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.

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.

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.

…THE PLANNING…

Me: Hey girl, how old are you?
Chula: I am two. I will be threeeee!!!
Me: Okay, what do you want for your third birthday?
Chula: I want to be a butterfly.
Me: Okay….
Chula: I want cake and candies and ice cream and presents….
Me: Okay….
Chula: I want to come and celebrate me, sing happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me, then I blow the candle and eat cake.

Yes! Yes! Yes! This is exactly what I wanted. The quarter would be over, papers done, grades published, with holidays fast approaching I was in the mood to throw a party. Just the thing I wanted to do! And she gave me some thing to work on – BUTTERFLY, her recent fascination, craze, obsession, interest…. She practically had me eating me out of her hand. Except for the ‘presents’ part. This gifting and re-gifting business was eating me up. So I decided to make it a gift free birthday. IF the guests felt awkward about the gift business, suggestions were made to donate the gift amount to a charity or to their library’s giving tree and send the good will as the gift. But Chula now knows that birthdays and gifts go together. She does not care what is inside, but just gets a kick when some one hands her a gift bag. So it was decided that hubby and self buy couple of toys/books, wrap it, display them at the party and bring them back.

With the theme and guest list handed to me, I had venue, food, decoration and cake to care of. After a little research I found this early child development center close to home where they agreed to do some activity for the varied age group children who will be coming to the party. Butterfly easel painting, play dough activity, (paper cut out) butterfly hunt, followed by art activity where the kids made a garden scene with the butterflies they found in the hunt and some circle time/parachute activities for the younger children. The much older kids were to be given ownership of conducting the activities.

I had read a lot about this particular bakery where they bake a mean Guava cake. They infuse few other fruits along with Guava both in to the cake and also in to the icing. By chance I had it in another birthday party and decided Guava cake it is! I picked a butterfly cake picture from the internet and asked this bakery to pretty much copy it. So cake was done.

Food was going to be simple – order pizza, make couple of appetizers and bow tie pasta at home. I also baked some butterfly shaped cookies as return gifts.

…EXECUTION…

Planning done. Supplies bought. Cooking completed. Things packed. Guest arrived. Kids ran wild. Cake cut. Small talk made. My younger one painted every single plain sheet of paper she could get hold of. At any given point of time the older one was found jumping/smiling/running/rolling from various locations! So were the other kids.

…HIGHLIGHTS…

The one birthday I decide no gifts, our family was gifted with the best gift any one could ever wish for. As an added bonus, it was a surprise! What more can one ask for?! Few friends made an audio CD with the voices of their little ones – all wishing my Chula a happy birthday. While the party was in progress, they played it in the CD player for all of us to hear. The puzzle was for me to match the voice with the cutie pie. I spent the day after the party playing and replaying the CD, figuring out the puzzle. It was lots of fun.

There were special wishes for Chula, from you all in ‘Circle Of Happiness’ and in my comment space. Thanks a bunch guys.

Cake was A-mazing. People had thirds and fourths. At 10.00PM, I was sitting on our couch, busily licking the whipped cream from the cake board and was certain that come next morning 10.0AM, I was going to the bakery and get a 6 inch round Guava cake all for myself.

…INTERESTING…

The parents were okay with the ‘no gift’ clause. But the kids were uncomfortable. I was told that the minute they heard the words birthday party uttered, they declared, ‘Wow, I want to go. I want to take a NICE gift for Chula’. Apparently the little ones were not quite happy that there would be no gifts. They insisted that they bring something to give birthday girl and Chula received a Kit Kat, a box of cookies, plenty of birthday cards and a cute little hand painted wooden butterfly!!

…AND SOME PICTURES…

…AND RECIPES…

Barnyard Dance by Sandra Boynton
Suggested read alone ages 4-7
Suggested read together ages 0-4

This review was written for SaffronTree.

Sandra Boynton, the author and the illustrator of this amusing book, portrays goofy-looking farm animals, square dancing with a lot of bowing and twirling. Throw in rhymes like,

Bounce with the bunny,
Strut with the duck
Spin with the chickens now
CLUCK CLUCK CLUCK!

Whats not to like in a book like this?!

This book is super hit at home turf and has been successfully holding its position as ‘one of the favorites’ for the past two years! Even the musically-challenged-me can make a decent song out of the catchy rhyming verses. Now I know the content by heart and when ever I start off ‘Stomp your feet, clap your hands, every body get ready for a barn yard dance….’ my children start bouncing with uncontainable glee!

Sandra Boynton brings out a mood of merriment with not just the rhymes but also with her illustrations. Plump hens dancing with eyes closed in total involvement, horses and donkeys slow dancing, the little chicks running around with confused expressions on their faces – all illustrated in simple cheerful line drawings.

Check out Sandra Boynton’s official website to get a flavor of her drawing style and her sense of humor.

Barnyard Dance is featured in Sandra Boynton’s music album The Rhinoceros Tap. Check out song #10 to get a flavor of the music and the rhyme.

Other:This book is the winner of the 1994 Gold Medal from the National Parenting Publications Award.

Ahem…..aaaa….. Hmmmp…..Uuuummmmm…….I don’t know…….Lifting eye brows….Shaking head….looking listlessly at the ceiling……
Never had so much starting trouble since my communication theory paper. Seriously.

I have always considered the my wedding very unromantic and typical. The thought only aggravated after reading all the engagement mush that circulated on the blogs. The Green Sulk Club was formed. For more details about GSC, our history, motto, how to apply for membership and point of contact, please read Tharini’s introduction.

There I was busily sulking away and Dotmom tags me on the engagement story. Quite frankly there isn’t much to write about. The horoscopes matched, my elder SIL dropped by one evening to see me, after the seal of approval was issued, boy meets girl, gets engaged and they get married after eight months. I tried my best to get out of the tag, but DotMom was relentless. She wanted me to write about the most mushiest momemt of our married life. I discussed with the co-members of Green Sulk Club and we decided to take up this tag. Tharini requested I write a little bit about the engagement. So here is the typical south indian engagement story and the mushes after that.

On the D-day (May 21, 1998) R came with my MIL, his two sisters and their husbands. A very cozy affair with 6 people from R’s family and only the immediate family from my side. I was wearing a salwar, which was ‘noted’ and ‘mentioned accidentally’ on a much later date . Some one in the audience suggested that the bride-to-be and the groom-to-be talk privately for a few minutes. I had anticipated this and had cleaned up my room on the earlier part of the day. But the privacy the majority had in mind and managed to give us was, R and self sitting in the living room and the rest of them sitting in the dinning area keeping and eye (and an ear) on us.

R asked me what I think about the wedding and I replied something insane like, ‘If it is okay by my father, I am okay with it.’ (Blaaahhhh, I have never been the person who come up with intelligent answers on the spot. 24 hrs later I would have the best quip, best answer to any question. But the moment would have long gone!). The engagement was to be conducted on May 29, 1998. A few minutes after R and his family stepped out of the house, our telephone line went dead. So our chance of us catching up over the phone went down the drain. During the numerous visits my father made to their house in planning the engagement details, a request was placed to my father, asking his permission to take me with them (R, his two sisters, mother, four nieces and nephews) to the tamil movie Jeans. My father promptly refused saying that it is not appropriate since we weren’t even engaged. God, I don’t know why he did that?!

In the 8 months of post engagement time, there was the biweekly phone calls. But hubby’s voice kind of wanes after sometime and I for the fear of being pronounced as ‘hearing impaired’ if I ask him to speak up every five minutes, settled in to a pattern of ‘Oh – okay – ahha – ooooh’ at periodic intervals. Long story short, I am still discovering all the things I said ‘yes’ to. Hmm, the letter…I must mention the letter. I used to send him pictures through snail mail and one of his snail mail replies was 10 pages, double sided, hand written with about 15 lines per page. That letter is one of its kind, still puts a smile on my face. Now a days it is mostly one line emails – ‘Refinance done’, ‘Are we attending this b’day party?’, ‘pick up diapers from Costco’.

What made it trickier was that hubby reads my blogs and is not too keen about me writing personal details on my blog. After reading my tag posts about My quirks, My dreams, Middle Name Tag etc he commented that off late my posts have become ‘too weird’. I became defensive and of course we had a fight. If he objects personal details about the kids or myself, I could brush it off, but if it is something that involves him, I have to be civil enough to accept his feelings about it. Right?! So I enlisted his help.

Me: R, there is this tag about the most mushiest moment in our 8 years of married life. What do you think it is?
He: Ummm. What do YOU think it is?
Me: I can’t think of any.
He: Ooohooo. You mean we don’t have any? Okay I want it mentioned in bold, big fonts in your blog that, ‘We have two kids and still feel there is not even a single mushy moment in 8 years’.
(Here it is R, it is mentioned. I am a lady of my words.)
Me: Don’t digress. What do you think is the most mushiest moment? I asked you first.
He: What about the time I swept you off your feet when I took you to that French restaurant? Wasn’t that romantic? We ordered soufflé and we had fun. Right?
Me: (Desparately trying to recall the French restaurant) Ummmmm….Okay next.
He: Next–a? What about the top of the Eiffel tower?
Me: Naaaahhh.
He: What about the first time we met?
Me: Che che. (After a minute, my face brightening up). Oh, so WHAT did you think the first time you saw me?
He: No. That moment is gone. Nothing. What about it? You are imagining things that I didn’t say.

Truth is we both had some memories under the ‘romantic’ tab, but they were so different that will make a neutral third party observer to suspect that we are not married to each other.

From my memory, I have few significant instances. The one most, utterly, incredibly nice thing he did for me was hike with me up the Kilimanjaro. I like to travel. If I make plans to visit a place, I like to do a extensive trip under the following two assumptions: (1)The world is going to be destroyed and I simply HAVE to see every inch of this place. (2)Okay the world is not going to be destroyed, but this would be my first and last trip to this place and I simply HAVE to see very inch of it. According to hubby I have the special power to turn a vacation in to a hectic ordeal, after which he needs to take a vacation (without me, of course) to recover from the first vacation. I some how managed to convince him to go for an African safari. For reasons unfathomable I felt we had to do the Kili hike. I put my fundas, convinced hubby and roped him in. Now, hubby likes certain things, relaxed sleep in a warm and cozy bed, his morning coffee, reading his news paper sipping his coffee, simple and healthy but good food, a long jog/run, doing things around the garden, if possible a nice afternoon nap, watch some silly stuff on TV. He is a creature of habit, we are talking about a person who had the same cereal for 4 years, every single day in the morning! He threw all that out of the window. He trained for months, took vaccines, medication for altitude sickness, drank water from streams in which we added chlorine tablets to kill germs, ate what was put on the plate, woke up at insane hours in the morning to start the hike, walked with me enduring my instructions and at times alone, slept in the A-huts along the Marangu route with three layers of clothing to escape the biting cold and frost…..beeeecaaaause, I wanted to do it. All this, for ME.

Right after surgery, I was lying in post-op busily sulking away, filling up my mind with as much negative emotions as possible. The one thought that stabilized me was ‘what hubby would do all alone?’. Then I started thinking that we need to be there for each other which led to the thought that ‘this too shall pass’ -> we may never have children, but we for sure have a purpose in life -> how can I leave without knowing my purpose? Convalescing at home, I would wait all day for him to come back from work and crash on the couch with him. Kind of felt right.

If I am the ship that wants/tends to wander away, he is always the lighthouse. The ship has never thanked the lighthouse(never will in direct words, read between the lines R and thats it ), in fact most of the time thinks that the light house ropes her in from all the wonderful adventures the mystic sea has to offer. Our characters and personalities are as different as the ship and the lighthouse – one in water, ever dancing, going up and down with every wave, always wanting to move and fluid – the other firmly rooted on land, unrelenting, not bothered by the lashing waves, but always there. But they belong to each other.

…..this is just in the past month. Sure more are to come up in the near future

Thing 1 – I am taking short video clips of Chula and Mieja playing using my digital camera. Chula suddenly walks to position herself behind the camera.

Chula: Amma, where is Chula?
Me: Right here. (Pointing to her)
Chula: No. Where is Chula(Pointing to the camera’s display). I want to see Chula.
Me: If you are here(pointing behind the camera), you cannot see yourself here(pointing to display)

**Chula is confused.**

Me: OK, if you need to be seen (in the display) you need to stand in front on the camera.

Chula walks to the front of the camera and demands the camera to be turned 180 degree and show her in the display.

Well…that explanation was a disaster. Any one in same situation and done a better job?

Thing 2: She is now in to the gender labeling phase. She barely knows that there are two sexes – male and female. Barely because she knows the social construct of gender, what society wants a gender to be. She has no clue about the biological classification. (Interesting that she got the social generalization even before the biological universality. Okay digression alert..!) She kind of knows that only living objects can be male or female – it is the case in both the languages (English and Tamil) she is used to. But her perception of female is long hair and beautiful. So she looks at a lion with all his mane and splendor and yells, ‘Amma lion’. She thinks a peacock is a girl and peahen is a boy. When I try to explain she firmly says, ‘No this is amma(pointing to lion/peacock), this is appa(pointing to lioness/peahen)’ and walks away signaling that the topic is closed. In the same lines she thinks that her sardar classmate’s father is the boys mother. Every time the father walks in to the classroom to pick up his son, she runs to him with the welcome slogan, ‘Hello A’s mommieeee….’ and does the courtesy of announcing to A that his ‘mommy’ is here. Of course, I am all red and embarrassed! At home, all explanations about A’s mommy is actually his daddy is meted out with a firm, ‘That IS A’s mommy. A’s mommy has hair up just like you after you clean and wash your hair amma’.

Ever since the last mishap Mieja has been doing really good. She has picked up a lot of new words. We understand only a hand full of them, but she is expanding her vocabulary.

After a while we decoded a few difficult ones

Hichi – High chair.
When we didn’t get it, she just pointed to the high chair.

Uppun – Up
Want to go up, like climb on a chair or couch. One fine day she got tired of saying UPPUN and the idiot mother trying to OPEN everything in her vicinity, she simply climbed up the dining table chair, turned facing the mother and said UPPUN. Well, another milestone here – climbed on something all by herself.

Thakadil – Crocodile
She watches national geographic videos with her sister. Last Saturday, in the mall, she pointed to the La Coste showroom and kept repeating THAKADHIL again and again and again. Simply too cute.

Aaachich – Ostrich, Cheecha – Cheeta, Sheepuaa – ZebraCourtesy – National Geographic.

She points to elephant, hippo, rhino, buffalo…all heavy set animals and goes ‘Maammi maammi maammi maammi…..’ I don’t know if this is an insult hurled at me!

Fly – Butterfly.
There was this phase after Halloween she wanted me to sing the butterfly song 24X7. She would dance and smile to this song.

Aaat – Heart, Ovee – Oval
She can recognize some shapes.

Thuthi – Cookie.
Following her big sister’s foot steps, she is now in to imaginary cooking. So after getting tired of scratching the ever silver utensils on the stone tile floor and making every hair in my body stand up, she picks up a plate and walks around the house offering THUTHI to every one.

Thoothi – Thooki (Meaning: Lift me up)
She says THOOTHI and extends both her arms. When I lift her, she swings her legs, adjusts her tush and settles well on my hip. If I had obliged her request without any delay, she flashes a wide smile at me and throws her hands around my neck. If for some reason there was considerate time delay between the request and the lifting, she purses her lips and pulls my hair.

Eat – Eat
When she wants some dry cereal in a bowl, she first says EAT. If my response time is slow, she picks up a plastic bowl, drags me to the place where we keep cereal, points to the cereal box, then says ‘AAAA’ points almost to the back of her throat, then to the bowl and says EAT. Any thing I give her to eat at this point, I end up collecting from various parts of the house, through out the rest of the day.

Akka – Akka (meaning: Big sister)
She calls her big sister Akka.

Shayiee – Sorry
Mostly to inanimate objects just like her sister used to do. But sometimes she uses it in context to Chula, like when she has accidentally(??) knocked down Chula’s Lego blocks or accidentally(???) grabbed Chula’s hair or accidentally(????) pinched Chula. That too the sorry comes with an expression that says, ‘OMG, did that pinch hurt? I never realized that it would. I am so sorry and will never ever do something like that in my life again’.

Name
She can tell her name and screams her name whenever she sees her picture or her reflection.

Numbers
She goes ONE, TOO, THEE……and starts singing the song ‘Thee, thee, thee’ from Shivaji wildly shaking her tush. She can count up to twelve. This rare feat I have witnessed only a handful of times, but her day care provider says that Mieja counts to twelve in English and Spanish with ease. The first time she said 1-10, I nearly fell down from my chair. She was hardly speaking, just out of the screaming phase and she starts counting?!

Pepi – Baby
She points to kids younger than her and says PEPI. My friend was staying with us for 10 days and Mieja wouldn’t let her 6 months old son in peace. She sat next to him trying to poke his eyes, put her finger in to his nose or mouth, rocking his car seat trying to make him sleep all the time yelling PEPI, PEPI, PEPI…

Peepul – Paper

A Bheembo – ??
Well this sounds a lot like ‘Bheemboy bheemboy, andha aaru lakshathai yeduthu yindha Avinasi naai moonjil viteri…’ Bheemboy from Michael Madana Kama Rajan. Still trying to debug by trial/error/elimination. Yesterday she pointed to the dustpan and said BHEEMBO. I was about to shout hurray, but she also pointed to random, in no way related to dust pan objects and said BHEEMBO. So I am trying to figure out if BHEEMBO is a verb/adverb/adjective/noun.

How can I forget ‘A’?
A as in the article ‘a’. Everything in her world is a pepi, a peepul, a bheemboo. Very rarely a word is uttered with the article. I could say she is very articulate!