45 days. 1080 hours. 64800 minutes. 3888000 seconds.

That’s how much time I had on my hands between the end of my fall 2007 quarter and the beginning of my spring 2008 quarter.

Well… let us say I was going to sleep 10 hours/day….and I was still working part time 12 hours a week…..effectively I had 462 hours. Plus my aunt was going to be visiting for three weeks. Which translates to me not entering the kitchen and not picking up any cleaning accessory of any kind. Plus I decided not to blog, read blogs. So I had undivided 462 hours on my hand.

What can one do with sooo much time?

I could enroll in couple of fast track, 4 days a week, four hours a day classes. Naah….Tooo many things to do at home. So I made a list.

1. Read a whole variety of books to the kids.

2. Read a bunch of books for myself.

3. Take the kids to the snow.
(For a long time now, Chula has been longing for the snow. Not that she has ever been to snow. She read about Curious George’s skiing adventure and since then, she would pick tow rectangular pieces of paper, put them on the floor, stand on it, bend her knees, drag the paper with her feet and walk around the house yelling, ‘Amma I am skeenking. Amma. Look at me.’)

4. Arrange a conference with Chula’s teachers to find out how she is doing at school.

5. Paint the house. I was getting tired of the monochromatic walls. Ugh.

6. Sort out some finance stuff.

7. Take my aunt to LA.
(A Crazy plan was hatched. Over the weekend we would all drive to LA, hubby would come back the next day. The rest of us would stay back for four more days and after sightseeing I would drive us all back. The plan was duly scratched due to extreme weather conditions and the kids running a temparature.)

8. Sort and clear paper and cloth clutter.
(Well, de cluttering along with ‘Talk more Tamil at home’ were kind my new year resolutions.)

9. Arrange the environment in the kids’ room.
(I wanted ‘montessorize’, if I may coin that term, the room. Nothing fancy, but arrange the things they use in a easily accessible manner, hoping they would learn to play more independently.)

10. Register for courses for spring 2008. Order text books from ebay.
(Is some one asking if buying books is a chore? Do you know how expensive text books are?! I watch ebay auctions for a month or so and pick up text books at unbelievable prices. Personal best, bought a $90 book at .99 cents, of course I had to pay $4.00 for shipping.)

Now the break is over and I was revisiting my list. Not bad….not bad at all.

6, 8 and 9 are untouched. God help me.

4 went great.

I just pushed myself and finished 5 yesterday. Yay. Picking colors…. had a tough time doing this. If I had my way, I would have gone with vibrant colors. Hubby threatened that he would not come home. So a quick compromise was reached.

2….err…. sort of. Picked up Namesake, Sister Of My Heart and a whole bunch of child development books from the library. Midnight oil was burned to finish Namesake and Sister Of My Heart. As for the child development books, they have been renewed to the maximum and still sitting at various locations around the house! BTW, I was very impressed with Namesake. Jumpa Lahiri has done an awesome job describing the process of identity formation of an individual from an immigrant family. Will do a separate post on that. Sister Of My Heart….eh….I have to think more about this. I was confused by Mistress of Spices, then a friend said that the whole thing is an allegory. It represents the turmoils of an immigrant and it all made sense. Trying to see if SOMH means something deep.

Reading books to the kids. We would have read atleast 60-70 new books from the library. Every evening after their shower and snack, I would ploink down on the couch for reading time. Mieja would run around and fetch a handful of her favs and park herself on my lap. Chula would nestle herself between me and the couch and we read for at least an hour. Now Chula picks the books she wants to be read, neatly arranges them on the center table, arranges a cushion on the couch(for my back) and calls out to me, ‘Amma reading time. I have everything ready. You sit here, like this. You put Mieja on your lap like this. Okay read now.’

Snow. That was so much fun. Chula was pretty excited. She wore all the ski gear and called herself an ‘astronaut baby’. She made snow man, snow Ganesha boombi daambi yaanai (for some reason this is what she calls Ganesha. I have no clue why! ), rolled around in the snow. We strapped rented ski boots on her, but apparently young kids do not get ski poles. This upset her and she decided if there are no poles, there will be no skiing and kicked the shoes away. Just before we left she did some imaginary skiing with the poles she found in the cabin where we stayed. Father and daughter were walking around with poles in hand screaming, ‘Ski. Ski. Ski. We are skiing.’ As long as she didn’t have to touch snow, Mieja was kind of okay with it. Normally she would have thrown away the boots, cap and mittens. But she was weighed down by the weight of all the stuff. So she decided to sit quietly on a snow tube and managed a smile or two when were dragging her up and down the slopes.

As for 10, managed to enroll in three clases for this quater. Books are bought. Jan 28th was the first day of the quater. Schedules were handed and looks very doable. Provided I continue to get up early every morning and spend time doing assignments instead of blogging and blog surfing. Now that requires some restraint huh?!

Thus ended the break. My aunt has gone back to Boston. Poor woman needs a break from the three-week backbreaking work she did on her ‘vacation’. Now it is just us, the kids, our work and my classes. Life is busy, but good

Okay what will you do if you had 45 days…1080 hours….64800 minutes…..3888000 seconds and no cooking on your hands? Show me your list.

The Relatives Came By Cynthia Rylant and Stephen Gammell.
All Ages.

This review was written for Saffron Tree.

In the past three years, my parents have visited us twice, staying with us for six months each time. My mother-in-law visited us twice, staying with us for six months during the first visit and for one month in the second visit. My aunt has visited us twice, staying with us for one month during each of her visits. All the visits were well-intended visits by grand parents and grand aunts to spend quality time with the children. During all these visits, the kids had a royal blast. They run to the my grand aunt whenever their evil mother is behind them with a glass of milk. They love bathing with my mother, go for long walks with my father and sit and recite songs with my mother-in-law. They love to curl with my parents or mother-in-law on lazy afternoons and sleep for an extra half-an-hour. They love it that they have a fresh, tasty, healthy snack waiting for them after their siesta. When you are in a situation in which you care for a child that you have not given birth to, you tend to be relaxed! This relaxed attitude is not spelt out in definite words but yet the children catch it and tune in to it.

But when it is time to say good bye, it is hard for both the relative and the child. The adult grieves that by the next visit the children would have grown up a little bit. They can’t bear to think of the things they will miss – the first step, the first word, the softness of their skin, the way they smell etc. They are unsure if the children will remember them and if they will bond again when they meet the next time.

Well…for the children….it is even more difficult. They experience the same uncertainties, insecurities, turmoil, but the worst part, they don’t have words to express their emotions. For the next month or so, the younger one is surprised that I am the only person who answers her cries. She tries crying a tad more and louder hoping against hope that may be grand mom/dad are sleeping and her cry will wake them. She is confused why she is not lifted and being fussed over for every single call for attention. The elder one, as soon as she is back from school, expects the door to open and a smiling face to pop out. Her face brightens the minute she sees idlis on her plate, she cries out in joy, ‘Idli!!! S patti where are you?’, thinking that my mom had come back and has started making her famous idlis. The anger comes cold, raw, powerful and real when the respective grand parents have reached India and we talk to them over the phone. My elder child refuses to talk to the ‘deserters’ and the younger one starts wailing when she hears their voice. All this despite of all the adults preparing the children and for the imminent good bye!

But life goes on…. teaching invaluable lessons of, ‘Each in their place’, ‘What happened, happened for the good and what is happening is also for the good’, ‘Out of sight is not out of mind’, …..oh, I could go on and on…

This is the crux of the Caldecott honor book, The Relatives Came by Cynthia Rylant. I wish I could quote every line in the book or scan every single picture and upload it…every word and every picture struck a chord in me. I am exercising immense self control and quoting a few lines as and when appropriate!

In this book, it is the time of summer vacation and the relatives come to visit from Virginia. They close down their house in Virginia, load their suitcases in their station wagon and leave in the wee hours of the morning. They drive all day long and all night long, thinking about both their closed down house in Virginia and the relatives they are going to meet at the end of the drive. When the relatives finally arrive there is much rejoicing, there are hugs and hugs and hugs.

‘The relatives just passed us all around their car, pulling us against their wrinkled Virginia clothes, crying sometimes.
….
….
You’d have to go through at least four different hugs to get from the kitchen to the front room. Those relatives!’.

Then comes the sleeping time. The illustration shows a huge bunch of people scattered all over, some on beds, some on the floor, some squeezed with hands and legs over the person next to them…..for some reason, the image it brought to my mind was my grand mother’s old village house-summer vacation time-whole family clustered in the hall-sleeping on make shift beds. And the author rightly puts it in to the words,

‘It was different, going to sleep with all that new breathing in the house.’

When the vacation is over, the relatives load their station wagon and drive back to Virginia. After waving bye to the relatives, the family crawls back in to their beds, which now feels too big and too quite and goes back to sleep.

Whenever I read the book, I take poetic license and read to suit our context. One of the characters is picked to be grand mom or grand dad. I tell them that they can only visit us, but eventually they have to go back to ‘THEIR HOME’, so on and so forth. Message is being well received and the book has now been successfully renamed as ‘Thatha Patti book’.

Giraffes Can’t Dance by Giles Andreae
Suggested read alone ages 4-7
Suggested read together ages 0-4

This review was written for SaffronTree.

For a long time now I have been wanting to introduce self-esteem books to my older child. She is just three years old and I wasn’t sure how much she is aware of ‘self’ in order to grasp self-esteem.

Then couple of interesting things happened. One day she looked at me intently and declared, ‘Amma, I am brown. Appa is brown. My baby sister is brown. You are white. No Amma you are pink’. It took a while for me to realize that she was talking about skin color. Being one of the few desi kids in a white class room, she had some how picked up skin color and was applying her new found wisdom at home. The second incident was when we were laughing at something she did and we thought was ‘cute’. Oh boy…. she did not take it very well. She burst out, ‘No. Don’t laugh at me. Its not funny.’ I was convinced she knew about self.

Just as I was on the look out for a good book on self-esteem, this book fell in to my hands. One of the lead teachers at my school picked this book to read it for the four-year-olds in my classroom. After reading it to my class, I saw how much the children enjoyed the book and was sure it would be a hit at home turf. Even if the concept eludes my daughters, I knew that they would be sold because it involves African safari animals.

The story is set in Africa and it is the time of the African jungle dance. The lions are doing a tango, the chimps are busy in a cha-cha, the rhinos are doing a rock and roll and the baboons are doing a scottish reel. Now, our hero, Gerald is a tall lanky giraffe. As long it is standing still and munching shoots off the trees, he is okay. He can’t even run a decent distance without falling face down. When it comes to dancing, he knows that he has two left feet but he has no assumptions. All he wants is to have fun. But the minute Gerald turns up in the jungle dance, the other animals laugh at him, they call him names. Gerald simply freezes, all he can think of is his clumsiness. With head hanging low, he walks away from the dance floor. Poor Gerald feels so sad…and alone.

Ta-da enters a cricket. Now, the cricket is like the travelling bard, you see in Indian movies – he just happens be in the right place at the right time, all the time, offering chicken soup for the soul! The cricket teaches Gerald that when you are different you don’t stop dancing, but you just dance for a different music. Gerald closes his eyes, listens to the music in the air, the swaying of grass, the chirping of the insects, leaves rustling in the wind, the music in the breeze. His body sways inadvertently, his tail starts swishing, his hooves are shuffling, he is leaping and making somersaults….oh he is dancing the best dance of his life! By now all the jungle animals have gathered around Gerald and they all oooh and aawwh at the amazing dance and ask him how he learnt to dance so well. Gerald smiles and replies, ‘We all can dance when we find the music we love’.

I was amazed at the depth of the information packed in such simple phrases. Even without explaining my three year old tells, ‘Oh, oh, all the animals are making fun of Gerald, that’s not so nice.’ Every time I finish the book, I reiterate, ‘Do you just stop doing what you love, just because people make fun of you? NAAAH. When you do something with love and focus the same people who made fun of you will say good job’, driving the point home.

My kids have picked this book to read for our evening reading every day for the past one month. We have read this book to bits, literally! I am in the process of taping the torn pages before I am supposed to return it to the library! That tells a ton about how much the kids love this book….and also a little bit about how they need to learn to handle books gently The minute I get a reasonably priced copy of this book, it will be added to our home library.

The illustrations by Guy Parker-Rees is stunning. What are you all waiting for? Pick out this book from library/store and check it out for yourself.