Nevergirl's

Sometimes, I think parenthood should come with a blueprint. It may not be as thorough as directions for the best acne treatments or Mesothelioma medication, but it’s directions nonetheless—and those always help. It’s hard to gauge if you’re doing the right thing, the wrong thing, starting too early, giving too much, pushing too little. We’ve decided to get a tutor for Charlie. She comes over three times a week; two weekends a month.

“But Charlie’s too young for tutoring!” some people have pointed out.

Charlie is two years and three months old.  She speaks English and Bisaya with a fluency people find amazing. She uses conjunctions, connectors. She tells stories so wild they make me gape. She likes kids, but complains they’re too rowdy and so she doesn’t play with them. She makes up children’s names (Nikolai, Julie, Mandy), gives them speaking lines, and tells me this classmate or that said one outrageous line after another. Yesterday, she played doctor with her sister and the yayas and gave each one of them funny problems. Yang-yang has germs; Menchu is barren (the exact line was: Si Menchu, dili ka-anak.). Meanwhile, Alex is supposedly dying. I do not know where she gets these ideas from. I should be appalled, I suppose, but the truth is that I am less shocked, more amused.

Read more »

We were going to roast chicken for dinner, but we realized we had neither an oven nor a roasting pan. How sad is that? Married, with two kids, and without an oven or a roasting pan.

I don’t know why the hub and I are taking this absence of a culinary equipment as a sure sign of delayed maturity, but it seems to us we should have an oven by now. And, a roasting pan. We were born to roast, demmit! We were born to roast chicken on Tuesday nights when we have absolutely nothing to do that in comparison, making an elaborate family dinner (and a mess in the kitchen, as a result) seems like a GREAT idea. We were probably born clutching an oven and a roasting pan in another lifetime.

So, anyway, because we couldn’t roast chicken, we had grilled T-bone steak and pochero instead. Pochero is a local dish that tastes like a smaller waistline – at least, that’s how I imagine a smaller waistline would taste. Of course, I can’t tell you what it’s made of or how to make it; that’d be like asking me to name at least 50 World Heritage sites without googling! And, because I really can’t cook anything that doesn’t involve scrambling and eggs, the husband cooked while I organized the fridge.

Look at how clean and middle class our freezer is.

I’m proud of the icicles I clobbered, and I told the husband so over this:

While we ate, we discussed road trips, deadly canned food, Charlie’s 1st birthday this September, our next foray to the beach, the baby’s new tooth (she has three now), and the sister’s 23rd birthday this August.

Life is, at turns, both good and better when you live with your little family, two nannies who are almost family, and your brother and sister.

Happy Tuesday, boys and girls!

I’m running behind and I don’t need a Panerai watch to tell me so. The hub and I have been working round the clock designing clients’ websites. But even if we’re the fastest worker ants in the planet (which we’re not), there’s no way on earth we could catch up. Worse, we won’t have much of a connection starting tomorrow because we will all be in Tubigon, to mourn my lolo properly and wait for the burial.

Still, being busy is better than being idle. I’m grateful we’re swamped because our pay is directly proportional to the number of websites we code. I often hear of people losing their jobs here and overseas, of businesses crumpling. I’m grateful that despite our share of troubles, both frivolous and dramatic, we remain luckier than most. We’ve a roof over our heads, a child we can send to a good school, and food when we want it and where. At the end of the day, it’s the basic that matters, not the trimmings here and there.

Iris told us about the beds sale in SM but the sloth  that I am (and in light of recent sorrows), I hemmed and hawed and only agreed to the hub’s cajoling that we check the sale out hours after. What a big sad case of fail!

They were having a sale, all right, and the beds were so huge but so cheapo I wanted to buy them all. Unfortunately – and no thanks to my dilly-dallying – the ones I really truly loved all had SOLD plastered on them. So we had to check out the display upstairs, the ones that weren’t on sale. Now, considering we were in the 2nd floor, it should have been a quick trip upstairs, right? Wrong. SM’s always packed with people and this afternoon was no exemption. What should have been a quick 10-minute walk (10 minutes because we had slowpoke Alex with us) seemed like a climb up a cell tower – a really, really tall one at that. By the time we reached the place, I was heaving and panting and it didn’t help any that I chose that moment to wear painfully steep (but pretty!) pumps.

Bottomline, we left SM with mattresses, mirrors, an ironing board, linens, my aching feet, and two beds we could have had at half price had I been just a little less lazy. The moral of the story is this: when a friend tips you off about a sale, drop everything and make a run for it, no questions asked.