Theorem I
The number of ‘NO’s a mother says to her child is directly proportional to (the personality of the child + life experiences of the mother).

Theorem II
In a particular house, the number of ‘NO’s a child hears is always a constant. This is irrespective of the birth order.

In order to spare the readers with the details, if I can describe myself in one word, while Chula was a wee little baby – HITLER.

But the second baby was such an eye opener. I learnt from my previous experience that there is absolutely no need to freak out. Mieja has lot more degree of freedom(from me) when compared to Chula. I really started thinking before I uttered the word ‘NO’. But when I said no it was a NO in 72 point, bold, underline, no matter the tears, tanrums, screaming. End of discussion. Case closed.

I learnt from experience that every single runny nose does not warrant a trip to the doctor. A trip to a restaurant can happen with out feeding the baby in the house/ packing food for the baby for hygiene purposes. If I don’t use Purell/anti bacterial wipes the world does not come to a grinding halt. The equation, ‘baby skipping afternoon nap one day = falling asleep in the evening = baby staying up well past midnight = baby with poor sleeping habits for the rest of her life’ exists only in the minds of a paranoid mother. Which lead me to write theorem I.

So you would assume that Mieja hears lesser number of ‘NO’s right? Wrong. There is this micro managing elder sister on her tail, observing her like a hawk.

NO baby, you can’t do that.
NO baby, you can’t touch that.
NO baby, it is not okay.
NO that is mine. Put that back.
NO baby that is not acceptable.
NO, come out of the room.
NO, NO, NO, NO……….

Which lead me to form theorem II 🙂

Tharini started a tag on nicks. I took it up, but didn’t come up with anything ground breaking.

Of late, Chula has been using lots of nicks with us.

Her favorite is to call herself Cinderella, her sister Snow White and me witch. Thanks girl, I just feel so fulfilled.

She was gifted with a set of Strawberry Shortcake books for her first birthday. Over the two years, she has grown quite attached to the books and the characters in the book. She likes to think of herself as Strawberry Shortcake. So she has named the rest of us at home around the other characters. Her sister’s name is Apple Dumpling, I am Angel Cake, her father is Huckleberry Pie and my amma is Ginger Snap. In short we are Strawberry, Apple, Angel, Pie and Ginger.

Today morning she delivered the ‘cherry of all nicks’. She called her sister, ‘my dear baby compost’ and I am all like, ‘Huh? Did you just call your sister compost?’. Apparently I heard her right and she was even able to give the correct meaning for compost. Now, why on Earth?

PART 2 OF 2.

Find part1 here.

But if I rationally analyze the habit, it is only 30 minutes a day and they are exposed to age appropriate contents. The way I see it, TV and the Internet have become necessary evils in the modern world. The children are definitely going to be exposed to these mediums. I could either keep the children shielded and in the process shock them or give them the impression that they have to do things behind my back. So we like it this way in our house.

Anyways, now my amma is here with us and she has introduced her flavor to YouTube contents. The children watch old tamil cinema songs. They seem to like the songs in which there are kids dancing/jumping or songs with animals.

But YouTube is scary. We screen the contents completely before we show it to Chula and Mieja. This lesson I learnt the very first day while I was searching for jungle book video. Just because the title says Jungle Book, don’t trust the contents to be clean and child appropriate. The first click I landed from the search happened to have the title or a song dubbed over the original songs, ‘Jungle Book, how a bear molests a boy’…something like that. The second one I landed on was ‘Jungle book meets the saw’ where the animals were subjected to lot of violence. Even I got a little scared.

Without further ado, top hits at home,

Varavu Ettana, Selavu Pathana – Bhama Vijayam

It is sooo funny to see the two year old Mieja singing, ‘Kanniyaraga vazhanum yendraal pillagal yedtharkaga? Kaadhal seitha pavathukkaga, vere yedhuthaga?’ (Q:If you wanted to live a no strings attached life style, why did you have children? A:That is the curse of love making.) It is still in the stage where the adults find it cute. The fact that she does not have a clue about what she is singing adds to the cute factor. The little devil is such a joker. She knows this will make us laugh, so she uses this when she wants a laugh from us. She does something totally naughty, I am steaming, getting ready to unload a lecture and she would hit me with this song. Manipulatress.

Kanna Varuvaan, Kathai Solluvaan

Oodi Oodi Uzhaikanum, Aagattumda Thambi Raaja – Nalla Neram

Do I need to spell out the attraction in this song? The elephants and of course MGR with his orange kurta and orange payjama 🙂

Chella Pillaigalam – Yenga Mama

Nila Kaikirathu, Acham Acham Yillai – Indira

Anjali, Anjali, Anjali – Anjali

Natha Vinothangal – Salangai Oli

Janani, Janani – Thai mookambikai

Kurai Ondrum Yillai

Bhaja Govindam

A sample of Chula singing tamil songs.
Agattumda Thambi Raaja

Kanna Varuvaan

Kurai

And this is Mieja singing…
Varau Kannan

Saa Sing Nila

PART 1 OF 2

We have a giant monstrosity of a TV sitting in our living room. Our old 27 inch Sony is a trooper. Even after 12 years it is in perfect working condition. There was no need to upgrade. But the husband works in the field of Digital Video Technology and wanted a cool new TV. The guy hardly splurges on anything for himself, so I had no problems welcoming the TV with open arms.

Now, I am not a big TV watcher. When I was new to this country, most of the afternoons were spent in front of the TV. Then it came down to one sitcom a day and few movies over the week. Slowly over the three years other things started displacing TV time. Finally on the days, I do sit down to watch a movie, after the first 15 minutes, the TV is watching me. I am happily suspended in dreams lulled by the TV’s white noise.

The kids, used to watch PBS while we shoved food in to their mouth. At least that’s what Chula did. Now, Mieja being Mieja, NOTHING works with her. She would still watch TV without bating an eyelid and her hand would automatically swat the spoon that comes close to her. (I have a theory about her absorbing nutrients directly from air. Let me not digress.) Just around the time our ‘big giant TV’ entered our home, I was considering my options. For one thing I did not want to turn the TV on during every meal. The main reason is the amount of electricity it sucked. The second reason, I felt that the TV was simply too big. The children were getting mesmerized by the effect the big screen created and I could almost see squiggly, swirly lines in their eyes. I simply didn’t like what I saw. The third reason, if at all they watched something, I wanted them to watch something in their mother tongue. So I switched the kids to eating in the kitchen, while I read books. The children adapted well..err…Mieja was still swatting spoons, but hey it didn’t get any worse right?

But by the end of the day, I didn’t have the energy to work hard. So YouTube was introduced in to their world. I even remember how it all started. November 2007, Chula’s school had taken all the children to a special screening of The Jungle Book. I was very curious about Chula’s reaction to the experience. But the dame can be so tight mouthed. Even after endless pestering she only managed to say, ‘Yes’, ‘No’, ‘Uh-uh’. So I looked for jungle book clips in YouTube and showed it to the children, just to make Chula talk. Mieja was immediately hooked on. Then came a phase where we watched lots of Tamil rhymes on Youtube. Within a week the children memorized all the rhymes. They were greatly kicked when I was able to dig out some of their favorite books on video, so was I. Then came a phase where they started making specific requests on what they want to watch. The situation now got very interesting, because the computer had just replaced TV!

…Continued soon…

Photo courtesy Amazon.

Author/Illustrator: DAVID WIESNER
Recommended Age group: 2 and up. You are limited only by your imagination!
Caldecott Award: 2007

This review is cross posted at Saffron Tree.

I have been reading children’s books for the past three years. The main things I consider while picking out a book are message and language development. For people like me, books like Flotsam are eye openers. This is a wordless picture book and I REALLY noticed the pictures, the effort the author has put in to the pictures in order to convey the message and was simply astounded. The medium Wiesner uses is watercolor. Every seashell is meticulously drawn. The use of lines and the play of light are so wonderful that one can almost feel its texture. The colors are pleasing to young children making the children focus on the story without overly stimulating them. The placement of pictures also plays a major role in story telling in this wordless storybook.

Wiesner’s message through his books – magical things are happening all around us, anything can happen anywhere, do not limit your imagination/dreams and never loose hope on your dreams becoming true(Digression: Check out Wiesner’s 1992 Caldecott Medal book TUESDAY. It talks about the dream of frogs coming true. Any one, even frogs can dream and you never know it might just come true! Keep dreaming, it keeps you alive!).

Flotsam is a story in which a boy finds an underwater camera in a beach, washed ashore by the waves. The boy is not able to find the owners of the camera and decides to develop the pictures from the film in the camera. When he looks at the developed pictures, a whole new world is thrown wide open to him. From now on it is a fantasy journey not only for the boy but also to the readers. The older readers who know about the functioning of a ‘real world’ stare open eyed at the mechanical fishes swimming along side the real ones, a family of octopus sitting on a couch reading a book, puffed up puffer fish acting like a hot air balloon, gigantic sea turtles with a whole city on their shell and star fishes of colossal size – that make grey whales look tiny, housing an entire island on them. That’s not where the surprise ends, one has to read the book to find out the final surprise!

It was so surprising how different the adult mind works when compared to a child’s mind. I am trying to make some sense of the pictures, and this is exactly how my brain went:
A key wound mechanical fish?!
What do I say if the children ask me to explain this?
May be I can say that this is a marine experiment and the biologists are observing patterns about this school of fish.
Whaaaat? A family of octopus sitting on a couch and reading books?
Aahhha! I see a moving container capsized behind the octopus and the couch must have fallen out of the container. The octopus just happened to sit on it.
What now? Puffer fish flying??? Okay I give up. There is no way in hell I can explain this….

And guess what questions I had to answer? ‘What is the boy’s name?’, ‘Ammaaaa, hermit crab eyes popping out of his head? That’s so silly[they put their index fingers on their fore heads and start doing a hermit crab routine. They even came with a voice for the hermit crab]’, ‘The boy has two shovels, one blue and one red. Can I have two shovels?’, ‘Can we put fish on our couch?’. They just surrendered to the story line and digested everything! Gosh, why did I even worry about flying fish and floating aliens? Their open mindedness, amazes me.

There was a lot of language involved. By the time we finished reading this book, the boy had a name, ‘Geeg’ (please don’t ask me why, I did not name him). When he looks through a ring, his eyes become bigger(Errr.. in the book the boy is looking at a crab through a magnifying glass and Wiesner has painted it from the perspective of some one observing the boy. So you can see normal right eye and part of left eye through the magnifying lens). He is playing on the beach and is not being responsible, always listen to your mommy and daddy Geeg (I thought I was looking at myself and listening to myself)…and so Flotsam from a 2 year old’s and a 3.5 year old’s perspective goes on…..

Ahaha, I am not revealing the final knot. Go get a copy of Flotsam and discover it yourself. Hey, you, you and you get off the couch and get the book. Next post surprise quiz on Flotsam.

Its been 4 weeks since the mother became a faculty in her daughter’s school. The mother and the daughter have settled in to a nice routine. They leave the house together and come back together. If the mother happens to walk in to the daughter’s classroom for some errand, the daughter comes running and gives a hug, kiss…yeah, the whole shebang. If the daughter happens to catch a glimpse of the mother through the window, she bangs the window to get the mother’s attention and waves all bright and cheery. She even calls her classmates and proudly points, ‘That is MY mommy’.

But it took quite a bit of learning from the mother’s part. Remember the mother’s bellyache about the lunch box issue? The first week, the mother did go overboard on the same issue. She checked the daughter’s lunch box during her break *gasp* pulled the daughter aside to feed her the food *gasp to power of gasp*. The poor daughter was seen walking around as if she crushed by an invisible boulder. At times she even hid under the table when the mother walked by.

But within two days, thanks to the over thinking and over analyzing mother’s brain that worked at the speed of light, a control system was established. Thus materialized an unspoken unwritten pact.

For the mother: When in school the child is cared for by HER teacher. Do not, do not, do not interfere.
For the child: When in school, you listen to what your teacher says. You were asked to sit out of circle time because you behaved inappropriately. Amma can’t do anything about it baby and NO you cannot come and start working in my class because you are unhappy with the situation you got yourself in to.

Guess even ‘mothering’ can become annoying, both to the child and to the mother, if the mother does not accept her boundaries.

Me: Chula, today was amma’s last day in her school.
Chula: Huh?
Me: Yes, I will be working in a new place from June.
Chula: Huh?
Me: Let me see if you know MY new school is. The new school’s name is “{ Chula’s preschool}”…ta-da!!!
Chula: BUT…amma, that is MY school!
Me: Yes, what do you think, you and me in the same school?
Chula: No. NO. You can’t do that. You have to drop me in school and go…GO AWAY. You go to your college school, don’t come to my Montessori preschool.

So does it start this early?

Anyways, she will get used to it.

What say y’all?

PS: WELCOME TO MY NEW DEN.

Friends, thanks for keeping in touch. So many people regularly cheking for updates and enquiring why I went AWOL means a lot to me. I am grateful for all your support.

I am trying to move to a self hosted blog. The process is dragging on purely due to WordPress import issues supplemented by my inertia. Self imposed dead line to get the issues resloved – June 14th, 2008.

In the meanwhile, some updates from my side:

•  I started working in the new place from May 26th, 2008. To say that the new job is stressful would be an understatement of the century. It is physically intense, I do about 100 lunges and an equal number of squats in one work day. ( Two words – Thundering Thighs. Hulk image would go great with my banyan tree green 🙂 ) As a result of all this, I drop dead by the time the clock hits 8.30PM.
• Six weeks of intense summer school starts June 16th. 9.00AM – 1.00PM work all five days, 5.00PM – 10.00PM evening classes four days a week…..its going be one crazy ride. The sole goal for the next six weeks will be to survive with miminum impact on the tots I will be servicing…oh, and of course not to doze off in the middle of the class. I already have nightmares that I forget to turn in an assignment and the teacher makes me stand up on the bench in front of the whole class.
• The kids are doing great. Mieja turned two end of last month. She is one naughty bunny. Her latest trend is waving her index finger and threatening people around her, ‘Odhai koduppen’ or ‘amma kathuva’. Means ‘Be careful, I will hit you’ and ‘My mom will yell at you’ respectively. Chula is turning her tricycle 90 degress, turning the pedal with her hands and is claiming that she is recycling. The mothers and daughters lock swords every now and then. But what is life without all this? Huh?

PS: MNAmma, thanks for the award. Thats super nice of you.

As Tharini writes about the pain of a mother and child to bid adieu to a teacher, I am composing the complement to that post.

Today was my last day at this school I was working for the past 14 months. For personal reasons, I decided to quit this job. Where I will be working next is will be revealed in a future post.

Last day didn’t sneak up on me. I knew for the past one and a half months that April 30 would be my last day. I never gave it a second thought. I went about doing my things, giving formal resignation letter, complete formalities, preparing forms to be given in the new place…etc. Every thing felt normal.

Today morning as I was half-running-half-walking towards the classroom and I saw little faces peeking through the door. I quite didn’t notice it in my hurry to get in to the classroom in time. As I entered the classroom, all my kids yelled surprise and gave me hand made cards. The little ones peeping were scouting to surprise me. It was not just that, the kids had planned an ice cream party for me, which I found out later. The money for the ice cream party was from the bake sale the kids made last week. Parents dropped in to say bye. But I digress, the moment the kids yelled ‘surprise’… THAT was precisely the moment it struck me that the next three hours were going to be different.

Some of the kids, I have been seeing them since they were babies. I helped them transition in to school, by holding them in my lap as they cried their hearts out for their parents. Some, I hugged and comforted them as their little lips quivered with embarrassment when their bodies didn’t quite co-operate with the potty training routines. One of the dear girls, I have held her hands during every writing session, assuring that she can do it and felt so proud when she wrote her name all by herself, no mistakes, all letters present, no B->D reversals. I have taught them to spell, to recycle, washed their boo-boos, wiped their noses. Most of them, I have nagged endlessly to finish their snack and worn their ears out with my ‘no wasting food’ sermons. There is this little boy, when I tell him for the n-th time, ‘Eat, stop talking, its almost time to clean up’, stands up, salutes me and says, ‘Yes m’am’. Now, I am going to miss that or what?! I have taught these kids conflict resolution. To this day, they come running to me to when they get in to a row and say, ‘Teacher, we want you to meditate.’ 🙂 . These kids have teased me about my accent…more like rolled on the floor and laughed.

**Sigh**

This one day, I didn’t hurry to get out at my usual 12.15PM. I lingered just a little longer, precisely arranging their folders, sorting their homework, laying the mats for the kids who stay for the full day…..

Just then I remembered what a little dude told me as he left… ‘You take care baby’. I sure will bud, I sure will…..

To new beginnings….

EDITED TO ADD: If you are wondering what this is all about, check this out.

Greetings wonderful MTBs!!!
and good work to all of you!
For having solved the riddle before
I give you all this clue.

The letter ” T “
Write it down, add it on…
And let’s move on to the next little song.

“Her namesake searches for a mitr friend
She stays content with Baby Naren
Need to diet, ask her how
Tis easy come guess this one now”

Solve it and you get your lead
Misguess, and you lose your speed
Solve it slow but solve it now
And before you go, take a little bow

Go to ‘Comments’ and leave me a clue
Tell me which blog you are off to.
Good luck! Good luck! Be on your way.
You have your work, cut out for the day!