the joy and perils of stairs

When you’re a little girl growing up on the top floor of a condo, your exposure to stairs is severely limited (just one flight up to the pool and playroom) – for everything else, you use elevators.

So when Sage attended the joint birthday celebrations of her Uncle Ric and cousin Satchi at a resto in Makati, the discovery of a staircase proved too tempting an invitation to resist.

And up and down and up and down she went, infecting the other kids with her sheer delight at…going up and down. At first, I stayed near her, reminding her to hold on to the banister, and for a while she humored me. But as time passed, she ventured to the center of the stairs, climbing hands-free.

The next discovery was that you could put your head through the gaps of the banister. More fun then as Sage and the other kids went up and down sticking their heads in the spaces.

Until Sage got stuck.

(over to you, Ser Marquez) “At the moment Sage failed to unstick her head from the gap between the iron rails, she knew she would be trapped forever, destined to the spend the rest of her childhood kneeling on the uneven stairs, watching the same view from the same angle until her hair grew long enough to obstruct it.”

Joy turned to horror as she twisted and turned this way and that, unable to extricate herself from the stairs. Nikki calmly went over, talked Sage through the steps (like a hostage situation or a stewardess trying to land an airplane), and got her out.

Shaken, Sage clung to her mother and it seemed like the end of an afternoon delight, until a minute later, a mascot was sighted, rousing the little girl’s curiosity once again.

It was great seeing family again. Apart from the birthdays, another reason to celebrate was my sister-in-law Snooky Serna’s winning Best Actress for Drama at the Star Awards.

But one reason not celebrate was Nikki’s face-to-face with the fruit of someone’s loins. But that’s another story and only hers to tell.