This is hilarious. I couldn't resist posting it here. My apologies and gratitude to noisyduck because I borrowed liberally (and I mean liberally) from his content, and for making me literally ROTFL (there's really no accounting for taste now, is there?):

How to Build a Bad Website

(And Why You Should...)

In the business world today, having a website is a must. But why should you strive to have the best website ever when it is much, much easier to build a bad website than a good one?

There are several benefits to having a bad website. For example, you can leave behind the stress of the "Web Race". Your customers will tell you that your website stinks, but will not necessarily be able to tell you exactly WHY it stinks, and because of this your web team may not be able to tell you how to fix it.

The result of this serendipitous confusion is that you can simply put your feet up and do nothing. No wasting your time snooping on competitors websites, no sending your web team to expensive continuing education seminars, and no worries.

Here are some tips to help you on your way:

1. Pick a nice dark background for your web pages, and use a color wheel to pick a nice coordinating color for the text. For example, navy blue and brick red go nicely together, so do royal purple and mustard yellow. This will showcase your excellent color sense, and keep your information secret from all but those with the best vision.

2. Make sure that your nice colorful text is small enough that your entire frontpage is visible without scrolling (Size 6 or 8 is nice). You don't need headlines to get attention, your subject matter is interesting enough all by itself.

3. Place high-resolution photos on every page. Photos should be at least 300dpi and have a file size of at least 1.2MB. This will ensure that only urban customers with broadband will use your site.

4. Add a nice long flash movie to your landing page. A commercial for your company is most appropriate, and will get your customers excited about you. Make sure that there is no "skip ad" button, so you can be sure everyone sees the whole movie.

5. Use music liberally throughout the website. Everyone loves music! It should play automatically at a good volume, so customers can get the full multimedia effect.

6. Ditch your navigation plan. The longer it takes for customers to find what they want, the longer they will stay on your website. Many studies have linked the amount of time customers stay on a website to the amount of money they spend on the site. Also, it looks really good in website statistics reports.

7. Stay away from homogeneous page layouts. Be creative. Customers don't want to see the same thing on every page. For example, it's just boring to have the links in the same place on every page, or the same number of columns on every page. This will also help keep your customers on the site longer.

8. Add lots of ad links and popups. These make the website more visually interesting. Make sure the links are broken, however, so customers can't actually leave your website.

9. Avoid frequent updates. You should think of your website as similar to a print ad or book. You put a lot a thought into your web content, and unnecessary changes could confuse your customers. A couple updates a year will be enough to keep things fresh.

10. Keep your site off the search engines. You know they send Spiders to your website? You don't want spiders. Your customers don't like spiders. Spiders bad. Ok?

Remember, anyone can have a good website, but a bad website is better.

Am I The Only One Who DISLIKES Manny Pacquiao?

Not hate. Hate is too strong a word. I don't hate him. I barely know the guy. Still, for someone I hardly bother an iota about, he sure has managed to rain down on my parade once too often.


The international pugilist franchise that is Emmanuel Dapidran Pacquiao has single-handedly managed to lure my husband away for whole days at a time during each televised fight, my considerable charms notwithstanding.

The potent PR locomotive that carries his label is such that previously respectable and dignified citizens (e.g., my Atch, his parents, my parents, the neighbors....darn it, the whole *meeping* world!) are moved to yodel and yowl and leap up in the air throwing right hooks and left uppercuts, as if they could propel the very brunt of their enthusiasm in aiding the Pacman to a TKO victory.


And yesterday, of all the days Atch couldn't pick me up from work because he had a meeting with the bosses, was the very same day Emmanuel Dapidran Pacquiao's publicist penned in his appointment book the much-awaited, much-ballyhoo-ed visit to a city that had claimed him as its adopted son. My city.

*Meep*

Earlier in the day, the office was a-buzz with excitement. It was Pacquiao-this and Pacquiao-that and Pacquiao-will-they-please-just-shut-the-*meep*-up.

I dashed out the door right after closing time. I had heard the Paquiao caravan was planning to wind its leisurely way all across downtown and I wanted to miss all the action. I boarded the first jeepney at the dispatch area and impatiently waited for it to fill up. Across the way, sidewalk vendors were twitching with excitement, clutching at their makeshift cardboard posters declaring that they were totally proud of the Pacman, that they totally loved the Pacman, and would the Pacman please totally sleep with them, just for one night.

Too late for me, the sirens and drumbeats started. Traffic cops on motorbikes quarantined the road. People started screaming and waving their placcards. Camera phones were held up in readiness. Our driver and the rest of the other passengers craned their necks and bodies as far out the window as they could without actually spilling down into the street. One would have thought the Beatles had reunited for one last concert.

I counted the lead car with the sirens, a truck with masked costumed dancers and two trucks with the drum-beaters. A host of other vehicular hangers-on. Then the frenzied crowd screamed even louder, lauding the Pacman's coming. He was atop the tallest truck, a nondescript man in a nondescript tan shirt, waving to the crowd.


“It's only fitting”, my officemate M.B. had declared earlier, tongue-in-cheek, “that his name is 'Money Pakyaw'”. She was referring to the term “pakyaw”, which in the local dialect means 'to acquire in large quantities”.

“And his middle initial 'D' stands for “dollars”, she continued, “so it is a good thing he is giving all this money away, since he has pakyaw'd a lot of it.”

One of the reasons the reigning WBC lightweight champion of the world was gracing the city with his presence was to hand over a donation of one million pesos intended for victims of typhoon Fengshen. Notice, I use the word 'intended'. What percentage of that amount will actually trickle into the outstretched palms of the beleaguered? But that is another story...which I'm sure will be dismantled to death in local coffeeshops and corner sari-sari stores all across this benighted land for months to come.

Squeezed nauseatingly close under Pacquiao's armpits, the mayor and some minor politicians held aloft his various championship belts, grinning even wider than the owner of the belts himself. 2010 was a long way off, and already they were working at cementing the deal on their re-election bids. But as politics and I haven't been on speaking terms in ages, I shall leave this topic alone.

The following day, Pacquiao would be photographed distributing relief goods to people in depressed areas of the community, again with his contingent of local political...erm...friends in tow. If I wasn't so irritated by his presence, I would have felt a tinge of pity that he was being thoroughly utilized to serve other people's quests for publicity. In exchange, he got to inaugurate a new traffic light and had a day named in his honor. Quid pro quo.

And so the Pacquiao caravan slowly made its way down the street, followed by his crazed legion of cheering fans. I let out a great sigh of relief, peering anxiously at a sky that was graying with approaching rainclouds.

But when I looked expectantly at the driver, he said, “wait Miss, the parade's going to make another turn.” His jeepney was full to bursting and he was next in line to go, but the *meeping* man wanted a second look. And so gritting my teeth against the humidity and overpowering stench of humanity, I waited for round two.

By the time I got home, the sky was fully dark. It was exactly two and a half hours after I had stepped out of the office doors. Two and a half hours of waiting for the parade and the traffic to pass in what would have been a thirty-minute ride home without a certain someone's *meeping* state visit. I was tired and dusty. My stomach was growling. My children were bathed and droopy-eyed for bed.

And to dip my raw-skinned psyche in a figurative vat of vinegar, my husband, the husband who was supposed to be in a conference with the bank's Ay-Vee-Pees, called to tell me he had walked to the nearby mall where the Pacquiao caravan had landed amidst another horde of waiting worshipful fans. “Aifee, he grew some whiskers,” Atch confided in an awed voice, “and his skin seems lighter than usual. You think he's had it professionally bleached?”

All this the husband had spied at a distance of more than a hundred yards, scrunched elbow-to-rib with the rest of the Pacquiao cult followers, when he hadn't even noticed that his wife, less than a foot away, had worn her hair differently that morning. Tresses shiny with a scented hair-sculpting serum, no less.

I fell to my dinner like the starving person that I was. Crunching bones between my teeth and imagining this was Pacquiao's tibia, or that other his sternum. I ate a lot that night.

If my waistline expands beyond my usual 30 inches, I am totally going to place the blame on his head.

Not Your Typical Fairy Tale

Once upon an early evening, a man and his wife went out on the town. They hailed fresh from a barbershop where they firmly held down the Wild Man of Borneo as he screeched and flailed and screamed. When the Wild Man's appearance had half-way began to resemble their younger son, they asked the barber to stop, and they hauled their snivel-faced snot-nosed changeling home.

Exhausted and much put-out, they decided a break was in short order. She wanted a slice of blueberry cheesecake. He wanted a beer. It was a Monday night.

They drove aimlessly, of two minds on where to stop. They bickered briefly about the hair-littered car while she upended her bra to let out more hair. Then they bickered about the bickering.

Suddenly, from out of nowhere, an edifice loomed in front of the windshield. It was larger than life and more solid than breath. It resembled a camelot, the likes of where Cinderella might have danced with her prince, or where Beast courted Beauty in all his barbaric splendour. It turned out to be a stately new hotel. It was huge. It was imposing.

It would do.

The grand gilded doors opened to them and they suddenly remembered they were dressed like peasants put to the plough. They were rough and they were sweaty, and they were furry with hair that was not their own. But there was a beer somewhere inside waiting for them, and a rich cheesy wedge glistening with thick blueberry sauce, and fairy tales were a thing of the past, so they glided in and ignored the pointed stares.

They eschewed the elegantly appointed dining room, telling themselves it was too cold and housed too much frippery, but really because he wanted to sprawl lazily spread-legged and because she wanted to enjoy her desert with one foot propped up on her chair, and wasn't the garden a much much better choice? Yes it was. It was a perfect place for grubby gnomes and dressed-down dwarfs and craggy creatures of the forest. Best of all, it was empty.

A haughty footman waiter handed over the menu, and informed them there were beers, but no cheesecake. So they ordered the cheapest item of beef and settled down, ignoring two tall white tophats who peered at them disapprovingly from the kitchen door.

But the beer flowed and the beef was tender, and their loosened tongues praised the solitude of the twilight terrain. They became as Scheherazade and her Sultan, and told each other stories that grew more riveting as the dark deepened and mosquitoes blithely feasted amongst the blades of hair that the Wild Man had left on their legs.

I will build you a castle, said he of his plans for the future, I shall slay every Maleficent that threatens our coffers. And she swooned at his gallant chivalry, mightily helped along by the contents of another bottle. How proud she was of this errant knight in rusty armor, even as he promised to adorn her finger with an engagement ring seven years in the waiting.

Too soon the comforts of their cave and their tiny trolls called to them, and beckoning their steely-eyed server once more, they paid their bill while he looked down his narrow nose at their platters scraped clean of all traces of potato and gravy. At the very least, the man and his wife surmised, the dish washer would be grateful for their efforts.

So they made their way out the opulent lobby, avoiding the floor to ceiling mirror lest it come to life and shriek that no, they were not the fairest in the land. Not by a long shot. No way.

Then they got into their car and rode off into the moonrise and lived happily ever after. Or for as long as that night lasted, anyway. And as you very well know, this is not

The End...

Pain Without End

How does one fill a yawning chasm that has so suddenly appeared in one's heart and womb? That caved-in feeling, so dark and soul-less: a bottomless pit of nothing that is all that's left after the tears have been spent.

You still long for that tiny heartbeat, so much a part of you in the long months you carried this burgeoning hope and fondest dream, only to have it snuffed away in a tempest, crushing you so you are breathless still.

So longed for and thought of, his very existence was your sustenance. It seemed that you could hold him almost, and smell him almost, and feel his gentle eyelashes tickling your cheek. But men make plans and God laughs, so it seems to you in the very depths of your despair, because he has been torn from you just when you thought he would finally be yours to shelter and adore.

You wonder if there is life after this endless pain, or if he is flitting in the air with gossamer wings even as you commit him to the ground he will never get to toddle upon. And you despair that you will never find room in your heart again. For even now, you can still feel the touch of his tiny hand....



____________________________

Atch's officemate C. lost the baby boy in her womb. It was eight months old. I do not know of any words that can ease her anguish, only words that describe her pain. For it would be my pain too, had it happened to me. Still, words are not enough. Not to sympathize, not to reassure, not words of any nature at all, except in prayer.


Would that her heart be calmed and her soul be stilled, and the emptiness of her womb be filled with one more chance, God willing.

Homeworkus Interuptus and Other Tales of Regurgitation

“But Mooooooo-oom, I want to do my homework,” my son whined.

Woog was clearly losing it.

After having dawdled over dinner, television and his bath, he showed up for our homework date at a time when some other person would have left the rendezvous point in frustration and vowed never to go out with him again.

But as his date was his mother, clearly she had no choice in the matter.

It started out innocuously enough with some drills writing Chinese number characters while he chanted “eee...er...san...sz..ooo...lio...” to the tune of his pencil scratching on the page. By the time we got to identifying the different rooms of a house in Filipino, he was picking chunks off his eraser with a fingernail, and I had to remind him to pay attention.

I finally called it a night when he rubbed off his umpteenth mistake from the “write the members of the family” crossword puzzle. The printed squares of his workbook were looking decidedly faint, and he was peering at me irritably, expecting me to provide him with the answers. The clock had struck the hour of nine. “Bedtime, Woog.”

“But Moooooo-ooom....!”

Upstairs, Eli was coughing up the contents of his milk bottle. His throat had a tickle, and he was scratching it vigorously with violent tremors of his glottis (hack! hack! haaaa-aaack!), in the process, upchucking everything else from deep down under. Twice now that evening.

I rushed upstairs, Woog still whining at my heels.

The sour stench hit us before we even took one step inside the room. One putrid puddle lay glistening at the foot of the electric fan, the other was messily sprawled too close to Eli's bed. Atch was cursing as he frantically scrubbed down two pillows with wet wipes. Meanwhile, Eli's rejected milky diet was slowly seeping down into the floorboards.

The owner of said lactose expulsion was sitting naked on our bed, newly divested of his soiled 'jamies. “Deeenk,” he said, “deeeenk....miiik.”

“Drink milk! Drink milk!” Atch glared in the direction of the baby, “I told you not to finish that second bottle! Now look what happened?!”

Eli burst into tears.

“Mooooooo-ooom! I want to do my homework!”

This was not exactly the best night in our lives. We were tired, cranky and vomitty. We were all in need of a rest. I sent Woog downstairs, took the wailing baby in my arms, gave him a drink of water and wiped the rest of the sour dampness from him.

Atch cleaned the floor with a scowl on his face. There was no help for it. The room was going to stink of gastric juices and curdled baby formula for the rest of the night.

“Deeeenk miiiik.” Eli ventured once more.

Downstairs, I told Woog in as calm a voice that I could muster that he needed to go to bed.

“Whyyyyyyyy?” (which came out sounding like waaaaaah-iiiiiii)

“Why?” I asked him back, taking deep breaths and buying myself some time.

Shamefaced, he acknowledged his tardiness and the lateness of the hour, but followed it up with, “so I won't do homework again. Ever.”

“Ok then, you might as well stop going to school tomorrow, too.”

“Whyyyyyyyy?” he started over in a grating wail, and I found myself in danger of not only losing my patience, but regressing to my son's level as well.

“I'm mad.” Woog gritted out, knuckling his eyes and trying to still his quivering mouth.

“Which is why you have to go to bed before both of us really lose our tempers. Now, please.”

He ran upstairs, pausing to give me a tearfully resentful glance before slamming his door behind him. Faintly, I heard the bolt turning in its lock.

Nicely handled. What a swell mommy you are.

Atch came down, looking all of his forty years. Poor Atch. Haggard from a two-hour drive out of town, just gulped down his dinner, only to come face to face with a toddler playing the title role from The Exorcist. And with a wife straight out the pages of Mommy Dearest.

Some days I wonder if we'll ever get this right.

...and Atch holds up traffic so I can take this picture with my camera phone

...because the grass is always greener

A Toddler's Birthday Tantrum

Look at you, Pet-a-poo. Crying your eyes out. Mommy tries to snap a picture of you on this night of your second birthday, but all you want to do is grapple the camera away from her. Tears are coursing down your miserable face, and runners of snot are dripping down your nose.


Do let up, 'pet. It's your birthday.


This morning you woke us up inhumanly early, raining kisses down on random body parts and grounding your chin down where you kissed. You left us groaning and ill-tempered on this blessed dawn while you chuckled and burrowed through the blankets and bared our warm limbs to the too cool morning air.


Tatay finally got up and asked you if you wanted to go for a ride. "Come!" You squealed, lifting your arms up imperioiusly. Manong Woog roused himself too, and the three of you left Mommy in peaceful blissful sleep.


Downstairs you continued to shriek, "Car! Brooom-brooom! Go....go!" Mommy had hopes that Tatay would bring you to Church for a birthday prayer, but he brought you to the market to buy coffee instead. In your 'jamies. With a full to bursting diapy.


(Doesn't matter to Tatay where he brings you, or what state he brings you in. As long as he gets his supply of heady caffeine, then all is right with the world).


But you are happy and you come home excited from your foray into the realm of native coffee beans, chattering incoherently to the neighbors about your grand adventure. And then not a few hours later, we leave for work and school, and you are in tears again. Poor 'pet. Bewildered each day as your nearest and dearest abandon you for long stretches of time. No wonder you are in a constant itch to go out and explore.


Look at you now. Night has fallen and you are in your 'jamies again. Your universe has shrunk to a minute space where you and Mommy engage in a tug-of-war with the camera. You are wailing piteously, turning your face up into the sky as if to ask, why? Why do I have to suffer such injustice? You look exactly the way you did two years ago at this exact same time: a yowling bundle of pug nose and fish lips, inconsolable at being pulled out from your warm watery home.

Poor 'pet. You are channeling your newly two-year-old self in a tantrum of great dimensions. Your own personal version of picketing at the roadside with a huge placard of protest for being left at home.


If only I can make you understand why we have to go away to work each day. And as I try to explain, you reject each placating offer of Tatay's laser pointer, a story book, and Manong Woog's fancy red ruler. Tatay finally puts Enya on and I twirl you around to Orinocco Flow. You settle down then, head deep in my shoulder, arms holding me tight. Music to soothe the savage beast. You have missed me, it seems, but never more so than I.


I hand you over to Tatay and you dance with him too, a sliver of a smile peeking from your lips and flaring your too damp nose. We wish things were different, that we could spend whole days with you as you grow. But for now we settle for waltzing away your hurt and sulk. Anything to put a smile on your face again.

Ah, good. You are laughing once more, shaking your hands to a Celtic beat. But you keep your arms tight around our necks, unwilling to let go. For now.

Because you are newly two and we are your whole world. It would be nice to keep it that way for as long as we can.

Happy birthday, 'pet.

Just so you know. You are our whole world, too.

Manog-hilot

When I was a little girl, I fell out of a neighbor's bugnay tree. The branch I was hanging from broke with a sharp crack and I landed flat on my back, gasping for air like a catfish on the chopping block.


The next day I was running a high fever and had the hoarse raspy cough of a veteran smoker. My parents brought me over to Tyo Gunding, a silver-haired man with a brown seamed face and a nearly toothless grin. Tyo Gunding enclosed my thin wrist with two knobby fingers and felt my pulse for a second or two, questing for a “kibit”. He laid me face down on his lap, and with his gnarled hands did something twisty to my back. I felt a mild uncomfortable snap, and then he let me up gently. The fever left me that very afternoon.


Through the years of various childhood mishaps, my siblings and I were Tyo Gunding's frequent customers. On some visits, I even came face to face with some kids from school who were there for the very same reasons I was. Tyo Gunding was obviously a manog-hilot of great reknown.

I never really thought deeply upon this phenomenon. The Tyo Gundings of my world were as accepted as rubbing Acete de alcamporado and binding the tummy of a colicky baby, or calling out “tabi-tabi” to unseen spirits when transversing an area of heavy vegetation.


It was a time when adults would append the requisite “puwera buyag” to every sentence someone would utter in praise of their younglings. And when these same younglings came down with fevers oddly coupled by cold clammy palms and soles, they would send for a “manog luy-a”, usually a female healer who would rub key areas of the child's body with a piece of ginger, blowing on it at intervals while uttering strange hispanic-sounding incantations. I vaguely remember a “manog luy-a” working on me once. As far as I know, this is done still.


I grew up and had kids of my own. When Woog was a rowdy toddler trotting faster than his equilibrium could keep up, falls were a frequent occurrence. Some of his more spectacular acrobatic performances were followed by a fever and dry hoarse coughing the next day. Without any second thoughts, we would bring him to Tyo Jimmy, an elderly man who owned an aquarium in which swam the ugliest fish I have ever seen.


Tyo Jimmy would briefly take Woog's wrist. It always intrigued me how the manog-hilots could tell something was wrong, some vein misaligned or pinned between a bone or cartilege, simply by taking the child's pulse.


Tyo Jimmy's next step involved either rotating Woog's arms from the shoulders, or stretching his legs backwards at the socket, depending on where the “kibit” was. He always ended each session by rubbing Vicks Vapor-rub front and back. “No baths until tomorrow,” he would say, “and no air-conditioning for at least an hour.”


We would thank him profusely and drop a twenty-peso bill in a small bowl in front of the hideous fish. He never touched the money himself. Nor did he ever specify his exact charge in “medical” fees. At any given time, the bowl would contain a motley collection of fifties, twenties, and coins of various denominations. I suspect if you offered him a loaf of good bread or a tray of eggs, he would gladly have accepted them, too.


And within the next few hours, like clockwork, Woog's fever always disappeared. The coughing, within the next day or so. When Eli would take sick from performing magnificent stunts of his own, we brought him to Tyo Jimmy, too.


They were almost always elderly men or women, these manog-hilots. Some say they were born with the gift of touch, others say they apprenticed for a long period of time under older healers before they could practice their craft. It seems they followed a code that disallowed them from charging a monetary fee for their services. It is said that if they did, they would lose their gift. Probably the reason for Tyo Jimmy's hands-off-on-money policy.


Needless to say, my sisters-in-law, both doctors, disapproved of our visits to these local chiropractors. “No scientific basis whatsoever”, they would say, or “of course your body aches when you have the flu, the manog-hilot massages it a little to make it feel better, is all.“


Yes, I suppose taking our febrile kids to the manog-hilot does take a stretch of faith. Why risk your children's bodies to someone with no formal medical schooling when there are hundreds of over-the-counter chemicals to pour into them, right?


But how do you argue with what may just be thousands of years of efficiency and effectiveness? Or with wide-spread word of mouth? And its not as if these manog-hilots dance around a bonfire in the dark of night, shaking an annointed palm branch over our kids and chanting all manner of satanic summons to raise the malignant spirits.


When my boys are grown and have kids of their own who are wont to slide down bannisters, tumble from headboards, or fall from trees, I hope they remember manog-hilots like Tyo Gunding and Tyo Jimmy. I certainly do.



Glossary of terms:

kibit – term used by the manog-hilot to describe a vein trapped between two bones, or between a bone and its cartilege after having been misaligned from its usual position due to sudden forceful movement.

manog-hilot – term used for a local chiropractor who heals through touch therapy.

Acete de alcamporado – camphor oil

tabi-tabi – literally “excuse me”. A phrase used to beg passage from unseen spirits who are believed to inhabit heavily wooded or grassy areas. It is said that harming these unseen entities by inadvertently stepping on one will bring unexplainable bodily harm and sickness.

puwera buyag – a superstitious phrase used to ward off “buyag” or “usog”. Buyag or usog is used to define a mysterious weakness or sickness accompanied by fever, excessive yawning or a tummy ache that come over a child when caused by a comment directed at that child by a person with “isog dungan”, or an overpowering personality.

manog-luy-a – a healer who negates the effects of “buyag” or “usog” by performing a ritual that includes rubbing a piece of ginger on parts of a child's body, blowing at the ginger and at the child's head, and chanting Spanish prayers.

Twists and Turns

I've been getting such wonderful surprises lately. For the past week, instead of having my heart and throat bruised each time I call home from work, it seems Woog is bent on proving he is Mommy's sweetest little boy after all.


Yes, Yaya says, disbelief apparent in her voice, he is upstairs ready to take his siesta. Yes, he has put away his clothes and taken a bath. Yes, he has finished his lunch. And five chocolate-coated cookies besides.


All this before the clock has even struck two.

Hello, Mom! Woog suddenly chimes into the receiver. I tell him I love him and I miss him, not wanting to start nagging and destroy this perfectly wonderful series of days.


I wuv you too, Mom! He exclaims, and launches into a description of the latest Battle B-daman model to hit the market, not without a hint of avarice in his high piping voice. I let his enthusiasm wash over me for a couple of moments more before asking him how class went and what Lao Shr has taught him today.


Maybe it's the new school, with its central rubber-floor indoor playground and air-conditioning, not to mention the Chinese half of the curriculum that may have inspired my older son to make this sudden a turn-around. Lao Shr is his Chinese teacher, an affable young man who hails straight from the People's Republic and is himself struggling to perfect his English.


Lau Shr has taught Woog how to say Wo Ay Ni, and Woog is pronouncing it to me now, very carefully trying to get the accent right. I throw the phrase back at him, insanely proud of how hard he is trying to please me.


When I wake up, I'll eat more cookies, okay, Mom?


Okay, Woog. I wuv you!


I wuv you too, Mom.

Before we ring off I ask to speak with Eli, and suddenly Woog is shouting in the background


Talk to Eli! Special delivery!


even before I finish the sentence.


Then the baby is on the line with his signature Mmmmm?


How are, 'pet? I ask him. Have you eaten?


Mmmmm.


Are you watching tv?


Mmmmm.


Where's my kich?


*smooch*


Where's my hug?


'Ug!


At this point he suddenly remembers he misses his mother, and demands Up!


But I can't carry you, 'pet, I'm at the office.


Up! He insists more vehemently.


I'll carry you when I get home later, ok?


And then Yaya's voice is there, telling me my toddler has just, all of a sudden, handed her the phone. Seeing as how I couldn't lift him up right that very moment (you useless Mommy, you), he has lost all interest in conversation, such as it is.


I sigh and ring off.


Oh well, I think to myself, its not like I can have everything all at once. But what I do have is beyond wonderful, and I am absurdly blessed.