Partnering

When your collaborator is a four-year-old kid, expect pleasantness in an activity you both aren't rewarded to do. That's how Kai of the Curly Tops and I found ourselves on the afternoon of her Mamay Kimi's birthday working with paint, paper, canvas.

She has freely painted several abstracts weeks ago and put them aside when she discovered it was just as fun to cut old notebooks or doodle human figures, odds and ends, or sound out the names of the people and pets she lives with to practice the writing of words. Most times though, the ruled notebooks feature gibberish--clusters of consonants with a number at the end like "Wqwk Fhjjufjheybvjhfjkfhj...6."

After I was done with my so-called mixed media work called "It is only a paper moon / Sailing over a cardboard sea", I looked for Kai's old works, leafed through her doodle book, then enlarged her figures with a pencil, copying as accurately as possible the way she shaped faces, eyeglasses, stick-like arms and feet, flowers, etc., then I used her abstracts as background for the, uh, creative collaboration before finally outlining the figures in black. These exercises felt more fun because my own work left me a teeny-weeny unsatisfied. Calls for retouching tomorrow

When she saw what I had done, she first had this doubtful expression on her face, then showed the works to her mother and told her Grumpa Tats to have these framed.

I trust her instinctive moves so inevitably I asked if she could help me with the background for the work I intend to do tomorrow. I explained to her I needed daytime sky, green and orange below that sky. The figures I will pencil in after I implant a dream tonight. Meanwhile, Curly Kai dived into the activity like a pro.

Okay, Teacher Kai, you can relax tomorrow while I figure something out of the beauty you had created. In fact, your biased mother said it's already a stand-alone work, and I needn't touch it even. Touché!

Snapshots by toddler K

The Wee One just needs a little assistance and encouragement, as I had earlier written, in skills that she needs to live and endure in this world. And perhaps with her elders' inputs, she'll be equipped to handle the whatevers later on.

Meanwhile, she has taken an interest in pushing the button of the digicam after a little coaching on framing. Sometimes one or two little fingers cover the lens, and she has to be reminded where to place them. Or to be steady from wherever she sits or stands before she takes a picture so the image doesn't blur too much.

Here are her portraits of some of her family members: her Grumpa and her Mamay. The thing with toddlers is, after the initial "mastery" of something, whether it's a puzzle or doing split jumps, their attention wanders or their sense of wonderment shifts. This granny is OK with that. I remember to follow the trail so there are keepsakes like these.

While he was reading

While she was threading the Christmas tree balls

She lights up my life...

...she gives me hope to carry on, and so on and so forth. 

At the slightest chance of a long weekend (three nights and four days), I visit the button of my  life. She changes at every next encounter, her babbling now acquiring coherence to the adults around her. 

At mealtimes, she likes to check if we're all present around the dining table, then points with her forefinger at each of us: "Tats! Mamay! Booboo! Ate!" Then she sits down before her own small dining table (her Mamay and Tita Ida's study table when they were wee girls) to try to feed herself from a bowl with increasing success.

The half smile that can melt the hardest heart

Veteran huggers

Before or after breakfast, she enjoys a walk in the neighborhood children's park for her dose of Vitamin D, then comes back famished, ready for a snack and a yogurt drink. Then she hangs out in her nursery with her toys or joins her Mamay and Booboo in the home office. 

To keep her from distracting her working mom, I like to sing action songs, recite nonsense stuff or read to her. Or we look out the window to count the number of white butterflies. But such are the counting skills of Butones that she tends to speed things up, crying out, "Eight, nine, TEN!"

The weekend I was there I introduced her to my small collection of matryoska dolls. These Russian nesting dolls are a recurring image in some of my paintings. She can open them up and extract one smaller doll after another but not put them back together again. Next weekend, I will teach her their Russian names and see if she can repeat them. 

Her nighttime routine is to pass by the grandparents' room for the last-minute giggles and hugs. Her Grumpa Rolly, whom she calls Tats, taught her to bless his hand before she leaves to return to her room.

They say giving is better than receiving, and I quite agree. But with a grandchild like Butones, I just have to make the effort to go up and be there to be at the receiving end of her unconditional love.

So young yet she already knows her best angle, a trait that makes me think of my younger daughter.

Photos by Booboo Babeth and Mamay Kimi

The end of the world as I experienced it

Once again, the doom's-day prophets amongst us have been proven false, the nay-sayers who, for once turned a negative prediction into something positive, like eating and drinking themselves merry while the world collapses, were also proven wrong.

What's certain is that a new year will unfold in a few days, barring further super-typhoons like Pablo, earthquakes, rebellions and revolutions, the massacre of the innocents here or in other parts of the world. "Turning a new leaf," "opening another window as God closes a door"--cliches though these may be, they acquire a personal poignancy for me.

God's mercy be upon all of us, especially the children, the sick, the lonely and the old, in this season of grace.

On a lighter note, this blogger decided that if God so willed the world's end yesterday, and He/She apparently moved the deadline, I could go about doing my Friday chores that included, among many, changing my grand-child Kai's cloth diaper filled with pee from the previous night while Mamay Kimi slept after doing overtime work from the house till 5 a.m. 

More workaday chores were done like trimming manuscripts down to its 800-word limit to earn some wherewithal for the New Year, composing a poem for this blog, meals in between, brief sing-alongs with the toddler and my sister Suzy (Kai's Granny Su), doing a bank transaction (one look at my new 'do with its touches of natural white and gray and the security guard allowed me to sit at a BDO branch where the staff attended to me as though I were already 60 and on remission from some form of CA), answering SMS from high school batch '73 of St. Paul College (now University) of Quezon City on preparations for our Ruby Jubilee (I like the rhyme in that phrase), buying rolls of toilet paper and a tube of toothpaste, scrap-booking, packing luggage for a Baguio Christmas, then heading off for the terminal to catch the 11 p.m. trip to the North.

One day started, one day ended without a hitch. A hitch would have been if I lost my temper over misplacing my eyeglasses or I'm pissed off with a bank teller who took his/her time processing my payment for a bus ticket, that sort. But none of that happened. After all, time for me is not just golden but a diamond, and life is shirt (deliberately misspelled word there).

There is much to be grateful for, chief of which is a beautiful life.

Photos found in the World Wide Web

As Soon as I Saw You

& as you grow,
miss a for adorable,
don't forget rule nos. 8, 9 & 10
but especially 10,
in the tenets
of positively pooh

8. keep an eye on your friends' welfare
9. don't question others' fashion faux pas
10. you need never stop learning

consider me, a family elder,
your friend as you move rapidly
from helpless babyhood
to determined crawler
to toddler etcetera etcetera

mamay kimi will also shift
from a hovering protective mom
to a friend who seeks, looks out
for, the best in you

the way your booboo
your utterly imperfect babushka
continues to be to her

meantime,
continue to also ignore
the soft stuffed immoveable
toy fauna freshly escaped
from noah's ark & with whom
you have to share space even
if you're not into cuddly cuties

continue also to seek out
the tambourine
& the piano-xylophone
that break the silence of our mornings
& with which you make a joyful noise

i bring your natural music
your gurgling brook giggles
the sounds your formerly toothless
mouth make everywhere i go
wherever whenever i have
to sidestep landslides & land mines
as i venture out each day

those sounds are to me sweeter
than my choking cracking soprano

innocence must never be
a commodity people can trade
for gold for silver for gewgaws
to ease their bottomless pit
their tummy tum tums
yet there are meanies out there
who do traffic
& sully young lives

you will find that booboo's
crimes in fashion sense are minor
& they make for enchanting entertainment
as years & tears go by

& that the true secret to
staying youthful while
father chronos metes out the punishment
of cruel time on all of us
is rule number 10

so consider learning limitless
taller than the
tallest tree is
that's how it's gotta be

outside your nursery window
buzz lightyear will assure you
is infinity & beyond

so hush hush butones
cala wala wash wash
booboo about to shush
the bellowing elephant
beside you

& you can continue once more
to tinkle the chimes
& bang the tambourines
of joy

--Babeth Lolarga

photo of Kai Mykonos (a.k.a. Butones) by Kimi Fernandez