Dear friend,

Nung weekend para kong may flu dahil sa severe symptoms ng hay fever. Di ako makakilos, even combing my hair was a huge effort as my scalp felt really tender. Then the limited breathing. Maaawa ka sa akin, I was breathing through my mouth for 2 days!!! There were times I really felt like dying. I felt guilty too that I couldn’t play with pogiBoy properly. Talagang telly-time lang sya. Friday night I planned on taking him to the town fair and even to the cinema, I didn’t count on my “enemy” arriving on Saturday morning. KAINIS.

This morning when I was about to leave for work, hubby said pogiBoy has temp last night. I felt my stomach lurch. If pogiBoy is not better this evening that will mean one of us will have to take a leave of absence. And that thought made me feel worse because ideally when pogiBoy has a temp, we let him stay at home for 2 days. But if we keep on doing that & he gets fever at least once a month, that would mean our work-attendance will be blatantly pockmarked.

Nakakaloka.

I really hope pogiBoy recovers today. I blame the stupid weather… Come on sky, where’s our Summer sun & warmth?!

As for me, it looks like I will have to wait a little longer for the hay fever vaccine to become available in the UK. Crap.

So how was your weekend again?

Lovingly yours,
me

I was offline for 5 days and I missed out on a lot of things. But first things first, THANKS TO EVERYONE who cheered me on my birthday. THANKS FOR your kind words & warm hugs & your very welcome presence.

Hubby & I were planning my weekend celebration for almost a month. No, it’s not big but we needed to notify our guests a month in advance so they could book their holidays. It was supposed to be a BBQ-cum-swimming party but rain hasn’t stopped in Blighty for nearly 3 weeks now. In fact, a number of towns in the countryside were flooded & some of the residents are refugees up to now. Unbelievable. One “victim” said the situation was not ala-Third World but more like “Fifth World’s”.

Then Tony Blair finally resigned & now Gordon Brown reigns supreme, well next to the Queen anyway. Lo & behold, we haven’t finished speculating what Mr Spin is going to do and two car bombs were found in Central London. They were filled with LPGs and nails. When I heard about the nails, I briefly remembered UP fratmen’s homemade-pillbox bombs.

After the “party” (more like chikahang walang humpay), we heard about the failed car bomb attack in Glasgow! Thankfully no one was hurt except the effing drivers. One of them came out while he was burning I’m not clear on the story that followed, but wasn’t he supposed to die in the carnage? Pictures I saw were of him dutifully standing still while being hosed down with water. I know I digress from the issue, but I can’t help it.

The other driver is in critical condition & is being guarded in a hospital. I hope they both survive so we can get as much information from them as possible. So far 8 people have been arrested. It is disconcerting though that all of them worked/works for the NHS! Now NHS is trying to defend the reason they hire qualified foreigners to mitigate the staff shortage. Come on people! Just beef up the security procedures in personnel recruitment, end of story. The media or whoever should not demand more justification, we already know NHS is in deep shit at is.

So there. Three big things happening while I was offline. Oh and yeah the PMN news! Gees I’m so far behind I missed the big push. In fact I’ve yet to read the posts & bloghop. The spirit is willing but the timing is weak.

The reason I was briefly incommunicado: The auntie left us on Tuesday (26 June) & my son fell sick on Wednesday! Hubby stayed home the first day, I took the Thursday & Friday shifts. Thankfully he was better on Saturday. His sinus was so congested he actually told me his head hurts (by pointing to his forehead & saying “hurt”! Poor guy. His fever went yo-yo, his appetite was gone & like Sheila Marie’s Lucho, he lost a lot of weight! And it’s only been 4 days. Thank God he’s all hungry hippo now.

Because I’ve got to catch up on work, too, I haven’t had the chance to visit your blogs or reply to your comments yet. But I will this weekend or sooner, promise. Blogging is so addicting, it’s like I’m aware I haven’t read about your life for a while & I miss it! EEECCKK.

So thanks again for dropping-by & I will hover over to your sites soon.

This is pogiBoy’s Spaceship drawn in his dad’s Father’s Day card. And yes, that’s my chicken-scratch (kinahig ng manok) handwriting.

My 3-year old loves to doodle but mostly only circles and lines, in fact even his square looks like a circle. Nope he’s no Van Gogh (yet), perhaps he’ll become an abstract painter?

Ever heard of Makaton Signing? I’m sure teacher Julie is familiar with it. We all know what sign-language is. Well Makaton is a simplified version. It uses a combination of pictures or symbols and signs from modified Sign Language to express what you want, but like with Sign Language the user is encouraged to mouth the words as they sign. The goal being speech will develop and then the pictures go, until finally the signing is dropped.

I first learnt about Makaton Signing from a newscast. A number of private organisations were offering Makaton Signing for babies and toddlers. In one segment, they showed an 8-month old baby girl “asking” for her hat. They read her a book and she was signing the words for the pictures she saw, like ducks and dogs. It was really amazing. Imagine as parents to babies we don’t really know what they want or feel, but with signs they can “tell” us. I didn’t give it much thought because I’m sure it will be expensive & besides, we talk to our son a lot. That was in 2005.

2006 and my son turned 2 but his speech was very delayed. He was diagnosed with glue ear, which I’ve already blogged about here. One of the speech therapist’s recommendations was the use of Makaton Signing. I couldn’t attend any of the classes and my husband, unfortunately, wasn’t able to keep up either. Thankfully my son’s nursery staff were already being trained on it.

pogiBoy’s speech has improved greatly since then due to a combination of events. It’s just really nice to have this Makaton Signing as backup. Whenever he’s trying to tell us something or he wants to make a point, he’d often sign to us. And because the purpose of Makaton is to make signing simple & easy to understand, the signs are actually what you’d normally expect for the words the person is “looking” for.

When pogiBoy attended a group session in a speech evaluation class, the facilitators were really happy to see him signing. He didn’t need any encouragement, it was second nature.

As staple of his telly-time, I always schedule BBC’s Something Special, so he can learn even more. This show is brilliant. It’s aimed at kids with learning disabilities or infirmities, but toddlers will really enjoy the colours, the pace and activities being shown. Unfortunately sometime back, their main character, Mr Tumble, got in trouble. One time he was supposedly signing for “i’m happy to see you”, apparently he was actually signing “i’m effing you”.

I thought I’d share this with fellow mums. Makaton Signing is easy to learn. Their website offers a lot of handy materials to get you started. Imagine being able to “talk” to your little angels even before they turned 1, that’s really something special.

Hey, this is not a paid post. :-)

pogiBoy has been exposed to cameras from the minute he was born. We have pictures of him coming out of my tummy, taking his first bath, his first step… you get the picture (no pun intended).

It was only a matter of time before he picked up the tool himself. In recent weeks, he’s been playing with my Nokia N70 every chance he gets. He takes the household members’ pictures, even copying us & tells us to “smile“. But his subjects are varied, sometimes he’d even take shots of my bum & laugh! It is curious to see things from his eye-level. And even better to see him really concentrated on getting the right (?) shots, taking the picture again & again & sometimes even kneeling or standing on his toes.

Here are some that are consistent favourites.

His telly which he shares with mummy

Dora fridge magnets

His favourite character, Noddy

We attended a Pinoy neighbour’s 7th birthday party. He’s a nice kid & his sister is even nicer. They’re always gentle with my toddler so I’m happy to get off my son’s back & leave him in their care.

The boys started to tease the girls by invading the sister’s room, where the nice-smelling girls were grooming each other. The boys on the other hand were all sweaty & when I checked their room I got out immediately. The smell was too overwhelming, magkasamang pawis at init. Anyway, the girls took pogiBoy & he was only too happy to “guard” their door against the invading forces. They played for hours.

On the way home, hubby told me that when he checked on pogiBoy, the birthday boy told him “Tito, kakampi namin si pogiBoy, spy sya sa girls kasi may special powers sya!” Powers? They call him “Super Laway“. Kawawa naman anak ko. He was dribbling excessively that his chest was so wet, forming an “S” (like superman’s) on his shirt.

Tawa kami ng tawa. Mga bata talaga… At least di sila nandiri & my son loved being part of the game. I loved it, too.