Planning for Nanay's 75th birthday

I’ve not been active lately, a bit busy with my life, work and just busy catching up on things. And most especially because on Saturday, it will be our lola’s 75th birthday. Some of you might know lola as grandma or nana, but for us we call our lola as nanay. It’s funny though because mama is our mom, nanay is our grandmother from father’s side and mommy is our grandmother from mother’s side. Oh well they’re all mothers in our heart. 

We are currently busy planning for the celebration on Saturday. We just chose to do it in our house and all of the family members would gather. We didn’t invite family friends anymore for the risk of infecting each and everyone with the virus. 

We will just probably order and cook some of our favorites. I’m quite not sure with the menu yet as I’m not that involved with planning everything because they usually plan at night and I am busy working during those hours. 

Because of this, I called for an emergency meeting. I sent a message on our group chat and they all came to my room and we started our meeting.

Money Cake 

One of the plans is to have a money cake, I’m actually assigned to find one and I haven’t got the time to find one and it’s already on Saturday. Wait, let me write it down on my to-do list for the day…

They’re planning to put 7,500 php in the cake, a dollar for each year of existence. I already found a baker who does this, the only thing to do is to contact her and give her specific instructions. 

Food

Our family has always been fond of doing a lot of eating and gathering. Every birthday or occasion, we usually gather and celebrate together. We’re almost 20 in our family, so every occasion would include a series of food. 

In rare times, we would always pick a cuisine like Chinese, Italian, Grilled and so forth but this time I think we would stick with nanay’s favorite foods. 

Tiktok 

We were told that we will do a tiktok presentation and hurriedly I sent a chat in our group chat and called a meeting to know what we will do. We brainstormed and thought of “tell me you’re nanay without telling me you’re nanay” but unfortunately, the one they wanted was for the kids to dance tiktok dances. 

So kids would have to practice for the remaining days, maybe we’ll join them in dancing but these days I can’t follow through with the latest dance steps. 

Gifts

Since it’s nanay’s 75th birthday, we planned for everyone to have a gift for her. Each one of us would have to think of a gift for her which is hard because she’s never materialistic. I usually just give her cash on her birthdays because honestly speaking you know how our parents love receiving cash for their birthdays. Another dilemma is that we are trying our best not to have repetitive gifts so a lot of brainstorming was really put into place.

These are some of the gifts we got for her:

• Sandals - She recently discovered a great footwear that fits her feet and you know that our grandmas are a bit picky when it comes to stuff. She is constantly telling me that she wanted to buy this but I postponed it for her birthday. 

• Knife - We remembered her borrowing a knife from us and she didn’t return it so we decided to get her own knife, plus most of her knifes are old. She really needed a new one.

• Plants- we saw this violet chili plant and got curious about it. I think she’ll like it since she’s a plantita or “halalola” as we call her. 

• Portrait - my sister would draw a picture of her and put it in a frame. The problem here is that it's really hard to find a picture of her since she's not fond of taking photos.

• Grocery items for her store - since she had a store, we decided to buy some grocery items that she can sell at her mini store. It would help a lot so she doesn’t need to go out and buy things for a couple of weeks. 

We’re excited for Nanay’s birthday, it’s not everyday that someone you love reaches 75 years of existence. I might share with you the happenings on the day itself but might not if things got busy. 

I hope everything goes well on Saturday!

Lead image: Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash