Bedtime Rush | 2011

It's 11:52 in the evening. It's almost midnight. We have been trying to put Jakjak to bed since half-past eight. And now that we're all sleepy, we finally decide to put the lights out. Then, to our horror, we hear a fiendish scream. "Noooo!". Silence. "I want a story!". It was Jakjak asking for his bedtime story.


Yes, even if we had been in bed for hours, Jakjak would not sleep, nor even ask for his bedtime story until the last minute. So, his stories end up near midnight most of the time. Sometimes, especially if we came from a trip somewhere in the city, we would be too tired to be reading. He would be tired too, but his day wouldn't be complete without a bedtime story.


I remember being too tired and sleepy that the story I had been reading turned out to be slurred words that didn't make sense, paragraphs that had been repeated more than once and pages that have been skipped (and double backed). Fortunately, Jakjak has memorized most (if not all) of his books. He sometimes corrects us when we say the wrong words or he protests when we skip a page. When he's really, really tired though, he just doesn't mind and merely waits for "The End".

He can read now. And those green back Dr. Seuss books are already easy for him to read. For some reason, he still asks us to read him those stories. I don't know if he has just gotten used to it as a habit or if he really prefers someone reading to him. Still, we do our best to oblige (sometimes I barter a trade for the number of stories he wants read). He has grown a lot too. I believe that these stories have not just helped him with his reading, but with his emotional and psychological growth as well (yep, we blame his crazy antics and vocabulary on Dr. Seuss and 'yus, yus, yus' from Pigling Bland).

Our advise? Read as much as you can to your little one. You never know how much he will grow with it. I didn't have bedtime stories that I could actually remember, and I wanted Jakjak to have his.