On Keeping Up...Then Starting From Zero

It's been awhile since I've posted here, and frankly it's because the rate at which my kids are developing has gotten so much faster than my ability to document it that I've kind of given up. It's become easier to take pictures and save them on my flash drive or post them on Facebook than to actually write down the dozens upon dozens of little vignettes. I feel a little guilty, truth be told, as there are so many gems to be written down that simply don't spring to mind right now. Maybe I'll just post pictures here too.

Well, soon I'll be starting all over from scratch again with a new baby, new vignettes and new adorable firsts. Having done this twice over I like to fancy myself as prepared for anything a new baby can throw at me and Theia, but judging from the way this baby has been treating her mother's womb like either a treadmill or a punching bag I can't help but feel like we're in for a whole new experience.

Going on my third child, I realize one never really does "get used to it." Having kids previously definitely helps but if they're spaced decently enough I think it's possible to have them and not feel like the entire process has become old hat. For some reason it's even more exciting that I have a couple of kids who can share the experience with me and Theia.

I actually want one more, even if it means adopting a kid down the line, and even now, years away from that actually happening, I know it'll be, yet again, something different (especially if he's adopted, which will be a first).

Playing Dress-Up

Old Pics Part III (aka mugging like crazy)

Hehehe what a pair of hams...

Old Pics Part II

Here's the kids horsing around a bit with their mom...

Old Pics Part I

My kids had tons of fun last Easter...

My Little Entrepreneurs

It would appear that, in one respect at least, my children have taken more after my eldest's godfather Ryan, than either myself or Theia.

My kids have shown initiative I never did as a child; they play "selling" games. 

One of my daughter Tala's favorite things to do with her little blue play table is turn it on its side and "sell ice cream." At first we had to explain to her that WE are supposed to pay HER for the ice cream as opposed to the other way around, but she caught on pretty quickly.  She doesn't do it much these days, but I hope the entrepreneurial instinct is something she remembers when she gets older; it could serve her well.

My son Apel, however, really floored me with his enterprising spirit. When his mother told him he could buy a toy (I think it was either Lego or a Bakugan, I'm not sure) if he raised enough money, he took the same blue play table his sister uses to peddle her imaginary ice cream, put it in our driveway in front of our gate, and started selling lemonade. His product, of course, came from the lemon juice I had bought in order to make lemon squares for some occasion or other, and initially cost, if I recall correctly, something seventy pesos or in the region of a dollar-fifty a glass before he reduced to something a little more sane. Of course, his best customer in the end was his grandmother, my mom, but between the two of them, these children have shown, this early, a potential for self-sufficiency I don't believe I ever did. 

This is definitely something worth cultivating. It may be imaginary ice cream and lemonade today, but with the right instincts, who knows what they'll be able to hawk tomorrow. For as long as it's legal and something that will sell well, I will throw my full support behind them.

I Want to Ride My Bicycle...

I can't remember exactly how I learned to ride a bike. I remember pedaling around for awhile on a small bike with training wheels, and how I was able to bike the length of our rather small backyard for the first time not long after the training wheels had been removed. I remember biking around on my cousin's BMX. I remember falls and scrapes, my brother's racing bike, and finally, my own mountain bike, which I bought upon graduating from high school, only to have stolen from me just before I graduated from college, but not before I'd eked six years of adventures and a good deal of mileage out of it.

But I can't for the life of me remember the process of learning to ride a bike. It's like, almost as soon as the training wheels were off, so was I.

But because I remember the bumps, bruises, skinned, bloody knees, a skinned, bloody calf, and even a nasty bump on my head (once), I have a vast reserve of patience for any child who wants to learn how to ride a bike, and fortunately I am now able to draw upon that reservoir when teaching my son to ride a bike. He's really quite a quick study and I've a feeling that before the month is through he'll be biking on his own quite a bit. That aside, there's something really special about sharing this experience with him; it's one of those things that I know I'll be proud of someday, part of the process in which I helped my son become a man, as syrupy as that sounds. I love teaching my kid how to bike, and paradoxically, just as most of me will swell with pride when he finally knows how, part of me will feel a little sad that he won't need my help anymore. Ah, the contradictions of parenthood.

Of course, even when he knows how to ride a bike, there'll still be the possibility of bumps, bruises and skinned knees and shins...I guess I'd better start buying knee and elbow pads (oh yeah, and a helmet, too)...

A Day at the Museum

Parents weary of the massive spending and consumerist urges that often accompany trips to the mall can take heart from the knowledge that there are alternatives to these temples to hedonism that don't involve getting baked under the sun or otherwise enduring a hopelessly muggy day. In Manila alone there are plenty of alternatives to be found, all of which boast air-conditioning.

The National Museum located in the old Senate building in Lawton, Manila is one such attraction. Home to one of our most cherished cultural artifacts, Juan Luna's seminal painting Spoliarium, the museum remains reasonably well-kept, most of its galleries being air-conditioned, clean and, to my slight surprise, updated. There's even a touch of interactivity, with one gallery featuring a little sketchbook where guests can sign or even doodle, to leave future visitors something to remember them by. It's a great place to walk around, though disappointingly enough, there don't appear to be any places to sit within the galleries. Those looking to introduce their children to Philippine art will definitely find what they're looking for here. I'd say, depending on the child's age (which should probably no less than five or six years of age), the parent can spend anywhere from one to three hours here, and for the measly cost of 70 per adult and 30 pesos per child.

The new wing of the National Museum is less about art and more about artifacts (though there's still a smattering of paintings here and there), and in that respect it certainly ups the ante in terms of presentation such as lighting and display. There are, I'm pleased to report, places to sit here, and there are a couple of interactive aspects as well, like the digital "musical instruments" section that allows the visitor to "play" musical instruments from different parts of the country which appear on a screen, and a large globe with a lights display to show the trade routes to and from the Philippines over three eras. A visit to both the old and the new wings means a little bit of savings as well; it'd be nice to be able to just pay a lump sum for the two building tour but unfortunately it doesn't quite work that way. Visitors to the old wing should make it a point to keep their receipts and present them when going to the new one, and presumably vice-versa.

For kids though, easily the best and most interactive place to go would be the Museo Pambata located right along the Roxas Boulevard, between the U.S. Embassy and Luneta Park, which, as the name suggests, is tailor-made for kids of all ages. Almost EVERYthing in the museum is interactive and each floor is chock full of activities and other curiosities in which they may partake. On certain days, as I understand it, there are storytelling sessions held in an adjacent buildings, so that can certainly be part of the itinerary. Now I went to this place some months (or was it a year?) ago with kids whose ages ranged from five to twelve and we spent nearly three hours there, which they enjoyed so much that by the time we left they weren't quite ready to go yet. And Apel keeps asking me when we're going to go back.

In a nutshell, the mall is not the only air-conditioned cure to your children's boredom. Not only that; the museums offer them a lot more than an afternoon spent looking at toys or playing video games ever will.

So What Should Kids Be Able to Watch Anyway?

My son Apel, about a month ago, was peeved by the fact that his classmates had seen The Incredible Hulk and The Dark Knight while he had not. After letting him watch the somewhat violent Iron Man, I figured that I had to go easy on the PG-13 movies thereafter, especially considering that Hulk and Knight kicked up the violence and darkness quotient quite a bit from the relatively "light" Iron Man, the lead character of which blew up terrorists with impunity, all things considered. Since then he and his sister Tala have watched the decidedly more kid-friendly Kung Fu Panda and WALL-E, both perfectly safe kid's fare.

Now, as my daughter is all of three-and-a-half years old and is not particularly keen on superhero or action movies anyway, she's not so much a question mark as my son who is six and will, next year, be seven, is.

By the time I was his age, I had seen Luke Skywalker's hand chopped off by Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back, a de-powered Superman get beaten bloody in Superman II, and all but the most gruesome violence in Raiders of the Lost Ark (my parents covered my eyes during the part where the Nazis were melted by the Ark of the Covenant's awesome power). The last time I checked, I'm not what one would consider a homicidal maniac.

I've skimmed through some internet sites on what's "developmentally appropriate" for children of my son's age and get varying results, though gratuitous sex and violence are obviously red flags all around. Violence, though, is a little more of an enigma as it's sometimes hard to draw the line between acceptable "cartoon" violence and the more serious kind. Arguably, "cartoon" violence is even worse because it doesn't illustrate for the child how bad the effects of violence can be on a person. I read somewhere how the Home Alone movies are worse for children than a lot of action movies because of the sheer amount of brutality to which the child protagonist subjects his adversaries.

And then there's the question of language, which now involves Tala because a lot of the shows she watches on TV when we're not around are not as easy to police as the movies she gets to watch, which we control. We don't like hearing our kids say "stupid," or "moron" or "idiot" in addition to all of the other, more traditionally abhorred, four-letter swear words, but unfortunately they're integrated into the dialogue of a lot of the shows they like to watch, like Spongebob Squarepants and a host of other shows on Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network. Tala loves Disney movies so we expose her to a lot of those (her favorites thus far being Cinderella, and Lady and the Tramp).

I'm glad my kids are into lots of other things besides rotting their brains in front of a TV, but I accept that every now and then they can watch. The problem is that policing what they do watch can be pretty tricky, especially as I haven't figured out how to lock channels.

Boundaries

Both my kids have certain habits I've been trying to cure them of. My daughter Tala is apparently incurably friendly. This is well and dandy except she has a thing for walking up to complete strangers and introducing herself to them, a trait which, under the wrong circumstances can prove pretty scary if it goes unchecked. While her mother and I have tried, and are still trying, the old "never talk to strangers" lecture, a three-year-old isn't quite yet in the condition to absorb this information. So we just make it a point to watch her like hawks.

My son Apel, on the other hand, is a chip off the proverbial block(head); when he is introduced to someone who is sitting down and eating he has the habit of helping himself to that person's food. Now, to my knowledge I didn't used to do that when I was a kid, but I know I had a thing for food, and I know I didn't have a very good concept of other people's boundaries (still struggle with it sometimes, really). He also barges into bathrooms and bedrooms without knocking. It's a good thing Theia and I make it a point to lock our door when we want to get busy. He even knows how to jimmy the bathroom door open when it's locked (it has that kind of lock, for emergency purposes) so his tendency to infringe on people's space isn't even stopped by locked doors.

So basically I sat him down yesterday to explain, sternly but gently, the concept of personal boundaries, basically saying that he should knock before going into rooms and ask before taking other people's food, or things in general. It's tricky trying to explain something so abstract to a six-year-old, but I started with the image of walls and tried to work from there. Essentially, I tried as best I could to instill in him the ability to respect someone's decision to say "no" to him, which is a mighty hard thing to do when talking to a six-year-old son, especially one of a parent who despite being 32, still has trouble taking "no" for an answer.

Of course, the flipside was that I explained that he had his own boundaries which other people would have to respect. I was lucky enough never to experience child molestation, but it's a crazy world out there these days and so without going into any graphic descriptions I did my version of the stranger talk with him (his mother had already started it some time before). He shouldn' talk to strangers or allow them to touch him, I basically said. Just as other people have boundaries ("walls" I said) he should respect, so does he have boundaries other people should respect. And just as he should learn to accept "no" as an answer, so should he learn to give it.

I think he got the point; I'll have to follow up as time goes on.

As for Tala, well, she can't quite appreciate the concept of the stranger yet, but we're still working on it. This can be pretty tricky stuff, I think.

I may have made a number of dodgy decisions as a parent, but I hope I at least get this particular attempt to orient my children in the ways of the world correctly.