Sunday's good boy

Yesterday, Javier had two achievements: He managed to attend the whole 1.5 hour mass with just me by his side (his papa was not feeling well) AND he finished his lunch in a very noisy, very chaotic food court without any problems.

I was wishing myself luck as this is my first attempt to bring him to church on my own. I feel better if there was someone with me because that means I don't have to worry about him when I need to attend to my personal needs. Luckily, he was very cooperative when we went to the toilet before and after mass. Good thing the toilet was always empty when we needed to go and I did not have to worry about him getting shocked by the sound of the hair dryer.

The mass is usually an hour long but yesterday, it extended by another half hour so it was pretty challenging keeping him behaved in his seat. He started getting noisy and restless in our first 30 minutes and I knew we had to leave our seats so we would not distract the others.  We managed to find a seat at the back where there are only 3 other people besides us. The boy behaved at first but since the mass extended, he got bored and started bothering the woman beside us. I am thankful the woman was pretty understanding and she did not give us an evil stare as many people here are wont to do when they are slightly bothered.

When mass was over, he said that we wanted to go to Thomson Plaza but since we are trying to add more variety to his routine, I explained to him that we are not going to Thomson Plaza because his papa is waiting in Junction 8. He was adamant at first and insisted on his way. I just kept saying that we need to go to papa because he will be sad if he does not see Javier. After thinking about what I said, he agreed as I secretly gave out a sigh of relief.

We explained to him that we were going to the food court to have lunch. He said he wanted to eat at Swensen's. But since he already 'passed' the test of eating in a restaurant, we wanted to take it a step further by taking him to eat in a chaotic, noisy place.

I am happy to report that he ate most of his roast pork rice and he only refused the food when some pork parts were hard to chew.

As a reward, we took him to the arcade to see his favourite games. I had time to do some shopping and we had an ice cream afterwards. It was a simple yet wonderful pleasure to just eat ice cream as a family and watch the world go by. Times like these, I feel like there's some consolation to our different path.

Waiting for the bus headed to church.