remember the fun we had with the ketchup?

I was home this past Saturday. I enjoy going home to experience the things that I miss so much like the beach and in-n-out burgers. But most importantly, I look forward to spending time with my niece. Serena Rose is not even two years old, but she’s got personality for days. She poses for the camera. She loves cell phones. She mimics animal sounds. She does this interesting nose-scrunching thing when she makes people laugh. Living so far away from my family, I had yet to see any of these things for myself.

For those of you who don’t remember my last trip home in May, I had spent an entire day with my niece then and she didn’t really like me much. My brother has this strong fear that someone might kidnap his child so he may have inadvertently instilled a fear of strangers in her. But I hate to think that my own niece (whom I’ve only seen a handful of times in her short 21-month-old life) thinks of me as a stranger. Unfortunately for me, I haven’t given her a reason to regard me as anything else.

In May, I came bearing a gift to her—a small stuffed animal Tai Shan from the zoo. Apparently, she prefers horses. When my mom left me alone with her (we were babysitting for the day), Serena’s smile faded and she looked at me blankly. I got down to her level, tried to play with her, and then gave her my present. She cautiously took it from my hand. A few seconds later, she gave it back to me with the same blank expression on her face. It broke my heart. I started to regret living so far away.

On Saturday, my mom and sister and I picked up Serena on our way to my hair appointment. I took one look at her and thought, wow, she’s gotten so much bigger. She was strapped into her car seat and off we went. While in the car, my mom and sister tried to get her to do her animal sounds so I could finally hear them. She refused. She was shy and quiet while I was around. At the salon, we greeted Mischa, my colorist. Serena actually got excited to see her. She smiled at Mischa. Meanwhile, I couldn’t get her to smile at me.


After the hair appointment, we went to lunch at Mario’s in Huntington Beach, home of the best Mexican food outside of my mom’s kitchen. Serena slept the whole time. Afterwards, we walked around and did some shopping. Serena woke up and wanted to play. While in the dressing room at Ann Taylor, Serena was cheerful and playful and a little more accepting of me. While playing peek-a-boo in the dressing room, my sister asked Serena, “Where’s Tía?” (“tía” meaning aunt in Spanish), and she actually pointed at me! I was shocked. I ended up playing peek-a-boo with her throughout the store, which she seemed to like a lot.


Heading over to the beach, Serena was more receptive to my attempts to play with her. She even asked me for sips of my Jamba Juice shake (ok, so maybe she didn’t ask…it was more like a gesture). We sat down on a bench on the pier and started to feed her a kids lunch from Ruby’s. It came with ketchup packets for the fries and Serena and I engaged in a long game of “Pass the ketchup packets.” As I handed her each packet, I would count, “One, Two, Three” or “Uno, Dos, Tres.” After I handed her the last one, I would show her my empty hands and say, “All gone.” Then she’d hand them back and I would count for her, “One, Two, Three.” When she was done, she would then show me her empty hands and I’d cheer for her. Yay, baby! At some point, I stopped to take a call from Jesse and she just looked at me during the whole call like she couldn’t wait for me to finish.


On our walk back to the car, I stopped at the end of the pier and asked my sister to take a picture of me and Serena. Linda took her out of the stroller and stood her up on a bench so I could pick her up. Except, she wouldn’t let go of my sister. Serena didn’t want me to carry her. I was so sad. I thought we had made such progress. When I did pick her up (against her will), she did the squishy face (when Serena was a lil baby, I noticed that her face would scrunch up right before she would release an ear-piercing cry. It was like her warning signal). I thought to myself, Oh no, she’s gonna cry. So, then I told her, “Remember the ketchup? We had so much fun with the ketchup. One, two, three. All gone!” That was enough to calm her down long enough to take a picture. When I let her go, she happily went into my sister’s arms.


Maybe next time, she’ll let me carry her. Baby steps, right?

For more photos of my trip to the OC, please check out my flickr page.