Being a father of a three-year-old and a three-month-old gives me the best and the worst experience at the same time. Lil Dan is at the best phrase of his life. Even when the eczema irritates him, he puts on beautiful smiles every time we talk to him. I love holding him in my arms until he falls asleep. Even though I am encouraging a bad habit, he’s only being this good for a short period of time. I know how fast time has passed by so I am just going to hold on to the precious moments as long as I can. By the time he hits two or three, that’s when the worst comes out.

Dao is now in that terrible-three stage. It’s not his fault though. It’s mostly our fault because we’re not sure how to handle him. In fact, I have to give him props for being a pioneer. Dao is a bright and imaginative kid; therefore, he challenges us and prepares us for his younger siblings. I am still learning my ways around him. This past week things seemed to be much smoother than the previous weeks. I have learned one important key: not to let him get to me. No matter how frustrated I was with his constant revolts I remained calmed. If he knew that I was furious, he would push it even harder.

So now on weekdays from 6pm to 10pm he has my full attention. I wish I could spend more time with Dan, but this is the critical moment for Dao. Besides, I am sure Dan is very content with his mom. In these four hours, my focus is to feed him dinner, give him a bath and brush his teeth. As long as we can accomplish those three taks, we can play all he wants.

With that said, Dao is very funny sometimes. Here’s a clip that he’s trying to breastfeed his little brother. When I took a little dinosaur toy and touched his cheek with it, he said, “Khung long (dinosaur) please don’t eat me. Eat grass.”

I work with MODX Evolution the day I took on a new job, which is four months ago, at George Mason Law. Since the site already built out, I just needed to learn my way around the system. I knew enough to redesign the entire site with HTML5 and responsive layout. It was a daunting task, but MODX gave me the flexibility to accomplish my goal.

Now I am learning to build a site from scratch using MODX Revolution and Bob Ray’s MODX: The Official Guide is indispensable. Through almost 800 pages, Ray demonstrates his inside-out knowledge of MODX. Using the book as a reference, I was able to put together a CMS-powered site with the exact markups I had intended. I am now in love with Revolution.

Highly recommended if you want to learn MODX. Must-have if you develop sites using MODX.

As mentioned last Friday, I invited my wife to lunch with me today, but she dissed me for her colleagues and didn’t even answered my call. Ouch! I was looking forward to it, but it’s all good though. I got a whole Sautéed Lobster in Shell with Salt & Pepper. This is perfect. Not too salty and not too messy, the lobster was perfect. If I want lobster, Viet Royal is the place to go.

I was beat by a three years old. He completely shut me down yesterday. Can’t talk sense to him because his replied was, “Don’t talk to me.” Whipping his ass didn’t work either. My only choice was just do it. When I gave him a bath, he screamed as if I was torturing him. Even my wife had to check in to see if I was torturing him. Putting on his clothes was also a battle. The positive outcome was we both tired as hell when it was time for bed. We both slept through the night. Parenting a three-year-old is a challenge and I am failing. He turned me into a taciturn. I am not giving up. I am just giving in.

A love like ours could never die because it was never alived to begin with. Sometimes I can’t really tell if my wife loves me or not. I think she does or else she wouldn’t bear all that pain to give birth to my wonderful boys. I would never experience what she had gone through, but I get it. Let’s put it this way. If I was the one that had to give birth, we would have no kid. Yes, I am a pussy and I know it. She knows it as well and I am not afraid to admit that in this marriage, I am the bitch.

My wife is a strong, independent woman. Sometimes I even doubted me role in the relationship and just asked her straight out, “Why do you even need me? You seem to be able to do everything yourself.” Sometimes she responded, “I don’t know why either” and sometimes she just gave me that you’re-such-a-dumb-ass look. Whenever I can’t find the right answer, I always draw back to my mom’s theory: either she owed me something in her previous life or I’ll have to pay her back in our next life. I hope it’s the latter because I do want to be with her again if there’s a next life.

As much as we irritate each other to dead at times, we always think and care about each other. We knew from the beginning that the journey ahead of us is rough and treacherous, but we can make it through if we don’t let go. One of our favorite quotes from Lê Uyên Phương’s was “Rồi mai đây đi trên đường đời / Đừng buông tay âm thầm tìm về cô đơn.” (Later, on the journey through life / Don’t let go of my hand to seek your quiet solitude.) These have to be the toughest years of our lives together, but we’re pulling through. Hold on my love, please don’t give up on me. We’ll walk right up to the sun hand in hand.

For the past three years, I have been through a lot of shit, but nothing beat tonight’s shit. After dinner at Red Hot & Blue, I took Dao upstairs for a bath. Suddenly the shit hit me. My head started to pound and I was damn near vomited. If I were stuck in a box with that shit, I would have die.

Something strange about the shit. It was not stinky. It had a light fragrance like someone was putting on some fucked-up, expired cologne. Not sure what he was eaten, but that was the worse shit ever. Even grandpa couldn’t tolerate it. I had to stop breathing as I was taking off his diaper. I was suspecting that he pooped a lot so I told him, “you pooped a lot.” Usually when he looked into it he would agree, “yes, I pooped a lot.” Tonight, however, he said, “I only pooped small ones.” He only pooped a few marble-size balls, but somehow they were killers. For a few minutes, I could understand why American can’t stand the smell of the durian.

Three-year-old must be the most terrible age. Not only their behavior is bad, their shit is also the worst. I told my wife about it and her reply was, “And you think your shit doesn’t smell?” See, you can’t even tell your wife this kind of shit, but that’s good thing that I have a blog. I can rant about shit all I want. I probably lose all my readers after this stinking post, but I can’t help it.

Then again no matter how awful his shit smells or how irritate his attitude gets, I still got mad love for my boy. This is what I called true love. You have to love everything about him even his shit.

Monday morning, drove Dao to daycare as usual. Pulled into the parking lot, he started mumbling, “my tummy hurts.” Before I could unbuckle him, he vomited all over his jacket. As I tried to reach for some paper towel, he threw up again all over himself. I told him to stay put and we drove back home. He said “yes” softly and remained quiet the whole way home.

I called off work and stayed with the boys and grandparents. We rebuilt the track on Dao’s table train. We added a bridge and added more rails. I held cu Dan on my arms and played with cu Dao. I had such a wonderful time with them. Dao was behaving quite well. I even got him to eat some rice and stir-fried vegetables grandma made. He took a bite of a string bean and said, “This is amazing.” Amazing? where did he get that word from? Then I got him to nap.

Later on grandma went in to nap with him so I took cu Dan out for a stroll. I walked around the block listening to music for over an hour and he was still napping. The weather was gorgeous and I was so glad to have a day off with the kids. I love interacting with Cu Dao and talking to Cu Dan. He smiles every time I talk to him. He only cries when he’s hungry or dirty. He’s a bit irritated with his eczema at times, but he’s doing really well. I really don’t want him to lose his chubbiness.

The main navigation for Visualgui has been reworked on small screens to allow more contents showing up on mobile devices. As much as I liked the colorful menu on the previous version, this is more user friendly.

FancyZoom, which being used mainly on the graphic section, is replaced with FancyBox2. FancyZoom worked well for what I needed, but has not been updated since 2008. In addition, FancyZoom doesn’t work with Infinite Scroll, which are used on both sites and motion. FancyBox2, on the other hand, has been reborn with CSS3, responsive design and integrated slideshow. The script loads faster than the previous version and works well with Infinite Scroll.

FancyBox2 is now also used to open Flash files on the motion pieces to improve the user experience. Infinite Scroll breaks the back button; therefore, visitors would lose their spot if they click to view a slideshow. Now they just launch FancyBox and close it when they are done viewing. This is also an issue for the site section and the easiest solution is to open a new window. I know that opening a new window is not recommended, but it makes sense in this case. Users go off my site to see the work I have done and then close the browser when they want to get back to my site for more samples. This method makes much more sense with Infinite Scroll.

I haven’t thought of a major redesign for Visualgui. I did a realign a year ago and still enjoying the simplicity of this site. It allows me to do what I would like to do: showcase my work, add new graphics weekly on the homepage and just write. As you can see, I write quite a bit on this blog and I hardly reread for grammar mistakes. I would love to because every once in a while I reread some of my posts and I can’t even figure out what I had written, but time is nothing I have plenty of these days. With two kids, the only free time I get is from 11pm to one in the morning. At that time, my brain is half asleep and half fried. As a result my posts are not as polished as I like them to be, but I still appreciate the ability to just write.

Santorum:

I believe and I think that the right approach is to accept this horribly created, in the sense of rape, but nevertheless, in a very broken way, a gift of human life, and accept what God is giving to you. As you know, in lots of different aspects of our life we have horrible things happening. I can’t think of anything more horrible, but nevertheless we have to make the best out of a bad situation. And that is making the best of a bad situation.

This might sound wrong on many levels, but just imagine a rapist raping a girl and telling her, “Look bitch, I am giving you a gift from God.”

Paul Krugman:

Once you’ve decided to hide your beliefs and say whatever you think will get you the nomination, to pretend to agree with people you privately believe are fools, why worry at all about truth?

The truth is that Mr. Romney is so deeply committed to insincerity that neither side can trust him to do what it considers to be the right thing.