5 lies ,1 truth

1) I currently work at the Esplanade in Oxnard.

2) When I was younger I had three Dalmatian dogs and a horse.

3) My mom's birthday is one day after mine.

4) Once my older sister and I traveled on our own and got lost!

5) My younger brother is studying to become an actress.

6) In my spare time I enjoy baking and make the best cookies in my family.

Good Times

This photo makes me laugh everytime I see it because my mom is horrible at taking photos. When I first saw it I laughed for a good 20 minutes. Now, I still laugh but it reminds me how lucky I am to have such a great mother because even when she is not trying, she can still cheer me up even if it is just a picture.

Change

When I was 14 years old I believed that the only people that could give me good advice were my friends. Whenever I had a problem or just needed someone to talk to I would go to my friends because I felt that no one else could have understood without any judgement. However, from time to time I would hear about hoe one of my friends asked her mom for advice whenever she had any sort of problem. I remember thinking, "wow, her mom must be really cool." Of course, I was a little bit jealous that her mother could be someone that she could talk to. Never in a million years could I have such an open relationship with my mother like she had with hers.

I always thought that my mom would simply not get any of my problems. Maybe she would have even told me something like, "well, that doesn't sound like the type of person that should be friends with my daughter." An answer like that were exactly the type of answers that I was trying to avoid so I never really confided in her with any of my teen drama. However, as time went on, I began to get bigger problems. I like to call these type of problems as "adult problems." My friends just simply seemed too immature and too unaware of how to handle them. Slowly I began to talk to my mom about it. It wasn't that I was seeking any advice from her. IN a way I guess it was just goo to have somebody listen and actually be able to say, " oh I remember, I had something similar happen to me." As I began to talk to her more and more about my problems, it eventually turned into us being able to just talk and update each other on what was going on in our lives.

Even though it took quite some time for my mom and I to be able to communicate it has made a huge difference in our household. I no longer feel like I can't talk to anybody in my house and we actually have conversations during dinner time instead of watching TV. 

Family

There are many different families with many different moral understandings. What could be the right thing to do for one family could be a completely foreign concept to another family .The way I was raised was to be a genuine good- hearted person. To my family, that means to be courteous and truthful. I grew up with: both my mother and father, my older sister, and my younger sister. We were all raised to be good people. Growing up I knew that if somebody fell on the playground that it would be a nice gesture to try and help them up. When there was a new student in class, while everybody tried to figure out why they had come to the school, I would go and ask. The person you become in life has to do a lot with the way you were raised.

My older sister was raised with the most responsibility on her shoulders because she has two younger sisters who are following her footsteps. I remember my mother would always tell her to be careful what she did because as soon as we found out, my younger sister and I, we were bound to do the same. I believe that I am who I am today because of my mother. She taught me a lot of things but the most important lesson she has taught me is that I am not perfect. That I am not invincible and That I can't expect people to bail me out of my problems. Some people might grow up with their parents coddling them but I grew up knowing that I would make mistakes and because of that I would become a better person.

My dad is the one who really taught me about the value of friends. He would spend saturday afternoons with his buddies and watch sports on TV. I remember he would tell me that family always comes first but with friends you can expand your family. He raised me to be very social and understanding because as he once put it, "everybody needs friends." Also, he taught me the value of education. Since I was in grade school my dad was always telling my sisters and I that we had to try our best in school. He then continued on saying that if our best wasn't good enough, we were not trying hard enough. Now I understand that in order to make something of yourself, in today's time, you have to have some sort of education.