PSA: The Story of Yoboro

I know....I seemed to be doing better and POOF, off the radar I went again. I have no excuse really. Forgive me and receive me with open arms....ok, maybe one open arm, yet again.

Let me quickly tell you about Yoboro though.

Everyone was out of the house, save for Ma Petrillo and I. As a background, we moved into our current location about 10 years ago, when the area was still more "foresty" than habitable for humans. But over the years, expansion and gentrification have smiled upon our area and the "foresty" days are like folktales. In all those years, we had contended with snakes, scorpions, alligator/some other big lizard, amongst other animals whose habitats we had invaded, but never had we had to contend another human being.

On this unforgettable Sunday morning, I had forced myself to fall asleep around 1am in order to be able to make it in time for a 7am Church service without looking like something the cat dragged in. I woke up around 5:30am to pee and that was when I noticed that a (sliding) window in my room had been open about 5 inches. I rolled this around my mind for a while and when I couldnt rationalize it, I filed it under "perhaps I did this unconsciously". The plan was to head back to bed for another 30 minutes before giving up on the sleep completely. I had barely been back to bed for 5 minutes when I heard Ma Petrillo shouting my name. For a while, she had been sleeping in the living room. According to her, the living room is better aerated.

I was grumbling at the fact that she was waking me up by shouting several feet away from me until she uttered the words which heralded the fear I lived in for weeks after this Sunday; "We have been robbed".
F-I-A-M......sleep cleared from my eyes as I ran to where she was.

Our house had been broken into and raided while WE SLEPT THROUGH THE ORDEAL!!!!
LOL...I laugh about this now, but really...it wasnt even remotely funny. Thankfully, we were both fine. I'd like to regale you with the theatrics involved but the short of the story is that our fence was scaled, sliding nets were torn from outside, burgalry proof was pounded out from outside, and access was gained into the house by so doing.

Bottom line is this, since we are living in Nigeria, we cant be cautious enough! Lock your sliding windows for the night, unplug and stow away handy electronic appliances for the night (tablets, laptops, phones) and most importantly, cover the 4 or 8 or 10 or corners of your house with the BLOOD of JESUS. Because day by day, these people get more and more sophisticated and let's not even discount the use of jazz or chemicals!  I mean, how possible is it that 2 grown adults slept through the pounding out of a burglary proof?!!

Obviously, a lot of things could have gone wrong but thankfully, other than a few items stolen and some psychological and mental confusion left in the wake of the ordeal, nothing else was in jeopardy.

Please dont even get me started on the Nigerian Police Force.

This country is just not it!
We generate or own power supply
our water
security
pay for our health services........ I dont know precisely what works.

Yet, we dey here, singing "e go better"

I guess as long as there is life, there has to be hope, abi nor be so?

Meanwhile, this post on Nitty's blog is making my leg shake unto this my desire to have twins matter. In all of my thinking of having twins...I had never even given thought to the potty trainning part. I can imagine how hard it will be with just one baby....not to mention 2! Chukwu biko!!!
Since we are still on that matter, biko, how do you breast feed twins. Do you tell the first one "hey, dont suck too much, you need to remain some for your twin"? or do they get the memo from heaven?
Infact, thinking about caring for two babies at a time just gave me a headache.

Wait a minute, people actually birth triplets, and quadruplets and quintuplets!!!!!

Please, I am out of here!

Mothers of multiples, I  want to hear from you!!

Oh, sorry, I forgot to say "Yoboro" is the name we coined for the "skillful" perpetrator of burglary and theft.

And my heart swells for SisiYemmie for being the poster child for LDRs (Long Distance Relationships). God bless your home, darling!

LDR Update: Where We Are At

It just occurred to me that I haven’t said anything about my membership in the LDR (Long Distance Relationship)  association. Pray, forgive my oversight. Since I all but shoved your faces into my LDR business since I started the blog, it only makes sense to give you updates on how it is going, since, YY and I are off LDR for now. I should start from the airport gist. Hmmm….maybe before the airport.

About a month before I came home (April 2012), YY was just pissing me off. He would talk, I would be pissed off, he wouldn’t and I would still pissed off. There were some expectations of him that he fell short of and I couldn’t bring myself to telling him, after all, he had a brain and thinking abilities, need I tell him everything? The die was cast though.  My ticket had been bought but we weren’t really on talking terms, in fact, I had started getting used to not talking to him every day. I think he was scared of me at that point too because I just closed up….locked shop…was very non-committal in my conversations and everything. He didn’t even know which day I was flying in. Eventually, about a few days to my arrival, I called him to give him the flight details. Per his usual (laid back) self, he arrived at the airport late, with his friend, my brother and a basket of excuses in tow. I was livid!

I mean, I am upset with you for reasons you don’t know yet. I have given you a redemption card (to pick me up from the airport, lol, I know how funny that sounds) and you failed to deliver?!!! Needless to say we started the trip on a very rocky ground. 

However, life happened!

In as much as he can be a goat….yes, I mean goat, he has several redeeming qualities. One of this is that he can be such a kid sometimes.  There are pros and cons to this quality but stay with me. 

Being a kid as a redeeming quality means that when I upset him, a few minutes later, he is ready to be friends again. It is like those children who you see crying profusely this minute and the next minute they are all toothy grins. It can be exasperating, but it is a nice compliment to my “take-so-long-to-simmer-down-and-let-go” self.  

Indeed, you can imagine my surprise when sometime last week, he pissed me off (he has a patent on that pissing-me-off thingy) and I, without much external influence, actually sought him out after a few hours without holding onto the grudge…..like what do I know?! Dude is rubbing off on me…God be praised!

Coming home for the period of time I thought I would (I was supposed to return in January), I had so many concerns about the relationship. I wasn’t sure that it would stand the test of time, given how much we both had grown apart (physically). However, I do have to admit, to a very large extent, that most of those fears have been unfounded. I have realized that this is as much a learning curve for him as it is for me. This is not to say that all is well and dandy and we will be bringing out aso ebi soon o….in fact, in spite of all the lovely niceties, we have attempted breaking up more than twice since July 2012 to now (it is funny now that I think about it).

So the point of this post is to reiterate that all your LDR problems WILL NOT go away automatically once LDR is over o! *pulls ear for emphasis*…You still gotta put your back into it and I don’t mean that literally, please! In fact, some issues that never came up in during LDR will begin to crop up.

Also, it is put hope in those who need it (fellow LDRers). LDR can work. If it isn’t that I seem to have some major “commitment issues”, we’ld probably be married by now. So, don’t despair……hang in there and do monkey swings while you are at it.

So yeah, @ilola, YY and I are doing well……thanks for asking in the midst of a more important issue  *shines teeth*

Ha! So Shoprite opened in Ibadan the other day! I had made up my mind to not go there until it is at least 3 months old. But God/devil used one aunty to lead me there yesterday. I had given her a ride and on impulse, she wanted to go to Shoprite. It was around 6pm so I figured it wouldn’t do me any harm….most people should be home by then. 

Per usual, I couldn’t be “wronger”!

You people should have seen the line at the bakery!!!!! We waited until the bread was done, we were given tallies and then told that each person was entitled to only one loaf of bread! On top my money!!! Gangsta that I can be (flips hair) I walked away with 2 loaves of bread about 2.5 hours after! 

YY begged for one and because I am magnanimous, I gave him (Never mind that it is just Ma Petrillo and I at home at the moment and I don’t even like bread). By the time I got home, I was too tired to even relish the bread. I sha tried sha and cut small to taste….and another one…..and another one….eventually, I called truce and went to spoon fish stew to down the bread with.

This point of this story?! It was very well worth it! No wonder Baale Iles (heads of house, husbands) were begging for  2, 3, 4 tallies….hahahahaha! But I am still not going back there for a while, abeg!

 

This is My Story 3

For the previous part to this post, check here.

I felt really bad for the air hosts and hostesses. There was no way for them to be effective in their dispensing of duties considering the throng of Nigerian passengers lining the plane aisles. Several announcements were made for them to get back to their seats, for where? No disrespect to my Ibo people, but boy, were they loud or were they loud?! You would almost think you were at Alaba market! Not to mention the women with kids on board. Other passengers were deliberately avoiding sitting with them. Did I blame them?  Not really? Those kids could be loud and unruly sometimes. But I probably would be too if I was 0-9/10 years old and had to be confined in a metal box for several hours. Matter of fact, add grouchy and touchy to the list.

Since myself and my sister were forming “non-Nigerian-language-speaking” personas. We just took in the whole scenery. I know you are already judging me.  But really, I had no interest in recounting my abroad experience with an overzealous elderly man who has been living in the states for donkey years and has one or two (make that hundred) things to say to me about being a Nigerian in diaspora..uhgggg. So, we let them think we spoke no Nigerian language. After we were told to turn off all appliances, my sister remembered that she had left her ipad on while in layover. So, she brought it out to turn off. Only for this man in the next aisle to say “ awon omo yi sha, se ko gbo wipe won ni ki won pa nkan ni? Won a saa ma se bi kini” (These kids, did she not hear to turn off appliances. They just act so silly).

MISTAKE OF THE DEVIL!!!!!

Increasingly, I am realizing that I am the nice one. Ngor, my sister can be a reaaaalll beyatch (excuse my French). Now it was bad enough that this man was pretty much insulting her. He was even worse off for saying it in Yoruba, which is a language we chew, sleep in, wake up in , drink and whateverelsehaveyou! She turned, looked him straight in the eyes and said, “it is usually better for  folks not to comment on issues they have no knowledge about. You, have no idea why I brought it out, so, next time, keep your comments to yourself” with a baddass incline in her voice. Now,  Ngor is not a small person. Me sister na big gal (not fat) with an attitude. Combine that with a baddass voice inflection and what you get is a pretty scared recipient. The guy just pamu for hin side! I was in hysterics.

Later in the journey, I said something to Ngor and decided to say it in Yoruba. Oh boy!!! The guy in front of me almost hit his head against the window in a bid to whip his head fast enough to ascertain that the sentence came from one of us. So yeah, we had them going…..”non-Nigerian-language-speaking-my-ass”!!!

Lagos my Lagos

My first sign was the scantily lit sight from above. I thought to myself…. “Lasgidi my lasgidi!!! Now my heart is at rest (almost) because I am pretty sure of where I am now!” I had smiles for all the customs officers. I had a valid reason. My passport had expired a day before the trip so I had gotten an Emergency Travel Cert. Knowing my people, I was pretty sure they were gonna give me a hard time. So with several words of prayer and smiles like a chesire cat, I approached them. I had to go with some guy to register myself and he asked me the dumbest questions ever! 

Question	Answer I would have loved to give
When did you leave?	**See jamb question o!!** Heloo….there’s a stamp on that passport you are holding, isn’t there?
How old are you	As old as Metuselah. I do believe that is also contained in that little book you are holding.

….amongst other questions! If it was the American checkpoint, I would be sure they were just trying to ascertain that I was indeed the owner of the passport. But for this guy, I was sure he just couldn’t read.

Customs hurdle crossed, I marched down to the carousel to pick up our bags. You people know there are just two, so Ngor and I picked one each (As we used a bag that could be easily picked up by someone else). Two hours after we were still waiting for our bags. When the last of the bags dropped, I silently blessed my family friend’s heart for insisting that we throw a couple of clothes in our hand-luggage. Did I listen fully?....er….r.r.r.r.  Nope!

After filling out the form for missing bags, we couldn’t wait to get the first whiff of warm Naija air.  I wasn’t sure how I was going to be able to find YY in the army of people by the door. While still looking totally lost coupled with all those gbeborun stares, I heard my YY, my own very YY ***nostalgic*** call me by his pet name for me.**smiles** I think my heart must have done a few seconds of tap dance, as I have no recollection of how I went from where I was into dumping my 170pound self on him. He looked tired (he had come right from work from another state), but nothing else had changed!!! **not fair!!!** I am not really a PDA person, but I think I must have deep-throated his tongue right there! I just kept mumbling “oh-my-gawd”. Ngor interrupted the moment by announcing that she was yet to be hugged.

I was on high and euphoric as we drove into the night.

Typing this, I am still mumbling “oh-my-gawd” and feeling euphoric.

dazzlejunction.com

PS: For those who called me out on my last post concerning YY; Mrs Newlywed and Koinonia, I have one exclamation, "Damn, you guys are good"....i was just being my overtly dramatic self in that last paragraph, I was pissed at him and had told him to eff off in anger.  *sigh* the guy knows my mumu buttons, so needless to say the "overness" was only on the tip of my tongue and a rant. Thanks to all those who commented, I really appreciate it.  Thank You