Ready for a swim, friends, and a birthday party?
Welcome to another post from me, your girl Jessie, this post is going to describe my amazing and hectic weekend celebrating my friends birthday and doing my favourite activity, as well as meeting new friends. So without further adieu, let's start the story, I usually start by chanting the words that go like...
Story story~
Last weekend was my good friend Tosin's birthday, and though we only met this year we instantly kicked things off when we met. It felt like she was someone I had grown up with, and that's rare for most strangers. As some of you know from reading my introductory post I recently moved back to my home country Nigeria and I am still trying to familiarize myself with the place I once lived in 13 years ago.
Before the birthday, Tosin said it would be better if I, her, and her sisters met up first and to minimize cost we would book a cab together to the birthday location, which was at a pool site called Brent Ford Resort. We also decided to suggest that everyone bring something, the women would bring food and the guys would bring drinks, though Tosin's mum and sisters would already prepare some food.
I had two dilemmas, the first one was finding a swimsuit, for about a year now, I have made a steady and unwanted progression in weight gain, the change initially happened kind of dramatically because at the beginning of 2023 and prior years before I was classified as average weight for my age and height, I now understand the struggles of tryin to lose weight but that's a story for another time. The point is I wasn't feeling exactly comfortable with wearing a tight swimsuit, and heaven knew there was no way I would wear a bikini, I didn't wear bikinis even when I was normal weight due to being more conservative with my dressing and a tad body shy overall, but I still love swimming, splashing around is just really fun, my swimming skills are debatable though.
I found a shop that sold swimsuits close to my place and after I and the amazing sales girl Deborah, went through several swimsuits I finally found something we both agreed on. I also found a swimsuit for Tosin since she wanted a new swimsuit and didn't have enough time to buy one, hence, I kept sending her pictures of different swimsuits and we imagined how it would look on her. It was kinda fun to shop with a friend like that.
The second dilemma was finding a present for the birthday girl. I spent weeks agonizing over it to the point I decided to give up and just ask her what she wanted. Being the kind girl she is, she replied by saying that she didn't want anything and that coming to her birthday party would be a gift in itself since she just wanted to spend her birthday hanging out with her close friends and sisters. What a beautiful soul 🥺, I bet you all are starting to see why I consider her a great friend. She was probably being considerate because we are both currently doing our mandatory youth service, which started in April of 2023 and will end around March of 2024, as corpers (which is the name given to the youths under the national youth service scheme) we don't get paid much and most corpers tend to see themselves running out of money more times than not.
Though what she said was heartwarming it did not solve the problem of what I was going to get her and she was quite adamant about the whole thing, hence I went back to being stuck on what to get. I decided to go the simple route and get a handbag since a lady can never have too many bags, hehe.
Sunday, the day of the birthday, I woke up around 6:00 am, went to church, I went to the early morning service so that I would come back home on time and get ready for the birthday. The meet-up was at noon so I had a lot of time because I was back home by 9:30 am -ish. Remember how I said we all had to bring something to the party and women would bring food, well I decided to buy a pineapple the day before and after I came back from church started to peel and cut it. The process was a bit messy since it had been a while since I peeled a pineapple myself, like years, but anyway, I then cut it into irregularly shaped cubes and packed toothpicks so that people could easily pick them.
There was no birthday cake unfortunately, I wished I had known that then I would have made arrangements for a cake, Tosin had originally planned to make two cakes. She wanted to bring the first birthday cake to the party and take the second birthday cake to work and give it to her seniors and some colleagues there as a way of telling them it was her birthday and then handing them cake with the possibility that they would feel obligated to give something back, like cash, yes, it's a thing in Nigeria, I thought it was kinda genius. They don't have to give anything and many would end up taking the cake with just a thank you, but you know it's like fishing, you put the bait in the water and you wait for the catch. Hopefully, that doesn't sound demented for those who might not get it. The budget she had for the birthday had run out so there could only be one cake, and we as her friends were fine with that, they had other more feeling foods in the part anyway.
On my way to the party
It was time! I would meet up with my friend and her sisters then we would book a cab and go together because I had no idea where the meeting location was and I wanted to help my friend prepare before the other guests. We wouldn't be many because Tosin only wanted invite those closest to her. So when we finally arrived at the resort. I thought it looked beautiful and peaceful. The place was almost empty, apart from one family that was already there as we arrived but they seemed to be wrapping things up. It felt like we had booked the place for the day when in reality it was most likely empty because of how far and almost deserted the location was, they probably get more bookings than they do regular recreational swimmers.
So eventually everyone arrived we were a total of 14 people, coincidentally 7 ladies and 7 guys. Honestly, it did feel a bit awkward trying to break the tension at the beginning since not everyone knew each other, but somewhere along the lines after some introductions, chatting, cracking of jokes, games, and swimming, we were all acting like good friends (we even went on to make a WhatsApp group chat). One thing I love of Nigerians is that you could put a group of random Nigerians together in a room and within 30 minutes they would be joking and playing around like best friends, especially when things like culture and politics don't come to play.
We played games like Wolf and Sheep, and Truth and Dare. I was trying to avoid truth or dare because it always goes above PG, and to make it worse they eventually took out the truth aspect and it became a game of dare and dare, which is basically deciding to do the dare that seems less worse. Watching others do their dares was... interesting to say the least.
The swimming was nice fun, does it make sense to say I can swim but not float? I can swim in the deep end from one end to another (though not exactly because I don't have high long capacity) if I were to stop I would drown. Unless I'm in the shallow end (like I usually am) where I can just stand with my feet planted on the surface.
I and some of the other girls including Tosin had so much fun playing and racing in the water, only one guy joined while the other guys and three of the girls opted to keep dry.
Eventually, all good things would come to an end as it was getting late and as I said before the resort location is kinda deserted so we all felt more comfortable leaving before dark. So after saying one last happy birthday to Tosin and goodbyes to each other, with some of the soon-to-be couples saying their goodbyes longer than others, cough cough (I know you guys don't know what the coughing means but I will do it because I do 😂), we booked our different rides and went to our various destinations.
I Tosin and her sisters took the same cab since we were headed in the same direction, though my home was a bit further away, we had at least an hour's drive or more with traffic. It rained lightly on the way. I bought dinner along the road and when I finally got home I took a shower and called Tosin to make sure she and her sisters got home all right. Then watched YouTube for the rest of the night before falling asleep. A good ending to a good day.
Ending Note: I really wish I had taken enough pictures, but unfortunately I took more long videos than I did pictures. I just get really caught up in the moment when doing most things so I'm not the best at remembering to take many pictures.
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THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONTINUED SUPPORT OF MY CONTENT🙇🏼♀️
All images displayed are original and belong to me, the creator of the post.