both little ones are presently in their respective rooms, fast asleep.

the littler one is on her own for the first time tonight.

somehow, i didn’t mind so much having her bunk in our room a little longer than we did with her brother when he was a baby (we ‘banished’ him at eight weeks old). i guess it’s because she’s never bothered us at night since she came home, so her presence in our room, happily bundled up in the moses basket next to me, hardly registers anyway. she’s been nothing but a pleasant bedfellow.

but off to her own room, she must. simply because, fair is fair.

speaking of rooms, the boy, in all his two-and-a-half-year-old glory, is going through what i think (hope!) is a universal phase of normal children his age:

1) the “ada hantu!” phase

we’re not sure if this is one of his delaying tactics at bedtime (the other being “i want to read a book!”), or if it’s a result of an over-active imagination. well, we definitely prefer either as the explanation, because, erm, i would really rather not think otherwise! =O

so, how DO we deal with these phantom sightings?

so far, i’ve done the most obvious thing any parent, or what a politician charged with adultery, would do – deny, deny, deny.

“no lah! where got? nonsense!! now go to sleep.”

then i tried the ‘tell it to go away’ tactic.

“just tell hantu, ‘go away! go away!’ ok?? now go to sleep.”

then i tried getting to the root of the evil, so to speak.

“how does it look like? muka dia macam mana?”

and his answer would be his face scrunched up with his hands, scarily similar to Edvard Munch’s The Scream, or more scarily, like Macauley Culkin in the Home Alone posters.

“apa ajer! now go to sleep.”

i’ve now resorted to leaving his desk lamp on while he falls asleep, and things are looking brighter, so to speak. not so much for the daddy, who will also do an Edvard Munch’s The Scream impression when he sees the next electricity bill.

we figure it could be due to a clutter at a particularly dark corner that made him see shadowy figures lurking. i’ll get around to removing some bits of toys to reduce the appearance of lurky shadows there. soon.

heck, i used to be frigging scared of the dark when i was small too. and it was exacerbated when i was separated from my brother, who’d gotten too old to share a room with his silly kid sister. once, when i was five, i had a nightmare involving the purple Count from Sesame Street springing up on me in the dark, and i could never till now think of that purple Count without a slight shiver running down my spine. (that’s also probably why i ended up hating math and anything to do with counting… ok, i’m stretching the psycho mumbo jumbo too far – i just have a really lazy left brain, is all.)

but of course, i got out of it (the scared-of-dark part, not the hate-math bit, which is still there), and am perfectly comfortable being in the dark (in more ways than one). it helped that i got married and finally had someone for company in the same room as me at night, ha ha.

another phase he’s going through, is:

2) the “i dowan to eat!” phase

now let me disclaim that he is, in essence, a true-blue anak wak jawa, in that he’d actually choose rice over pasta or even bread, for his meals. he can even be content with eating white rice on its own (his other eating oddity includes stalks of broccoli by itself).

but lately, feeding him is like negotiating with a terrorist. bribes, in the form of jellies and vitamin C (his choice of candy, or rather, OUR choice of ‘safe’ candy for him, ha ha) are brandished, like carrots dangled in front of a mule.

so it was one of those bedtime chats (another of his delaying tactics, no doubt) that i began my spiel on why he has to eat rice.

i’m sure you’ve ALL heard it before, the old tale that has been passed from generation to generation, the one that sows guilt in many a small children into polishing the food off their plates.

the How Rice Cries When You Don’t Eat It tale.

as a perfectly rational teenager, i used to scoff at how illogical it was that tiny lifeless grains of rice could be personified as weeping, grieving beings, and i would feel betrayed that old people would spin such stories to fool impressionable little children into believing such things.

but, oh my god, there it was, out of the blue, i didn’t even know why i did it, or how i even remembered it, but the words just flowed out of me, spewing forth like a full-fledged diarrhoea, the age-old tale of How Rice Cries When You Don’t Eat It.

*in most dramatic voice* “you know ahh, mummy buy rice, but aniq don’t want to eat the rice, so mummy has to throw the rice away. the rice is soooo saaaad *insert sad voice* – ‘i’m soooo saaaad, why aniq won’t eat me??’ then the rice CRY! ah ahh!”

i never got how or why our parents spun that particular web of apparent deceit, but in that instance, the lights switched on and i – a Parent – just… got it. it made perfect sense – appealing to children’s basic sense of empathy. brilliant.

and so i went on to tag emotions to every item he’s rejected according to his whims – his bed (“i’m sooo saaad, why aniq won’t sleep on me??”), his milk (“i’m sooo saaaad, why aniq won’t drink me??”), his toy (“i’m sooo saaad, why aniq throw me??”), etc.

it got him thinking for a bit, then he started grinning, not too sure what to make of this newfound realisation that objects around him actually react to him. but he started to slowly reach for his bottle of milk, and downed it accordingly.

and now when you ask him what happens to the rice if he doesn’t eat it, he’ll tell you – “rice cry!”

maybe it’s maybelline

i could come up with a few other phases, equally exhausting and exasperating, but journalling them all down would prove exhausting and exasperating by itself.

it’s been nine weeks since i gave birth (funny, it feels like much, much longer than that), and i was telling the Spouse the other day a cold, hard (and heartless) truth:

i sure don’t miss being pregnant.

i think it was around this time, after giving birth to aniq, that i’d gotten the “i miss being pregnant” pangs. but strangely enough, this time, i don’t.

maybe i’ve lost the maternal mojo, maybe the last one overstayed its welcome. but the thought of going through all that ten months of whatever that goes along with being pregnant, does not appeal to me very much any more. :S

and since it’s been nine weeks, i guess i really should make that appointment to see the doc to get my plumbing sorted, aye? get it, erm, plugged or something.

coz i say, these two will keep me pret-ty busy dealing with their multitudes of phases for the next, ohh…. twenty-odd years or so.