We had a late dinner tonight. “We” being The Family (rarely does any one family eat out during the weekends without inviting the other families). For conversation, we talked about the silly things the children did when they were babies. For instance, when I was a baby, my parents abhored – and I mean abhored – eating at restaurants with their baby son. For absolutely no reason discernable to my parents, I would start crying. Now, a baby crying is annoying enough. Yet, my cries were not of an ordinary baby: it was so loud, so peelingly loud, that everyone in the restaurant would turn to see if the parents dropped a hot bowl of soup on their infant or something. I mean, I was horrendous. I was even more of a handful when I started to crawl (in fact, I progressively became more of a nightmare to my parents the older I got). I just wouldn’t sit still. My parents used go to this Chinese movie theater, for example, and I would start whining and fidgeting in my seat. So, my mom would let me crawl on the floor. To the surprise of the other moviegoers, they would see a toddler quietly scrambling up and down the aisle without a parent in sight. “What a great idea!” They’d say. “Why didn’t I think of that?” Pretty soon, you see the theater full of babies in silent determination hunting for food, the parents enjoying their movie, and a clean-up crew losing their jobs. Thanks to me, that theater from then on offered a discount for people who brought babies with them. I’m surprised that theater ever went out of business…
When Joey was a toddler, he was dreadfully afraid that someone might take away his mom. He could not bear being away from her. The child would throw a huge fit if she was ever out of his sight. So, one of the endearing things that he did was clinging to his mother’s leg whenever anyone else was around. He wasn’t afraid of people. No, he was afraid of someone stealing his mother.
Jonathan was a good boy. He always minded his own business and never made too much fuss. Feigao, on the other hand, had a number of funny stories. For one, when he was still in diapers, he would always crawl and hide somewhere whenever he needed to take a shit. The adults would start looking for him, and they’d find him in some dark corner, or underneath the table. Oh, and whenever he crawled, he always had his right leg tucked in while he used the other one to move. Everyone thought that was hilarious. We still do.