Ben - SHORT STORIES
Now it is difficult to explain how Ben is when the last time anyone has seen him was at least a year ago. I mean he’s obviously grown physically and intellectually but it is difficult to gauge to what degree. His problem solving sure has got better - for instance on the top of our fridge is a bag of sweets and he has managed to get them by bringing a chair into the kitchen to reduce his height disadvantage. This also applies to reaching for the light switch in his bedroom and CDs on the higher shelves. He has also been taught how to load his DVDs into the appropriate system, fire up the TV to the correct channel and press play so he can watch Winny the Pooh for the next hour.
But perhaps the best way to know how the little toddler is getting on is with good old Chinese stories told by his father and mother.
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Yin Ping took Ben to the Botanical Gardens on Sunday and as it had rained heavily that weekend, there were many leaves on the floor. She watched him pick a leaf, smell it and she stopped him in time just before he was about to put it into his mouth. The immediate conversation went as follows:
YP: What are you doing? Stop eating those leaves. What are you eating those leaves for?
B: But monkeys eat leaves.
The next day whilst we were carrying him as well as teasing him about being a monkey, he simply stated, “I’m not a monkey, I’m a baby.”
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Yin Ping woke up at 6am on a dark Saturday morning to prepare to go to work. Now for those of you who don’t know her, she has astigmatism so everything is blurred if she doesn’t wear her glasses. So the first thing she does is to reach over for her glasses but on this morning, she panicked because she couldn’t find them on the table where she thought she left them. After 5 minutes of groping in the darkness and she woke me up because she thought I had put them elsewhere for safe keeping.
I couldn’t find them either in my drowsy state but she mentioned that the last place she remembered putting them was on top of her medical book she was reading before she fell asleep. Now I did find her medical book on the floor whilst I was tidying them up after the both of them were asleep but didn’t see her glasses.
Now I need to explain our sleeping arrangements. Ben sleeps on a double bed in his room with one of his parents. The bed consists of a metal frame with a mattress on the top and at corners of the head of the bed are two metal hollow posts. On the top of each of the two posts are gold-gilded tops. Recently Ben discovered you could take them off and was intrigued by this.
On Friday night whilst I was surfing the net for the latest (fantasy) football news, I was aware of Ben having removed the tops and putting various of his things into the hole. But in good fatherly fashion, I didn’t care because they were his toys and if that was how he wanted to play with them, that was fine with me. So then I went back to surfing the net.
This information floods back to me in my sleepy state and I thought Nahhh. But after further minutes of searching yielded no success and wife needing to get to the hospital, I put a sleeping Ben on the sofa followed by the duvet, pillows and bolsters before heaving off the mattress. After tipping over the bed frame, a flood of small crayons and assorted toy bricks came out together with, yes you guessed it a paragraph ago, the wife’s glasses.
When confronted with our evidence, he denied it but got a firm lecture about putting things into the bedposts.
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Whilst our pastor was giving the benediction at the end of the church service and everyone had their head bowed in prayer in silence, our little toddler son promptly said in his solemn, not too soft voice…., “One fine day, in the Hundred Acre Wood…”
(which is how the Winnie the Pooh stories start in his books).
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We were in the car one evening, heading to town and the topic of discussion was about our upcoming trip to England. I (Yin Ping) remembered how Ben screamed and cried at the airport when we waved goodbye to his grandmother at the Penang airport not too long ago.
So, I turned to look at Ben and asked him, “ Where does Por Por live?”
He answered, “ Por Por lives in the aeroplane.”
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I (Yin Ping) was rushing off to pick Derek up from the football pitch one evening, as I had to leave for work soon after that. Ben was with me in the car. As I stepped on the accelerator to overtake a car, Ben spoke up, “ Mommy, why Mommy driving so very fast ?”
I went red, and said, “ Err,…it is because Mommy is trying to overtake the other car. That’s all.”
5 minutes later, he says, “ Mommy still driving very fast.” And continued, “ The car go very fast, then crash and then drive into the drain!”
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