Hello, hello , hello. I just have to take matters in my own hands, otherwise things never get done. Never, like in N.E.V.E.R.

Dear readers, I am 22 months old. My amma often forgets this. She is either stuck at me being 10 months old(and treats me that way, which I totally hate) or thinks that I am already two and a half, nothing in between for her.

I like to think of my self as a mischievous little monkey, like the Kapish in Twinkle or Meera monkey from Karadi Tales. My mischief will not make you mad, but will make you hug me tight and plant kisses on my chubby cheeks. Okay, just not kisses, I also love it you blow raspberries.

A sample of my mischief. The other day I was in the library with appa (father) and akka (elder sister). Appa was checking out some books. Akka was standing next to appa, with a mesmerized look( oh, she always gets that look when she sees books) on her face. I tried calling appa a few times and he continued focusing on checking out the books with an occasional ‘Hm’. I like to be given full attention, so what do I do? Do I roll on the floor and cry. Nah, that is so old school. I just pull Chula’s pants down to her knees and run away. That got your attention, right appa? (Sorry Chula, you were just collateral damage. Don’t take it personally, okay?) Amma couldn’t control her laughter when she heard about this, but she also secretly made a mental note, never to wear sweats when I am around. I could see that in her eyes.

You have all heard about my scream-mication (screaming to communicate). Though, I occasionally scream to inflict the right amount of terror in my parents, I have come a long way. I talk!….full sentences,….and…..*drumroll*…… make conversations over the phone * *. Last week amma was changing my diaper and was talking to patti(grand mom) over the phone. I grabbed the phone from amma and said, ‘Patti, Mieja diapuul. Numeel four diapuul. Mickey moose diapuul.’ (Grand mom, I am wearing number four mickey mouse diaper.)

I am still a very persistent child. I like my mother’s school folder and cell phone. But amma makes a big fuss. Honestly I don’t see why? Amma any ways drops her cellphone, like a 100 times. Whats the big deal if I drop it a couple of times? Regarding her school notes, I was just trying to add a child’s perspective to her assignments on child development. Any ways, she over reacts, as usual, puts the stuff away, carries me, sings and dances and tickles me. This charade goes on for 30 min and I play along. After amma is done I go back to the place where I last found the object that attracted me and look for it. I give amma that famous smile of mine, extend my hands and say, ‘thaaka’(thaanga, which means ‘give’ in english). If I sense that it is that amma means business, I add a ‘peesee’(please) to the ‘thaaka’. It is so irresistible that amma almost caves.

I am a picky eater, just like my sister. But Chula gets easily distracted if amma reads books, but not me. If I says no, then it means N.O. You can sing, dance, read books, switch the TV on, it is still N.O. Amma failed to get the message, so I drilled it home by throwing the bowl of food at the wall couple of times. Now she doesn’t even try.

I love to dance. Especially for ‘thee, thee, thee, chakka joey joey’ or ‘vaadi vaadi cd‘. There is nothing like putting on a skirt and doing my famous dabanguthu moves. My other favorite songs are the Indian rhymes for Indian kids from Karadi tales.

I like singing too. My favorite used to be ‘Jinkuwawe, Jinkuwawe, Jinku-Waaa-Weh’(Jingle bells, jingle bells jingle all the way). Last Christmas Chula sang this song in her school performance (which was conducted in the church close to Chula’s montessori school). I tried joining the chorus, but amma shushed me so hard that I stopped singing. But me being the productive person, that I am, I had to do something. So I picked up an application for membership to The Central Church of Christ from the pew and filled it up. Still waiting to hear from them if I got in to the church.

Sometimes my love for singing transcends the time factor. I wake up at the wee hours of morning (5.00AM) and sing at the top of my voice, ‘Isabella, Isabella, ISABELLA……Alara, Alara, ALARA’* and wake up all the sleepy heads in my house.

Though I like my sister when she gets all dressed up, I hug her and kiss her all over her face, I consider the few minutes before bath time as a special bonding time between us. Amma takes off all my clothes except my diaper, I run to Chula demanding that she strips down to her underpants and we make circles around the house, Chula singing, ‘5 little ducks ran up one day, over the hills and far away…..’ and run behind her shouting, ‘duckie akka, duckie akka.’

Okay, that’s a long time sitting in one place. Got to go and do some mischief. See yaa later.

Runs off singing,

‘Monkeys, we are the monkeys.
We like to sing, we like to jump
We like to romp around……’

* - At Chula’s school, they have a cool routine at circle time. They call every child’s name with music from keyboard starting from the lowest note to the highest note. This introduces the differences in the ‘do-re-mi-fa-so-la-to-do’ notes. Mieja listens to Chula singing this song at home and repeats it often.

Discussion I
Background information: I am now in the process of motivating Chula to eat well. So I picked up books from library on nutrition. The food pyramid, 5 serving of fruits and veggies, 16-24 oz dairy…the whole works.

Me: Do you see what the book says? We have to drink two cups of milk a day. That make your bones happy. Otherwise your bones will break. Ok?
Chula: Ok amma.
Me: (Trying to quiz her) What happens if you drink two cups of milk every day?
Chula: Your bones will break.

Discussion II
Background information: I am driving Chula to school and we pass a recycle truck.

Chula: Amma, is that garbage truck?
Me: Looks just like the garbage truck-huh? Do you see that the truck is green in color? That means that it is a recycle truck. The things that can be recycled goes in to the green recycle truck.
Chula: Ok, green garbage truck.
Me: No kannamma. We don’t put garbage in to this truck. We put things like paper, bottles and milk cans in to this truck. This is a recycle truck. (Quizzing her), what are the things that can be recycled?
Chula: Trucks, green color, garbage, dinosaurs, elephants, lions, my baby sister, diapers… Did you know that my friend D bought a cupcake for lunch? Lunch bag, white car, orange car. I play with R on February too. Crayons, big giant TV …Let us just say that this went on for the whole 7 minute drive to school.

Discussion III
Background information: Hubby is trying to give Chula lesson in oral hygiene.

Hubby: You have to brush your teeth properly. Otherwise you will get poochi(roughly translated to insects) in your mouth.

{From the next day onwards, Chula refuses to open her mouth claiming that she has lady bugs and butterflies in her mouth.}

Chula: I have lady bug in my mouth amma. No brush, no paste. I don’t want no more poochi to get in to my mouth

PS: This happened almost three months ago. Now Chula is an expert in brushing her teeth. She has a bit of starting trouble, but once she starts she does an awesome job.

Discussion IV
Background information: A discussion about (Boo’s) Ashu came up when I was getting the children ready for bed tonight.

Chula: What is Ashu’s thatha’s name?
{I tell her the name.}
Chula: What is Ashu’s patti’s name?
{I tell her the name.}
Then there was a sudden light bulb in my head and I thought that this might be a good way to introduce many to many relationship.
Me: Hey, guess what? Ashu’s thatha and patti are Yaadayaada aunty’s appa and amma.
Chula: Huh?
Me: Yeah!
Chula: No, Ashu’s thatha patti are Yaadayaada aunty’s thatha and patti.
Me: No. No. No. {Begin a complex lecture on relationships and how many people are can be related to many more people}…..
Chula: Amma, stop. I know. Ashu’s patti is Yaadayaada aunty’s amma and Ashu’s thatha is V uncle’s appa.
Me: No
Chula: {Cuts me off my placing her palm on my mouth}, I think it is time to sleep.

Discussion V
Background information: The contents of the lunch box is pretty much the same at the end of the day, a very irritated me.

Me: Chula, what did you do during lunch?
Chula: I was talking to A. {Smiles so wide that her ears are about to fall off her head.}
Me: Talking? You are supposed to eat at lunchtime, not talk.

{Taking time off and counting to 10, to control myself. Hey, some of her teachers were watching, I didn’t want to blow my top in front of them }

Me: {in a sarcastic tone}What did you talk about, that was so important and made you miss your lunch?
Chula: Peace.
Me: Huh?!
Chula: {in a matter of fact tone}World peace amma.

Okay, for the past year I have been reading about bloggers meeting (here, here, here and here). The whole excitement behind such a meet is people who have met online and have formed a mental picture of a person, meeting in person. Then the actual image is cross checked with the mental picture and necessary corrections are made. Some times people hit it off in person too.

We had a different kind of meet yesterday. People who have been friends and are blogging now met at my place for dinner. Yaadayaada, Boo, Sundar, DDMom. Valleyblogzine had to cancel out in the last minute, otherwise we would have been a grand number of six. We hobnobbed and gossiped over blog world happenings over a scrumptious dinner (for which I cannot take any credit!). People offered to bring food and I ended up making just the appetizer and dessert.

The highlights of the meet:

Oh, BTW, we are having another meet next week!

For original source of recipe, click here.

My variations and story behind the recipe click here.

Chk out the recipe here.

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.