A Cookie Before School Time.

Upon the doctor’s news of the baby in her belly, Araoluwa stops waking early to make breakfast for her husband, Banjo and their daughter, Bimpe. Bimpe is barely seven years old and still has to be monitored by one of her parents if she wants to get things done by herself. At the crack of dawn, around 5:00 am, Banjo wakes up and makes his way to Bimpe’s little pink room.

“Good morning my sunshine. Let’s get set for the day,” as usual, Bimpe mutteres to herself on the bed and she stands up to stomp her feet on the floor due to the anger of always having to wake up early especially on Monday mornings.

Banjo leads his daughter to the bathroom and uses her pink soap and sponge to scrub her body while he uses her pink toothbrush to brush her mouth.
She was all set and it took Banjo an extra twenty minutes to get cleaned up and get set to work as well.
After stomping her feet on the floor countless times, Bimpe happily hops into her father’s car to get to the Chinese restaurant which he had promised to take her to for breakfast. At least, that will be a fun way to start the day.

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They had a nice meal and a cookie at the end of their meal. As soon as Bimpe bites into the cookie, she felt a paper in her mouth. Neatly, she brought out the paper which was rolled into the cookie her dad ordered for her.

“Daddy, there is a paper in this cookie. Is that a mistake?,* innocently, Bimpe asks her father about the paper in the cookie. She has never seen such before despite being taken to different restaurants by her parents.

“No, it isn’t a mistake. That’s what they call fortune cookie. You get it at the end of your meal in most Chinese restaurants. Read the message on the paper,” Banjo instructs Bimpe to read what the message implies.

“Imbibe the habit of kindness today,” she reads aloud. Banjo was so glad to hear his daughter read well and applauds her.

“But daddy, what is kindness? I don’t know what it means,” Bimpe giving a confused look truly implies that she didn’t know what kindness meant.

Carefully, her father acted as her first morning teacher. He teaches his daughter about kindness and shows her different ways to be kind with some pictures he generated through the internet.
At the end of his lecture, he composes a song about kindness which he and his daughter sang till he drove her off to the school gate.

Upon reaching the classroom, Aunty Rose already wrote Bimpe’s name on the board as one of the nominees for the position of class captain. As ordered by Aunty Rose, the three nominees steps forward to the front of the classroom while they are being asked some academic and moral question which will be the yardstick for choosing the class captain.

“As class captains, it is necessary to be kind to your teachers and your fellow pupils. Who then, can give us a proper definition to kindness,” even though they hadn’t been taught in class, Aunty Rose believed that there should be one of the three brilliant nominees who can give an answer to the question.

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No one in class tried to give an answer and not even the nominees but the only one who had a fortune cookie earlier in the morning. All thanks to the fortune cookie and daddy, Bimpe thought.

Brilliantly, Bimpe explains all her dad thought her about kindness before getting to school and also used the same instances he used as examples for her.

Just be kind, you can put a smile on a face, she sings this song her dad composed at the Chinese restaurant. The song was so interesting and her friends in class joined her to sing the song. At the end of her presentation and she won the position of the class captain.

“Who taught you this?,” surprisingly, Aunty Rose asked. No pupil has ever given such well detailed explanation in class.

“It was my dad and my fortune cookie,” Aunty Rose guessed right. Bimpe had just been taken to a Chinese restaurant. At last, she got home and tells her dad what happened in school.

Her dad was super proud of her when she told him. As a kid who feels every day will be filled with the same luck, she begs her dad to take her to the Chinese restaurant before going to school in the morning hoping to get another prophecy or luck from another fortune cookie.