Movie dates with my little girl

I played nanny again to my niece Keona on Saturday. It wasn’t really planned, as I had a long list of to-dos (including watching Sundo) and her real nanny was away for the weekend, but she was so excited when I asked her if she wanted to go with me to SM (“Wait, I get my Crocs,” she replied), so I ended up going to the mall, happy anyway to have a two-year-old in tow.

Now, what do you do if you’re alone with a two-year-old, and you don’t even know enough to remember that bringing her would also mean you had to bring a small backpack filled with an extra diaper (just in case, as she often does without them now), baby bottles filled with distilled water, powdered milk, a lampin, and extra clothes? You do three things: A. You find out the “password” that would make her behave (in Keona’s case, it is “Do you want to go home?”); B. You do a juggling act with bags on one arm, and baby on the other; C. You ask her if she wants to wee-wee at 10-minute intervals; and D. You take her to places that would actually interest her, but not to places that would interest her too much. That means, P80 per 30-minute play area, yes, but Toy Kingdom, no, no, no, no, no!

I once had an Italian student who said he had realized that there were no baby girls, only little women. This, I now understand with Keona. But I’m a woman too, and I’ve discovered ways to convince her to behave, or to do what I want her to do. When she wants to be carried, all thirty or so pounds of her, I would pretend to cry and say, “Auntie is tired and auntie is crying,” and she would touch my face and say, “It’s okay, Auntie.” and forget about being carried. When she wants to linger too long at a toy display, I run away and say, “Bye, Auntie is leaving!” and she would run after me.

When I wanted to watch a movie last Saturday—because I was so tired and I just wanted to sit down and relax and still have some bonding time with her—and she’d said, “No,” the first time I asked her if she wanted to watch a film, I said, “It’s like Mamma Mia!” which was the first movie she watched. “Mamma Mia?” she asked me. And she would ask me this several times as the first few scenes of Monsters vs. Aliens rolled in. Happily, the animation of this DreamWorks film is perfectly captivating for little children, so the moment she saw the first US military airplane, she stayed quiet and stood on tip-toes for most of the film, powered by popcorn.

Now, let me tell you about that popcorn—which is the reason why I mentioned item B. a few paragraphs ago. I also did some shopping, so by the time we watched the movie, I had a total of three bags and a kid on my arms. As you all very well know, popcorn is yet another bag altogether. Five minutes into the pre-movie trailers, our buttered popcorn was already on the floor, and Keona was practically begging for it. We had to make a mad dash to the snack booth—bags and all.

Monsters vs. Aliens is one of those films that parents and children would equally enjoy. I doubt if Keona got all the punch lines—US President Hathaway (voiced by Stephen Colbert) is perhaps the funniest character—and she did cover my mouth when I laughed out loud, but she liked the fast-paced action, with the helicopters and planes shooting at a cute, gigantic one-eyed robotic probe. She wasn’t scared at all by the monsters and aliens, and when I asked her, “Are you a monster or an alien?” halfway into the film, she smiled and said, “I’m Keona!”

The story about good monsters fighting evil aliens also has a message about self-acceptance in it somewhere, with the surprise metaphor of a mutant grub developing into something rather fascinating. I suppose it would have been better watched in 3D (and I promise to do this with Keona when Coraline is showing), but at the end of the day, only one thing matters to me when it comes to the budding tradition that is my movie dates with this little girl.

“Are you happy?” I asked her, as I finally obliged to carry her to our ride home.

She looked at me and touched my cheek, smiled, and said, “Yes, Auntie!”

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