Tinuohang Buktot

Today's Easter, celebration of rebirth and fertility for all sorts of denominations and my favorite goddess figure (Astarte). No matter what you believe in, everyone seems to want to get a piece of this celebration pie. The flavor is presumably egg.

Another reason to celebrate is that the boring days are over - baby's aunts and uncles are here for the holidays and are keeping me on the move. Island hopping is out of the question though, despite getting multiple invitations over the week to go T_T. Maternal lola's afraid that if I waterbirth in the middle of the sea, baby might escape and become Aquaman.

Sorry Aquaman, even my mom thinks you suck.

So far, we've trekked to the farm to get coconuts; failed at getting coconuts by getting distracted by guavas; tried not to get trampled on by horses; failed to acquire XP points by running away from every sound encountered on the hike back to the house after sundown (sorry bunch of adventurers are we); and marathoned season 2 of Game of Thrones in preparation for tomorrow's season 3 premiere. We'll probably get it on torrent a day after tomorrow, and thankfully the show runners don't mind. Yarr!

Since maternal lola's protests about the religiously offensive tone of my previous post, I decided to dedicate this post to being deliberately offensive of out dated belief, especially those regarding babies.

I should probably be the last person to talk down on superstition considering I still need to completely cover myself with a blanket at night lest the mumu get my feet. But such is the nature of human belief - to laugh at things you don't understand while defiantly standing by other things (despite not completely understanding them either).

For example, when one of my cousins was a colicky baby more than a decade ago, the healer decided I looked like a witch and therefore the culprit. To be fair, a hairdresser curled my hair with varnish for a play and made me look like this as a result:

So she picked a hair off my head and burned it to heal the kid. I kid you not. 

Another belief I picked up was that you were supposed to bind a sick baby's head with saliva-coated thread. Another variation is placing a saliva-soaked cotton ball on sick baby's forehead. Is this because saliva has surprising antifungal qualities that maybe the skin absorbs? How's that supposed to help with hiccups?

There's a practice of reciting "puera buyag" after proclaiming baby's cuteness or healthiness to ward off evil spirits or curses that may undermine the qualities you were just praising. Another way to counter these curses is to place ginger on a baby's body/clothes before leaving the house.

And then there's the age-old "Lihi" that I remember mentioning a couple of posts back. Lihi could pertain to craving for specific foods or irrationally hating the guts of someone random. Supposedly, the baby's appearance is linked to whatever it was you were Lihiing over. Tita Contessa added that if you fed the lihi object to the child as a first solid food, the kid would acquire attributes from the thing. Tito Kenny promptly suggested to catch and feed the kid Zerg.

These folks want to turn my kid into a monster boss of some sort for XP. I'd be flattered to be in the same league as Medusa and Lilith, but I'm relying on the genetic lottery for baby's stats. Maybe I should've invited them to the boondocks to fight off the stuff me and my cousins were running from.

It's often said you can't lose anything by believing in these cute "harmless" little beliefs, but I highly doubt feeding Baby cat stew is going to be good for him or for Nana, or give him her tuxedo coat or feline abilities.

I'm probably just sore because I'm the one whose hair got burnt to cure baby-cousin. In this day and age, we might no longer be burning suspected witches at the stake, but we've evolved to just burn their hair. That's progress right there.