Baby Bro Post #1

I am not a baby person. Never have been, never will be. I don’t get people who go like ‘I love babies!’ and, at every gathering, go around with God-knows-whose kid. What satisfaction could you possibly derive from holding a baby for an evening, and making cooing noises at it? You won’t be around long enough to witness any of the exciting stuff like it growing and developing a personality, and it most definitely won’t remember your face, so what’s the point? I’m not trying to ridicule people who do such things; I’m just saying I don’t understand it from a purely logical point of view.
Anyhow, I was talking to a friend of mine on the phone and the subject of my baby brother eventually came up. Post-rant, after my friend was done laughing, she told me to write about him on my blog. ‘Ew,’ I replied. I DON’T want my blog to be one of those crazy gushy motherly blogs which no one reads, where they discuss minute details of their kid’s life like ’Oh, he farted for the first time today! Isn’t he amazing?’ (There is nothing special about baby farts, Imaginary Lady. Don’t be stupid) I was assured that my writings would be anything BUT that. Keeping those words in mind, I have taken the bold step of writing my first (and possibly last?) Baby Bro post. I’m thinking of limiting the number of stories I include in each post to three, because Lord knows I don’t lack material when it comes to him. I could go on and on. Hope you people find my pain amusing.

Foiled, Yet Again

One thing about having a baby brother around is that no plans, no decisions are concrete. Nothing is for sure. You may have been saving something for special occasions, like a cream that wasn’t being sold in stores anymore, only to have him waddle out of your room smelling all nice and FAMILIAR. You hover over him incredibly and see that his face is covered with three-dimensional quantities of the stuff and that he’s reduced the entire thing by half. He looks up all innocently and wipes a big glob off his face and helpfully offers it to you. ‘Want some?’ his concerned expression asks.
Or yesterday, when my mom got a very complex-looking toothbrush back from the supermarket and I immediately called dibs on it. I was all pleased with myself for having beaten my brothers (ages 11, 14 and 16) to it and opened the packaging. I was at the computer at the time and feeling too lazy to get up and put it in the bathroom, so I ‘hid’ it under the keyboard. I go by my mom’s room later and see my brush on her dresser. “Why is this here?’ I ask nervously, already knowing the answer. ‘Your little brother was using it. I took it out of his mouth. He was brushing so well! Just like I’ve been teaching him!’ AAARGHHHH! Slobber on my toothbrush! NOOO! I couldn’t even inaugurate my own toothbrush. How sad.

Beep

By reading the title of this one, what possible scenarios are you expecting? Him making car noises and being cute? WRONG. Let me explain. I have five brothers. Yes you read right, five. Who has families that big in this day and age, you ask? My parents, apparently. Anyways, in our language (yes, English isn’t my first language. The fact that I speak it better doesn’t make it my first language) older brothers aren’t called by their names, like the Korean way of calling older brothers ‘Hyung’.  So we had the task of appointing variations of the term for ‘brother’ to all four older brothers. The oldest one, the one who’s a year older than me, is ‘Bhai Jan’. The one after is ‘Bhayya’ and the one after him is simply ‘Bhai’. Having run out of variations, for my fourth brother, we just assumed he’d be called by his name or something.  My baby brother (Let’s just call him BOB from now on) had a better idea. He named him ‘Beep’. Yes, beep. As in the car horn sound. He pronounces it perfectly, and it most definitely is ‘Beep’ that he’s saying. And he’s sticking to it. No matter how many times we tell him to say his name, he always calls him by that graciously given name of his, to the point where WE catch ourselves saying it too sometimes.

Where’s Bhai Jan?
My older brother is studying abroad, but was here for the summer. Bob formed an attachment to him, probably because he had an inexhaustible supply of energy to satiate Bob’s hunger for piggyback rides and throwing-up-in-the-air-rides and such. When he left, we asked him, ‘Where’s Bhai Jan?’ and he would wave his hands and say ‘gone’ as if that’s that. Soon after, when he saw my brother’s ginormous fullscreen face in the computer when my mom was web chatting with him, he actually freaked out. (Only the first time. Probably because he was like ‘WHERE’S HIS BODY?!) After that when we would ask him the same question, he’d calmly point towards the computer and go like ‘in there’. Cracked all of us up.

THE END. Please give me your HONEST feedback. Was this lame? Comment or else I shall discontinue this series.*dramatic music*