BEDTIME, STARTING THE DAY, BAD HABITS, AND THE THREE STOOGES

I love my kids, don’t ever think otherwise, but I will tell you right now that they are no different than those in the states.   You see, they like to use Philippine time for everything.  If bedtime is at 8:00 pm they will try to drag it to 8:30 pm or later.  Even if I start them getting ready by 7:45 pm (brush your teeth, go to the bathroom), they will come up with something to delay the inevitable.  “Oh, I forgot to do this”, or “I need another hug” (OK, I am a softy on that).  Then it is the carousing in the bedchamber, the continual voices and rustling in bed which tells me that they ARE NOT just settling in for a long night’s nap, but wrestling with each other…usually it’s the boys.  OK, in all fairness, I was not the best child during my youthful days.  I remember that my brother and I would lie in bed (in the upstairs east bedroom) reading comics after the lights were supposed to be out.  Of course dad could hear us at the bottom of the steps and then would ask if we had our bed lamps out of which we would both acknowledge they were.   Being blind and also the concerned parent, he would then creak up those wooden steps to our room and feel the, although extinguished, still hot bulbs of our lamps.  I will not elaborate the consequences of that discovery.  At other times, he would just go to the fuse box and pull the main circuit breaker which threw the whole house into darkness, but he didn’t care….let’s face it he was blind.  The only saving grace was that Jerry, my older brother, would then have me make up stories to tell him before falling off to sleep.  In reality, like with every other child, it was plain difficult for my kids to go to bed at times.  Still I realize it was just a normal phase of life….just as it was normal for them NOT to get up in the morning.  

Toy Toy Baguio still dripping wet

The challenge for getting them to bed at night was no more daunting than getting them out of bed in the morning.  When I was growing up, we were awakened and would all come downstairs at the same time, but in this household, you got up one at a time.  First it was the COLD water bath that needed to be taken and then a hot breakfast of rice, eggs, and warm milk.  No one would eat their meal until after the morning wash.  AND, I will tell you that even though they may have been acting like zombies when crawling out of bed, by the time they came out of the bathroom, they were fully alert as well as shivering.  There’s nothing like a brisk water bath to begin ones day.  The boys were the easy ones to get moving, but the girls….oh the girls.  Clarisse had recently started the routine of “just a minute”.  When it was time to go to school in the morning, she was ALWAYS the last one and if you asked her to do anything, the reply would be, “JUST A MINUTE”.   She may be doing nothing at all, but I think it just took so much mental momentum to get her physical frame to move in any given direction.  The bad thing was that her little sister had now started that routine.  Mae Mae picks up bad habits so easily and I am constantly trying to get rid of them before the next one is adopted.  The latest was a terrible laugh she had acquired from a friend…..it was almost as bad as fingernails on a chalk board.  Still after many threats along with a few meaningful swats on the behind, Charissa Mae had finally gotten the idea that maybe she would work on other bad habits and abandon that one…..Unfortunately, it must have been like a virus as Santiago has begun laughing like that lately. 

Still after all the grumbling to get out of bed, the pounding on the bedroom door (after the bath) so the next child could get in and dressed (Clarisse always brought  the assembly line to a halt when in there behind locked door), along with the sibling bickering at the breakfast table, it is a typical family on the edge of the jungle in the Philippines.

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We received a complete set of Three Stooges movies this past Christmas.  Gee, as a youngster, I remember watching those at the theater before the main movie and would laugh so hard, but as the years passed, I thought I had grown out of such silly shenanigans.   However, it would appear that I was in error.  I discovered The Three Stooges were universal.  Even the movies from 1935 still got belly laughs out of my kids.  The boys would actually roll on the floor with laughter and even I would chuckle at the absurdity of it all.  What I came to realize was that you didn’t need to know English to enjoy The Three Stooges.  It didn’t take long for the kids to know what was transpiring in those simplistic scripts and then roar when the inevitable occurred.  I read once, that if you wanted to live to an old age, you needed to surround yourself with children and you would never grow old….at least mentally.   I will acknowledge that my kids have had a positive effect on my mental attitude as well as physical attributes…..No, I am not twenty years anymore, but I truly enjoy my children’s (along with their classmates) fresh perspectives on life….especially Philippine life.  And I know, that as they grow and change, so will I…..and both for the better.

Daryl A. Cleveland

01-18-13