Lessons learnt...

Yesterday was my House Warming plus Family Gathering plus my very early birthday celebration (almost 2 weeks in advance!) Actually my mom was using my birthday as a reason/excuse to invite all my family people down la... hehe

well it was truly a happening evening... 3 generations in the house: My grandma and my granduncles, my uncles and aunties and my cousins... all from my mother's side... it lasted into the night... 3am plus i think... haha... and i think i've learnt quite a lot of stuff...

1) Kids nowadays are very familiar with computers
My bro was hogging the computer outside in the living room with his warcraft games and stuff... so naturally the guys were hanging outside as well.. in the meantime, the youngest cousins (a pair of twins who are 9 this year) were in my room and they knew pretty well how to handle my laptop (should have turned it off man.. haha) they were looking for games on my desktop, browsing the internet for their game sites (whose URLs they keep in their wallets)... amazing... maybe i should hang out a bit more with the younger kids... so different from us back then =)

2) Moms are always watching the backs for their kids
My mom was sitting around the dining table talking to my uncles and aunties over beer... there was still food left from the buffet catering and no one really wanted to eat anymore... i went into the kitchen to find my grandma rummaging through our cupboards looking for pots and containers to keep the leftover food... so that when the caterer comes to collect the stuff, they won't take all the food back as well she says... and all the while my grandma's kids (my uncles and aunties) were chatting over beer... =) yeah man.. Mom's watch our backs for us...

3) Frankness is good... but too rare in our generation...
My mom grew up in a family of 8 siblings.. last night, my 2nd uncle, his wife, my 3rd aunt, my youngest aunt and my parents sat around and talked about all sorts of things over beer... they talked about their marriage, about their childrens, about the past, about each other's personalities... it was frank... but everyone was comfortable.. i was impressed... there should be this kind of frankness among siblings... not some unspoken rift and political correctness we see more often nowadays...

4) As much as they trust us, they still worry
After my cousins and i got bored with mahjong, we were "invited" to join their table and conversation.. and the topics that came up were about boyfriends and girl friends, getting a driving license to drive parents home (especially after drinking sessions.. heh), about lesbians and gays and how open they are today comparatively, about us not being feminine or masculine enough (haha)... yeah.. they trust us a lot.. but parents will be parents.. they worry too =)

all in all, i think my family rocks... they brought us up to be independent, to be close among the couins in our generation, to have that kind of frankness and honesty with our parents that not every youth in Singapore has nowadays...

They rock.. =)