Archive for February, 2008
Tops And Bottoms
Author: utbt15 Feb 2008
Tops And Bottoms
Adapted And Illustrated By Janet Stevens
All Ages.
This review is written for Saffron Tree.
During our recent library trip, my younger child went berserk pulling out all the books she could lay her hands on and thrusting it in to my face to read it for her. One of the books she pulled out was ‘Tops And Bottoms’ by Janet Stevens. The Caldecott Honor sticker on the cover really caught my attention and I borrowed this book from the library.
The rich, lazy bear has plenty of land and money, but he spends all his time sleeping on his front porch. The bear’s neighbor, hare has a huge family to tend to and an empty pocket. So the hare decides to over come its adversity through wit and deception. He strikes a partnership with the bear. The terms of the partnership being:
-the hare gets to work on the bear’s land
-the hare would do all the work
-and at the end of the season the bear would get half of the produce.
The lazy bear immediately agrees and chooses that he wants the top half and goes back to his precious slumber. He sleeps the whole time only to wake up after the harvesting and discovers that the clever hare had planted tubers – carrots, radish, beet root and such. The hare rounds up the goodies and the bear is left with nothing.
The second time the bear chooses the bottom half and goes back to sleep. This time the clever hare plants broccoli, lettuce and celery. Again the hare ends up with the vegetables and the bear gets zilch.
The stubborn bear simply refuses to learn his lesson. He declares that he wants the tops AND bottoms this time around, lets the hare do the work and sleeps through the season. He wakes up to find that the clever hare has planted corn. So all the bear gets is the corn husk! Finally the bear realizes the only way to get the spoils is by getting his hands dirty and decides to take care of his land. The hare, having a huge stock of vegetable, opens his own vegetable stand and takes care of his family.
It is a simple folk tale, packed with messages like ‘You snooze you loose’, ‘One can overcome adversity through wit’, ‘Anything that seems too good to be true is obviously too good to be true’. Plus I thought that it would be a cool way to introduce a bit of botany. My three year old now faithfully repeats things like ‘carrots grow under the ground’, ‘celery grows over the ground’, ‘the bear gets kuppai(meaning: stuff that is not worth anything) because he didn’t work’. But I think it is mostly rote, because, how much ever I explain that carrots grow under the ground, she is finding very hard to visualize it.
For some reason both my three year old and my almost two year old love this book. The only reason I can come up with – the illustrations. The older one bursts in to a full-blown laughter whenever she sees the lazy bear sprawled over the patio chair. The younger one gets a kick out of identifying ‘cawee’(carrot) and ‘baathalee’(broccoli).
Another thing that needs to be mentioned is the orientation of the book. The spine has to be held horizontal and as you finish a page it has to be flipped up. There is a full page illustration of a garden. The spine is the ground and it shows tubers at the lower half of the book, growing under the ground, and vegetable like celery and lettuce at the top half of the book, growing above the ground.
This is definitely a book that I will reintroduce to my three-year-old in a few months time.
Confessions About A Desi Tiffinbox
Author: utbt4 Feb 2008
When Chula started school, I had these images of a well balanced lunchbox. Every meal would have a serving of fruit, a serving of vegetable and whole grain in some form. Chula was not a peanut butter and jelly kind of girl. I wanted to make her all these fabulous desi food with a western twist so that it isn’t too ethnic for her lunch box, at the same time she wouldn’t turn her nose on the regular desi food. The slide show pictures are pictures I clicked every day I packed her lunch. I had to share all the exciting recipes and my culinary adventures so I promptly opened a separate blog space. Unfortunately that space is sorely neglected 
Every day morning this would be the conversation at the UTBT household.
Me: Kanna, What have I packed for lunch?
Chula: Chula names all the stuff I have packed.
Me: What should you do?
Chula: Aachu pannu. (I must eat it all.)
Me: Because……?
Chula: Amma worked hard on my lunch.
Me: And…..?
Chula: You will be so proud of meeeeee!
Me: And…..?
Chula: You will be so happy of meeeeee!
Me: What should you bring back?
ONLY the lunch box.
Me: Should you throw food in garbage to bring back empty lunch box? (I wasn’t giving her ideas. She being MY daughter*, I was just covering my bases to make my statement water tight.)
Chula: No, thank you we don’t do that. We eat the banana flesh and throw ONLY the yellow skin in garbage. We eat cheese and throw only the cover in the garbage.
Same dialogue is repeated one more time in car. This time with specific questions like, What do you do to chapathi? Should you bring it back? Should you throw it in garbage? So on and so forth.
This dialogue also had my chithi(aunt) in splits. She was rolling on the floor laughing because it reminded her about the roadside shows where the person performing the show asks his assistant, ‘Vaa yindha pakkam(Come here)’ , ‘Vandhen(Okay, here I am)’. ‘Ayya yenan vechurukaru? (What does the gentle man have?)’, ‘Panam vechurukaru(He has money)’….
Coming back to the point, at the end of all this yap, yap, yap, yappity, yap, yap, yap, the food came back untouched. I let it slide by for a week. Hey, the child has just started school, may be she will start eating once she settles in. I would pick her up at 3.00PM and feed her the contents of her lunch box in the car.
After couple of weeks I asked her teachers what was going on. They said that she was busy socializing and how much ever they keep reminding her that she MUST eat, she just goes yap, yap, yap, yappity, yap, yap, yap. Also, once she told the teacher that she is ‘SAVING’ her lunch so that she can eat it in the car with her mom (*Please allow me some time to finish rolling my eyes.*) and suggested that I stop feeding her in the car at 3.00PM. Now, this is a child who left home at 8.00AM with just a cup of milk. Yes, she takes two whole hours to drink 8 ounces of milk and there simply is no time or patience in me to make her eat breakfast. (The morning drama is a post by itself!) I cannot not feed her at 3.00PM. At least to save myself from a cranky Chula I have to do that. I told the teacher that this is not an option and the vice simply must be tightened on her at lunchtime. The teacher said that she would do special arrangements.
So dear Chula sat right next to the teacher in a smaller group (lesser the kids lesser the distraction) and sometimes subtle threats like, ‘Do you want to eat or sit in a table by yourself?’, ‘Do you want to eat or go to the infants class to learn how to eat?’ and emotional black mails like ‘Chula, mommy got up at 4.00AM to make this yummy food for you. You are not respecting her work. Please eat.’ were administered.
At the end of all this food patterns are still highly erratic. I have superstitions like:
Anyhoooo…. all excitement associated with lunch making and packing has subsided and I have settled in to a boring humdrum.
Mon: Chapathi, string cheese, dry raisins and nuts.
Tues: Mac and cheese with broccoli and carrots, dried blue berries.
Wed: Spinach kuzhi paniyaram.
Thurs: Bagel chips, snap peas, tofu, nuts and dry fruits.
Fri: Idli, fresh green beans, peanuts.
B……O…….R……I……N………….G
PS
* Separate post on how the apple does not fall far from the tree.
Proud Member of Saffron Tree
Recent Comments