read anything quite like it. I mean, I don’t remember reading about loss but not feeling the heaviness of it. 

Crew’s Journey is both a memorial to Dex, and a celebration of Crew’s baby steps to wellness. I think that most importantly, it is a chronicle of the mother’s road to healing.

Whenever I hear of mothers who lost their babies, I can’t imagine how it was for my mother, losing her baby many years ago after having spent only a few days with him. My dad once said that my mom wrote poems but I’ve never seen them. And we’ve never talked about it. I can only conclude that at the time, she had the support and love to keep her going.

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