Congratulations Dominic & Paige! Big News Coming This September
Congratulations Dominic & Paige!
Big news is coming this September for two people who once stood shoulder to shoulder in front of a Tinker Bell piñata at a Vallejo birthday party. For now — save the date, and get ready to celebrate.
Some articles start with research. This one started with a shoebox — or the digital equivalent of one, a folder of old party photos I hadn't opened in years. I went looking for a specific shot from Chesca's first birthday, and what I found instead was this: a Tinker Bell piñata swinging over a crowd of my kids and their cousins at Blue Rock Springs Park, and right in the thick of it, barely five years old, my nephew Dominic and a girl named Paige.
Neither of them knew each other's names would end up next to each other on a headline twenty-one years later. But that's the thing about a Fil-Am childhood in a town like Vallejo — the parks are small, the community is smaller, and the kids who show up to the same birthday parties tend to keep showing up in each other's lives. Today, PinoyBuilt has great news to share about Dominic and Paige. We're not sharing the details yet — that's coming this September — but the family wanted the moment marked, and this old photo felt like exactly the right place to start.
The piñata in this photo isn't a Filipino tradition by origin — it traveled north from Mexico — but it's been fully adopted into Fil-Am party culture up and down California. Ask almost any Filipino-American who grew up in the Bay Area in the 2000s about their childhood birthday parties, and a piñata swinging from a tree branch or a pop-up tent frame is part of the memory. Blue Rock Springs Park, with its mature trees and picnic structures, hosted more than a few of them for Vallejo's Fil-Am families.
Abangan (ah-bahng-AHN)
Meaning: Watch out for it; stay tuned; something worth waiting for is coming.
You'll see abangan flashed across Filipino TV promos and movie trailers — a single word doing the work of a whole marketing campaign. It's the perfect word for where this family stands right now with Dominic and Paige's news. We're not saying more. Just: abangan. September.
The Photo: Blue Rock Springs Park, July 16, 2005
Chesca had just turned one. This was her first birthday party. Blue Rock Springs Park was doing what it always did on a summer Saturday in Vallejo — sunny, packed with folding chairs and pop-up tents, kids running loose between the trees while the adults kept half an eye on them from the picnic tables. Somewhere in the middle of all of it hung a pink, heart-shaped Tinker Bell piñata, and a cluster of children — my kids, their cousins, mostly, plus a few family friends — circled it like it owed them something.
Dominic is right there in the middle, in a white tshirt. Paige is a right next to him in yellow, watching the whole operation with the kind of patient focus five-year-olds save for things that actually matter. Off to the side, my sister Joy is holding her youngest, Keo, while my own kids — Nica and Jian are pulling at the piñata's strings — and a handful of cousins fill out the rest of the frame. It's a snapshot of an ordinary Saturday that neither Dominic nor Paige would remember on their own. That's what the archive is for.
Wardlaw Elementary: Where Their Story Started
The Blue Rock Springs photo wasn't the beginning of Dominic and Paige's story — it was just the earliest proof I happened to have on file. The real thread runs through Wardlaw Elementary School in Vallejo, where Dominic, Paige, and Dominic's cousin, my daughter Veronica, were all classmates. Wardlaw is one of those neighborhood schools that quietly produces a disproportionate number of these long Vallejo friendships — kids who sit next to each other in second grade and somehow end up sitting next to each other, in one form or another, twenty years on.
Dominic is my nephew — born and raised in Vallejo, just like my kids. Paige has been part of the extended picture for years now. I knew her lolo and lola before she was born. Watching two people go from a shared classroom to a shared piñata line to whatever September has in store is exactly the kind of full-circle moment this site was built to hold onto.
Big News, Small Wait
PinoyBuilt's job today isn't to break the news — it's to mark the moment, dig up the receipts, and let the community know to keep an eye out.
So consider this the save-the-date. Congratulations, Dominic and Paige — from the family, from Wardlaw's old hallways, and from a Tinker Bell piñata in Blue Rock Springs Park that has no idea it's about to become part of the story. Abangan.
- PinoyBuilt Family Archive — J.F.R. Perseveranda personal photo collection, July 2005
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J.F. (Jonjo) left the Philippines at age nine, spending a lifetime bridging the gap between his Marikina roots and his Chicago/Vallejo upbringing. A proud Hogan Spartan from East Vallejo and resident of LA/SF, he founded PinoyBuilt not just as a digital archive, but as a cultural compass for his three children to navigate their heritage, language, and identity with Pinoy Pride.
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