M A C V A Y S I A

Me: So, buddy…soon you’re going to be a big brother. Are you excited?

Al: Yes.

Me: But listen…when your little brother comes, sometimes Mummy’s going to be really busy. You know, she has to give him milk, and all that stuff. So you’ll be spending a lot of time with Daddy, okay?

Al: No, Daddy.

Me: No? But you know, Mummy’s going to be really busy. In fact, Daddy has to help a lot too. I’ll be changing a lot of diapers. Everybody’s going to be really busy.

Al: No, Daddy! Not busy. CRAZY.

Me: Uh…wow. So you understand.

Al: Yes.

I still don’t know whether to be very impressed or slightly disturbed. Maybe both.

I’m sure most little kids have awesome imaginations, so it might sound overproud-daddyish of me (yeah I just coined that term) to say my son has an awesome imagination. He does, though. He can play out epic scenes with his toys, or with invisible friends (and especially invisible enemies). I like to think he’ll be into all sorts of creative pursuits — drawing perhaps, like I was when I was a kid. He sees dragons in clouds and I get all giggly. That’s my boy.

Today he was having a bath and had just dumped half a bottle of kiddie shampoo into the path of a furiously flowing tap, creating impressive mountains of soap suds. “Look Daddy!” he shrieked. “This like snow!”

“Wow,” I said, “look at that! Yes! It’s snow!”

Suddenly he stopped jumping up and down, shot me a ‘what you talkin’ bout, Willis’ look and said, “Um…no, Daddy. This soap.”

Whatever. Come on, he sees dragons in clouds. Tee hee!

After watching Monsters Vs. Aliens, Al and I were playing with some of his toys.

Me (holding the head of a robot dinosaur): Hey guys!

Al (holding a transformer in one hand and a generic Voltron-like robot in the other): Hey!

Me: What’s your name?

Al: My name Robot.

Me: OK. And how about you? What’s your name?

Al: My name Transformer.

Me: Wow, you guys have such original names.

Al: What’s your name?

Me: Uh…Robot Dinosaur…Head.

Al: Robot Dinosaur Head. Haha! (That’s two-year-old-speak for ‘Wow Daddy, that’s such an original name.’)

Last Saturday morning Leen and Alisdair and I left our little apartment so I could drive Leen to work and spend the day with Al. I was quite sore because the day before I’d finally started exercising again (a deceptively simple bodyweight workout that must have been designed by Satan or at the very least one of his trusted minions). I’m sure I looked pretty pathetic grimacing as I bent down to help Al with his shoes…and even more pathetic when I tried to get back up. But anyway, there we were, walking down the hall towards the lift lobby. Al ran ahead, which is something we rarely let him do. You can never be too careful these days, right? But hey, this wasn’t a crowded shopping mall, this was our apartment building…our floor. There was nowhere for him to go. So we didn’t worry when he disappeared into the lift lobby. 

“Wouldn’t it be something,” I said to Leen, “if the lift just happened to be there and Al went in and the doors closed?”

We both laughed. We were still laughing when a woman came out of the lift lobby. Unless she had just gone there to throw something into the garbage room, her presence there meant she had just come out of the lift. Which meant…

Oh no, I thought. He didn’t.

“Oh f**k!” I said, entering the lift lobby. “He did!”

The lifts were all closed. We could hear Al screaming for me, but his voice was getting further and further away. I burst into the stairwell and ran — well, it was more like a combination between jumping and swinging — down 18 floors. When I got to the building’s lobby I lunged at the button to open the middle lift, but suddenly the ‘up’ arrow appeared and the lift was on the move again. Leen came out of one of the other lifts.

“I could hear him!” she said. “But where did he go?”

Suddenly we heard him scream again. But this time he wasn’t in the lift. The scream was coming from somewhere above us. It sounded close. I bolted back up the stairs to the first floor (Malaysians have inherited the very strange British habit of calling the second floor the first floor) and there he was, crying, running to me and telling me very incoherently about his big adventure.

Phew.

And so began our weekend, one which proved to be somewhat eventful: besides Al’s solo elevator ride, we had to deal with rain pouring into Ibu’s living room in Muar (the handiwork of some renovators who did a great job on the front yard but really messed up the roof), a mosquito getting stuck in Leen’s eye, and Al getting his face scratched up by a cat that, to Al’s horror, wouldn’t tolerate being ridden like a horse the way Smokey often does. Oh, and after hurling myself down 18 floors at breakneck speed, I was in even more pain. I could hardly walk.

I know that sounds like a wild weekend, but actually it was quite nice. We enjoyed ourselves at a birthday party at Gymboree and had a nice visit with Ibu in Muar, rain and all. I’m happy to report that Al still likes cats and elevators. And it turns out he really likes to dance as well:

Ah yes, a good time was had by all.