HOLY Week is about taking stock of your spiritual life in the light of Christ’s Passion and Death, so that you will realize what an idiot you’ve been the whole year complaining about the high prices of gasoline while the greatest Man who ever lived had to ride a dumb ass on his way to be ganged up bloody hell in Jerusalem.

Most important of all, Holy Week is about accepting the extremely spiritual truth that from being one of the most highly respected beer-guzzling, guitar-slinging bachelors in the entire Ypil-Ypil St., Friendship Village, Sitio Sinangag, Barangay Basak San Nicolas, Cebu City, Philippines, you are now nothing in the Greater Scheme of Things but a lousy baby poo cleaner.

Yes, you should be ashamed of yourself for giving up The Life in exchange for the anti-beer, anti-cigarette, anti-party career called Fatherhood.

Even Jesus refused to marry! Why did you fail to see that? The Man could have picked a wife from among the gorgeous women surrounding him as He preached, washing his feet, shampooing his hair, bathing Him in perfume, drinking His wine. I read somewhere that the girl Mary Magdalene was a hottie. Oh, the company of sinners!
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We met through this song and video. Salamat.

So that’s him. What now, boy?

AFTER our baby was born at 8:09 p.m. last April 3, Sunday, I now think pregnancy is overrated. So, that was it? Nine months of anticipation, fear, excitement, mood swings, baby blogging and high-folate, low-fat milk, and the baby pops out just like that?

Whatever happened to that dreaded scene of the wife being rushed to the hospital only to give birth in the backseat of a taxicab? Or where’s that romantic scene, if the mother ever makes it to the hospital on time, of husband and wife holding hands and looking lovingly into each other’s eyes as the hugely bloated figure in a maternity dress is wheeled inside the delivery room by a legion of nurses and surgeons and the entire Department of Health?

This was not the movies, so nothing of that sort happened that Sunday. Instead, we were having breakfast at home when the wife said, “Oops, I think I wet my panties.” And I said, “Oh, too much beef loaf. Let’s have corned beef tomorrow.”
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WE’RE getting bored of being pregnant now. When you’re nine months on the way, you start to wonder if all this would ever end. I heard stories about women who were weeks past their due dates. There’s this story I read about a mother who was so many weeks overdue that when the baby finally came out, she enrolled it immediately in prep school.

When you’re nine months on the way, the most exciting event in life consists of the daily walks around the neighborhood. We’ve become friends with the neighbors this way, because part of this prenatal ritual is to smile at everyone on the street, so people will know you are genuinely happy, when in fact the wife feels so bloated she is beginning to think she’s a newly-discovered planet.

Don’t forget to hold hands, too, and look into each other’s eyes when you pause at the corner to catch your breath. If the weather is good, gush over the clear blue sky, the birds on treetops, and the setting sun, and the neighbors will say, “Oh, what a lovely couple.” If the weather is bad… but why would you want to cozy up to each other in a rainstorm unless you’re Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst?
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It’s not every day that you get written about by a Mayette Tabada. So I’m posting it here. — insoy

I’M a fan of mall events, specially the unplanned ones.

Recently, while accompanying the husband and teenage son to check out gadgets, we turned a corner and almost bumped into celebrities.

My foot-dragging made me swerve in time and avoid a collision with Rei’s baby bump. Rei is the first of my former students I saw get married on Facebook.

That evening, Rei and Baby Bump (BB) were accompanied by The Baby Blogger. “Insoy,” I babbled. “I’m a fan of your baby blog.”

The bleary-eyed fellow eclipsed by Rei’s beatific smile and BB is known better to readers of news and the Sunday Light section of this paper as the editor, Lorenzo P. Niñal.
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IF you’ve been following this column the past weeks, you will notice this little Tuesday space we have here has become a sort of repository of my experiences as an expectant father. I didn’t know that until last Sunday, when I bumped into fellow Sun.Star Cebu columnist Mayette Tabada at the mall.

“I follow your baby blog,” Mayette told me. Baby blog! That disturbed me, because I was expecting her to say, “Since when did you start thinking you’re the marrying type?”

Then it hit me. What a disservice this column has been to you, my dear readers. As a columnist in this paper’s Opinion Section, I am supposed to give you my expert’s opinion on what’s going on in the world around us: Libya, Japan, New Zealand, Joavan “The-Son-Of-God” Fernandez, The Fall of Sharon Cuneta, The Showbization of Philippine Football, and Justin “What-Have-We-Done-To-Deserve-Him” Bieber.
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A NEWS article written by Sun.Star staff reporter Rebelander S. Basilan last Sunday sent me running to the Department of Education (DepEd) 7’s Ecotech Center in Sudlon, Lahug yesterday morning. It was raining, which would have been enough reason for me to stay in bed and to hell with Basilan’s story.

And there was this message in my phone that said: “Warning: At 4:30 a.m., the nuclear power plant in Fukumi, Japan exploded. When rain falls anytime today, just stay inside the house, and if you are outside, see to it that you have a raincoat or an umbrella because the rain may be acidic and may cause skin cancer. Please pass this to your friends and loved ones even if you know this chain advisory is crap, just like those Marian prayers that promised you a life of misfortune and profound sadness if ignored.” OK, I made the last part up, but what the heck.
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I BELONG to the extremely rare type of fathers who get pregnant with their wives. What I mean is that I will be offended if you approach me and say, “When is your wife due?”

If you want to deal with me during these bumpy days of our pre-natal excitement as a couple, the more politically correct thing to say would be, “When are you both due?” Because that would mean it’s me and my wife who are pregnant. Cute? Wait till you finish this article.

Call it my Freudian desire to grow a uterus and fallopian tubes. So far, I’ve only succeeded in growing my hair long like a frustrated seductress with limited budget for shampoo. And you know what? I sometimes find myself stuffing a pillow under my shirt to look like I’m eight months pregnant, to the delight of the wife during those boring spiels of her, I mean our, pregnancy.
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