Tween

It was my daughter's 8th birthday yesterday. I went on leave from work to help my Tita prepare some food. It's a Tuesday so she has classes and to top it all, their week-long mastery test started yesterday. A celebration in the afternoon is not
possible since she has to review for the following day's exam. We called off inviting her friends in the neighborhood. A simple celebration will be next week.

How time flies. She's eight! And as my husband always say, eight years ago, we were at a lost on what to do, how to handle our daughter since she looked so fragile as all the babies look when they're bundled in a baby blanket.

Well, now, our baby is officially a tween.

She loves The Suite Life of Zach and Codie and pretends it's Tipton Hotel at whatever hotel we go to. She even made this the wallpaper in our PC. She also wants a guitar. I recently found out why. Because Emma Roberts' character in Unfabulous sings her 'sentiments' out while playing a guitar. And lately, she is so into High School Musical, even singing the theme song she memorized by heart. Like me, she's into books too, browsing on The Silver Chair (Chronicles of Narnia, Book 6) these days.

All these Disney and Nickelodeon shows are eating up a good part of her television viewing. She'll outgrow these things of course but at times it enters my mind how the values (or the lack of) these tv shows affect her. Popularity, tween angst (oh yes, tween angst), peer pressure, whining on too much school work, crushes and all that.

Discussing...or talking about the good and the bad on all these is my way of telling my daughter not everything that appears cute on television is alright. A cute outfit does not make a person, having a small set of real friends is better than being popular. And so on and so forth.

Oh well, it's all part of dealing while one is growing up and we're both in it together plus her Daddy of course.