Since this is a mommy blog, I have to write about the kids, even if it is once in four months.

Chula, all of a sudden looks so grown up. She is all of her 6.5 years and a little more, if you ask me. The danger in this is, I start thinking of her as an adult and start developing adult level expectations and she has to grow up, even more than she is currently, in order to catch up! Constantly reevaluating every scenario and breaking this cycle has been my prominent job for the past one year.

She has certainly departed from the ‘child’ category, but yet to arrive as a ‘girl’. In this journey, she is opening her mind and assimilating the world, thanks to the zillion-gazillion books she is devouring, eyes that are constantly observing and ears that are always listening.

Parents have been aware of the phenomenon of adolescence for ages now. Even terrible twos get noticed by parents, thanks to the child. But the flux children get caught while moving from what Dr.Montessori would call the ‘absorbent mind’ to ‘concrete thinking’ does not get the attention it deserves. From the parents point of view, first comes the monumental process of child birth. You don’t even get time to count all the toes and fingers and feel confident about the health of the offspring, you have to jump head first in to understanding a newborn’s needs and establishing a pattern that works. You take a breather and terrible twos is staring you in your face, which quite frankly is a misnomer, because we all know that terrible twos starts before two and drags on till four! Through out this phase we input values, family and personal, observe the outcome and keep tweaking the limits till we have a self propagating control system. By the time the child is six we start thinking about curriculum, extra-curricular activities, schedules, the poor second born, if any and such. So the transition  from child to girl/boy gets least notice, even if the parent notices it, since this transition is mostly inward, they pretend that it does not exist and do not want to deal with it.

I get some clues to what Chula is thinking. Of her most recent fascinations – namely poverty, pain, meanness, good and bad, kindness etc, the top priority goes to jail. Do children even go to jail? Why? Why would some one want to punish children? Are there even children capable of committing punishable offenses? Baby girl, I will tell you the truth and promise to answer your questions, but when you ask me, ‘But….amma…..if I don’t put my seat belt on, YOU are the one going to jail. Right???’, it scares me a little.

By now it is clear to me that she has a very broad sense of time. I think this is it. It is not going to change and I can either deal with it or try and make her perfect. While I understand that she gets it from me, it is annoying to have two such people living under the same roof. Half the battles between me and Chula is because of the clock. She is constantly taking her own sweet time to do things and I am constantly micromanaging her. It is chaos and friends will vouch to that!

Her clarity of thoughts amazes me at times. The other day she told me, ‘Not because I like you amma, because I love you amma.’ One of the drives back home, she requested for Enthiran songs and I replied, ‘The iPod is in shuffle mode and one of these songs will be an Enthiran song. I cannot drive and DJ.’ The reply she gave me for that, ‘Amma, there are 7 songs in Enthiran. There are 273 songs in your iPod. So 7 out of 273 will be from Enthiran’. I did not make a squeak after that.

After Chula was born, I learnt the art of giving choices. If I put my mind to it, I can give a child choices and still get the exact results I want. But now Chula is in a stage where she wants a role in coming up with the choices. She wants to be more involved in me parenting her. My choices are to either try figuring out how a child can parent herself or learn this new art without any manual what so ever. Sigh.

Her sense of humor is developing really well 🙂

Mieja…..

Her current thing is to yell, ‘Don’t talk about me’, on the occasions I narrate something adorable she did/said. So here I am, writing about her.

She is still asking cyclic questions. Now her cyclic questions are scientific. Need I say that I have completely lost my hair?

We watched The Oscars and the poor child sat patiently asking, ‘Is this Oscar?’ for every human being she set her eyes on.

She likes school and she hates school. When ever she whines to me that she does not like school, I insist that she has to go to school to learn things and she makes it in to another of her famous cyclic conversations. On a particular day she went on a walk with YaadaaYaadaa, picked a dandelion and made a wish, ‘I do not want to go to school. Ever, never, never, ever in my life again. I want to stay home all days. All 8 days of the week.’ See! Case in point for me.

We were going for R’s colleague’s son’s birthday party. YaadaaYaadaa asked her, if she knows the child from school/dance class/tamil class/swim class. The answer was, ‘YY aunty, you don’t come to my school. You are not my teacher. You don’t come to my tamil class or my swim class. But I know you right? That same way, I know this child.’ People, I have to say there are V.E.R.Y few occasions in which YY has been rendered speechless, any one who has know her will vouch for that. This was one such occasion.

Her favorite thing to do while riding in the car is to play games with me. So far name, place, animal thing; find the odd man out are super hits.

This 5 year old is forced to constantly catch up with her 6.5 year old sister. Sometimes I have to physically stop her from doing that.

The MPDs….how can I forget this? She has 3 different personalities. Bawawdi the cat – she licks you, holds your leg, meows and pretends she cannot talk English. Gaggiga the baby elephant – she hits you with her trunk and crawls on the floor. Diggie the dog – she barks and bites. Her big sister is her owner.

Finally a joke from Mieja, of course she got it from a book, but I was surprised she understood it.
WHAT IS A MUMMY’s FAVORITE MUSIC?
Wrap music.

Until later….