Hijri New Year/ My Sisters' Blogs

May this year bring

Happiness and less grief
Hope and not despair
World peace and less conflicts
Better health
Useful new technology
less death tolls because of wars, hunger and disease

Happy New Hijri Year

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For Arabic-readers

on another note, I would like to congratulate my sisters for joining the blogsphere.
Here's my eldest sister blog "My Homelands", and here is sosa lola's blog "Words I wished I could have said", both in Arabic.

Good luck to you both :)

Happy Birthday Sosa-Lola

She’s this cute, childish, loveable, funny, spontaneous, smart girl, not because she’s my sister but because for some mysterious reasons, it’s helpless not to fall for her or not to like her. She Sosa lola, my youngest sister. No matter how old she gets, we see her as we’ve always knew her “noq6a” (a dot or a point)

I can go on and on talking about how we enjoy our times together but you’ll never get the picture. We invented games, invented words. We made practical jokes, we made fun of everything. .We wrote songs together and we wrote movies, but above all we had our own way to sing. It’s this silly kind of singing that makes anybody who listen to us drop down laughing. I would sing and she would add the beats and tempo in a very funny way, moving her hands as if she’s drumming. Oh how I miss her.

One of the games we invented was “khamsha mino yukhmosh awal?” don’t worry, you won’t find any of these words in a dictionary. Simply because they are made up. “khamsha” from “khashim” (=nose) and a driven fake verb “yukhmosh”, “mino” (=who), and awal (=first). So the game is “who would snatch other’s nose first?” We were in kindergarten when we invented the game. And the best place for us was our parents’ bed. We would lift our hands straight up vertically and say “khamsha mino yukhmosh awal?” And that’s when all the fun begins. Many times the game ended with a fight or at least one of us crying.

Sosa has a major crush for Tigger.Oh yes, of Disney’s Winnie the Pooh family. She made the entire family along with her friends fall in love with this creature. She considers him her pet. Unfortunately Tigger the Tigger and Tigger The Baseball Player are with me now and not with Sosa. She only has Tigger the Baby. Hopefully the entire family reunion will be the coming August. Pray for them :)

The “noq6a” is graduating this summer inshalla. She’s studying Finance and Banking. From the 9th grade, Sosa made up her mind and decided she doesn’t want to waste her time on chemistry and physics nor on geography and history. She wanted something she liked way much better: Business. She was the first one in the family who would say it firmly that if she won’t go to a commercial school she won’t study at all. Amazingly, she made this precedent decision and she graduated from her commercial high school as one of the top 10 students. That year, she spent it alone with my father in Baghdad. She refused to leave Baghdad even with the worst situation to live let alone to study, even after my eldest sister, my mother and I left Baghdad. Dad had to stay with her so she would be able to graduate.

To Sosa, the bravest tinny girl I’ve ever known, I want to say Happy Birthday. May all her wishes (the good ones ha ;) ) come true. May God bless you, guide you and lighten your way.

Sistery thing

The previous two months I could handle the papers, exams and the exhibition thing easily because I'm used to it and this is the kind of life I was born to live. But with my eldest sister around, here comes the bomb. The thing is no matter how much you disagree with someone and no matter how far the relationship can reach, it's different with sisters. First, we are family. We've been through almost the exact experience of life, share almost the same genes. We were raised by the same parents in the same house but still we're different.

My sister and I have this "sistery relationship", which sometimes faces mad wind and other times enjoys a summer breeze. She's only three years older than me. And that alone does not make her the big sister, but her bossy nature does. And she used to love it when she makes orders and control everything when my parents are at work or away.
Lately she discovered that she's been taking care of me and my other sister for her entire life. When she was only seven or eight, after she comes back from school, she would walk to the nearby kindergarten to take me and then the next-door nursery school to take my baby sister. She would walk me and push my sister's pram all the way home. Luckily those days were safe then and we lived in a building neighborhood with no streets for cars.
For so many years she was the one I'm depending on to make decisions. She would tell me what to wear and how to arrange my hair, what to buy and how to use, what to play and with whom. It was fun for me to depend on her. She made my life easier. Maybe this is the kind of life we, second children, like because we are always told to look at the bigger siblings and do like them.

Once we started to attend the same school I started to stick around her and her gang. I would want to play with them. Even if they didn't let me I would show my sad face to make her pity me. I was an adorable chubby girl (until the second grade) and her friend had no problem in letting me hang around with them. But she needed her space and the feeling that she was with her own gang doing their own stuff. But there was a trick she used to do to make me leave by bribing me with her nuttella's sandwiches.

Years and years have passed and she got married. I haven't seen her since the two weeks I spent in Amman early 2007 and before that on August, her wedding.

Since 2005, I've been living with my parents in UAE, and both of them have been spoiling me in so many ways, but now it's reality time and my Sister is in town. I gave it a week before we start our "sistery thing" but it started three days after she has arrived.

They are silly stuff which we disagree about but it reflects our own personalities and perception. She's the kind of "live your day as if it was your last". And to her I seem not to enjoy the day. For me all the "Carpe diem" thing is beautiful in poetry or maybe a movie. Somehow I just cannot live by that code. I enjoy what I can for the moment but I have to think about tomorrow even if it will never exits the next day.
Suddenly, the way I eat, the way I think, what I wear and how I style my hair, all those are not excellent. They are not even good for her. She made me straight my hair (which I rarely do); wear the glamorous clothes I forgot in the back of my closet. She made me wear make up wherever I go, the high-heel shoes I neglect and pretend I'm in my twenties. But wait a minute; I am in my early twenties. That strikes me! ok, she's right.
....

As for my youngest sister (sosa lola) she doesn't only live for the day but she lives the minute. She's the party type. Hanging out with her friends, spending time on the PC or watching TV or a Movie is pretty much all she does.

The two years between us sometimes doesn't exist but other times it seems to be a huge gap. But we communicate the best when it comes to movies and songs. She's the bravest of us all. She refused to leave Iraq when we left until she finished high school. My dad had to stay with her of course.

One of the greatest things about having two sisters is that you can make alliance with one of them and enjoy making fun of the third for a while, as the same time you still can make alliance with the third and make fun of the first. But I have to warn you that it's not so much fun when the other two are making an alliance against you for so long.
Sometimes we do wish if we had a brother but when we think about it we make fun of it and how we'll make his life impossible. I’m very grateful that I have my two sisters and the best of all when the three of us make alliance and make fun of someone else. We get really sistery. (Is that even a word?)