Missing her best friend
For some reason, Maia woke up very quietly this morning. And for a time she would not talk to anyone, nor give in to any treat we proposed. She just lay on the sofa with a sour face, and when I asked her if there was anything she wanted she just shook her head. She didn’t want breakfast, she didn’t want milk, no water with ice, not even the computer.
Then I asked her if she was missing Ate Bebing, who she always referred to as her best friend. She nodded, and almost started crying, but then I told her that we were going out in a while to get Ate Bebing’s ticket so she can come back to us. That made my little girl smile. Actually I had really planned to get the ticket today, it was just a good thing it cheered Maia up as well.
So off we went to the 2GO outlet at SM Sucat, where a ticket from Iligan to Manila cost a little under P2,000 including travel insurance. Not bad, I thought, since the ticket going to Iligan cost a little over 2K. This is the longest time Ate Bebing’s been on holiday, but I am glad to report we suffered no ill effects like the other year when she went home for a couple of weeks on Christmas. No hunger strikes this time, and no stomach flu.
Maia and I must be getting older and more mature 
Long weekends staying home
At the end of week one without Ate Bebing we seem to be doing better than usual. The last time she went on her annual vacation, Maia went on a semi-hunger strike and ate nothing but orange juice and chocolate wafers. We also both got stomach flu. This time Ate Bebing will be gone for an entire month, having foregone her two-week Christmas break to have a longer one this summer.
I suppose it’s better now because Maia’s older. Being the only child in a house full of adults can’t be easy, but she’s doing rather well these days. What I’d like to find out is if Maia can do without her best friend for an extended period, say for the time it takes to go on one of those Orlando vacations (as if I could afford one), and be the well-behaved big girl her mom would like her to be.
Not a very good bday postscript
I must have caught a virus somewhere on the way to Diliman last Wednesday. I started to feel it an hour or so after lunch, when I started yawning almost uncontrollably while waiting for the coffee at Khaz. Sam had stood up to greet his friend Rasti who was a couple of tables away with another friend, and in the few minutes that he was away I nodded off.
By the time we got home I was close to catatonic. I didn’t even bother to have dinner. I didn’t have a fever, but everything ached like hell. I didn’t have a temperature, but it got so bad I asked Ate Beng for a hilot.
This is one of the Cebuano words I have trouble with translating into any language. The word “hilot” is closer to acupressure than to massage, but I’m not sure if there is an actual equivalent. Hilot is applied so that “panuhot” can be expelled from one’s system, the word panuhot translating loosely into “gas”. But while gas can only be in the stomach, panuhot can be in joints and muscles, and it is expelled either by sweating shortly after the hilot or by passing gas by burping or through the other end.
After I put myself under Ate Beng’s hands I retired to our bedroom, turned the lighting down and slept. When I woke up in the morning I felt too sick to work. I informed the office and then went back to sleep, and stayed asleep the whole day. My little girl Maia came into the room and was told that Mommy was sick.
She went back to her room and got her play doctor set, stuck a plastic thermometer in my mouth, listened to my heartbeat with her plastic stethoscope, and tried to pull out two of my teeth with her plastic forceps. Then she asked “Are you fine now, Mommy?”
I told her I was, after which she put her toys away and lay down beside me. A few minutes later she was asleep too.
Behind the camera
Off from work again tomorrow, to attend brother-in-law Rowley’s wedding. That’s two 4-day work weeks for me in a row (was out Friday last week too for something less auspicious but required time away from the office nevertheless). That is something that should appeal to a few House Representatives who are pushing for a 4-day work week for government offices. Yeah, right, like they didn’t have them already. Anyone who has made it a necessity (or a habit) to visit the house on Batasan Hills knows that Friday is a day of rest for most people there. And Saturday, and Sunday and Monday if there is no session, and so on …
But enough of the ranting about politcs, and more of the wishing I had a hi-def camcorder for occassions like this. Been spending more and more time behind the camera than in front of it, proof of which is Ate Beng now has more pictures with Maia than I do. Here’s the two of them at a co-worker’s celebration of his first daughter’s first birthday.
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