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.