Check out the link from Parenting magazine.

When I was sitting in the doctor’s office waiting for the pediatrician, I picked up PARENTING magazine, partly because the title caught my attention and partly because I had to divert myself from typical Seinfeld-ian thoughts like, “Oh, what does that child have? Is it okay to let my kids touch this book? May be we must move to the other chair”. I gave it a quick browse and rated myself on their scale of 1-9, before our name was called. I liked it. By the way I am big sucker for these kinds of things. Hubby is pretty happy that motherhood has diverted me from taking and forcing him to take the Cosmo kind of quizzes! “Are you leading a happy life” quiz always ends up creating havoc in our household 🙂

Sense of humor – To name a few scenarios, Scenario I: At eleven in the night baby gets from sleep, throws up and cries her heart out. I ask hubby to clean up. He is willing but asks a stupid question, “Clean up what?” Scenario II: Toddler is being very clingy on the day when I have my plate too full. So I say, go play ABC games and come to me when you are done from A to Z. Toddler hits A, then Z and says, “Amma Iam done.” It is sense of humor that keeps me sane!

Creativity – I am pretty creative. For the sake of modesty, I leave it at that!

Type B personality – Serious problem here. I am a typical type A. I always have a schedule at hand and pain the rest of the family. Rest of the family is made up of typical ‘don’t-care-about-your-schedules’ personalities.

Stamina – Boy, oh boy. I have plenty of that! Some times my body runs for days together on 4 hrs/day sleep schedules. I am used to carrying a diaper bag on one shoulder, my infant on the sling and my toddler, who has declared, “Amma carry baby, amma carry me”. I am petite, I am 5 feet tall and weigh less than a hundred pounds. How I do it sometimes even amazes even me.

Immodesty – I choose to let my looks go partly because of the lack of time and partly beacuse I am lazy. I am always envious of the ‘not a hair out of the place moms’.

Tool skills – I officially am the tool woman in the house. Every single furniture in the house is assembled by me, me, me. I get inspiration from Pottery Barn catalogues and used to wander in the aisles of Home Depot trying to put together something by myself. Yep, ‘used to’, past tense. My Saturday morning trips to Home Depot ended for couple of reasons – lack of time after the second baby arrived, irritated employees at Home Depot. I ended up irritating one of the employees that he once told me, “Well mam, if something like that is readily available in Pottery Barn, have considered purchasing it from Pottery Barn itself?”

Ability to relax – I can relax…at times…when every other work is done…after I have made my list of to-dos for the next few days…

Love of song – I do this all the time. My toddler loves it. My versions of “Brown bear Brown bear what do you see?”, “Are you sleeping” are super hits at home. There is absolutely no tune or rhyme or rhythm, but they smile such a blissful smile when I sing(if one call it so)!!

ESP – Every mom has this. I call this the invisible umbilical cord. No doctor can cut this off! I diagnose an ear infection or a chicken pox even before the doctor does. I never let any one talk me out of my instincts. We were recently in India, hubby and self put the kids in bed, made sure that they were fast asleep and went for late night movie(Paruthiveeran, tamil movie). Something kept gnawing at me all through the movie. We get home and the kids were up and crying! They had woken up a few minutes after we left and were screaming.

Looks like I have a 7/9, not bad at all!
(I need constant validation for what I do. So please do leave comments! 🙂 )

Hubby and self believe in introducing things that we value most dearly to our kids. Bringing up the kids in pardes, exposure to kids from families with different value systems, eating foods other than Indian food, celebrating typical American holidays, all this scared us that kids might loose their roots. We decided to start introduction to Indian Mythology, you know Gods, stories, slokhas…etc.

Our older child, who is only 2 years and four months, can already identify life letters in tamil, count till 50 in tamil, recite a few tamil rhymes, tell the names of the months in tamil, identify most of the Gods, recite a few slokhas and religiously puts viboodhi (the holy ash) and kum kum (sindoor) on her fore head every evening after she comes back from day care. As parents we are very proud of it, but hubby and self decide to take things to the next level.

So on our recent trip to India we picked up few amar chitra kathas, few animation movies that tells the stories of Hanuman, Shiva, Ganesha and Krishna. We started with the amar chitra katha about Krishna. This is how things proceeded.

Hubby started telling “Kamsa was a king, Kamsa’s baby sister Devaki and Vasudeva got married. At that time a voice told Kamsa that Devaki’s babies will kill Kamsa. So, Kamsa decides to kill all the babies”. At this point of time hubby realized that he had to use kill at least twice and he was still in the first page.He didn’t feel like telling a two year old about killing, that too killing of babies.So he decided to take a little poetic license and tells the child that Kamsa is giving all the babies a time out. Hubby and self look at each other and smile that we have evaded an uncomfortable reality of life for the time being. Then comes the part where Boothagi comes to Aayarpadi to nurse Krishna and kill him. This part, considering the fact that my children regard me as the Boothagi of Kaliyug, they have no problems relating to! When hubby tells child that Boothagi is trying to give Krishna milk, her eyes automatically turn in my direction and I can see that she is quite relieved that I don’t have anything edible in my possession or within my arms reach. We try telling her about Kalinga Nardhanam(how Krishna danced on a snake) and Govardhanagiri(How Krishna protected Aayarpadi by holding Govardhanagiri as an umbrella). We see bursts of interest as she hears familiar words like Aayarpadi, mountain, snake, dance, but we realize that we are slowly loosing her.

On another day we started with the story of Ganesha. She was quite enthused at the beginning. She was quite discouraged when we explained that Lord Shiva is not carrying a mop, but it is a thirisoolam (weapon with three sharp edges). When we showed her a picture of Ganesha with a normal human head as opposed to the elephant’s head, she refused to sit and listen any more. Anyways the story was already quite uninteresting because Parvathy was giving Shiva a time out and Shiva was giving Parvathy a double time out, then all the ganas jumped in to the scene and were giving each other time outs of their life times. We lost her again.

But we are very persistent parents. We introduced Hanuman. When a talking, flying monkey is the hero all other minor glitches are forgotten. After becoming familiar with Hanuman’s story, she started pointing to the characters and identifying them. All was fine, Hanuman was a super hit, but one day she pointed to Kesari (the monkey prince Anjani married) and said “Hanuman’s appa”, then she looked at Lord Pavan (the wind God) thought for a second and said, “Hanuman’s another appa”. Then she looked at hubby and said, “My appa. Where is another appa?”. We refrained from telling her that Hanuman is also considered as Shiva’s son as he was born with Lord Shiva’s blessings, because we didn’t want her to go looking in the garage for her third father.

More than the child we as parents were very confused how to tell her a mythological story without worrying too much about peripheral details. You all know what I mean right? When grand moms and aunts told us that Krishna stole butter, we some how accepted it because Krishna was a God, he can do anything he wants to do. We didn’t interpret that stealing is good because even Gods do it or Krishna cannot be considered as God because he steals. Now that I think about it I am not sure when that enlightenment came, but growing up in a place like India with grandparents and aunts, doing pooja every day, where every Tuesday and Friday was celebrated like a festival, where every day temple visits were a very common thing, listening to stories of Krishna or Rama while amma feeds her rasam sadham( rice and rasam ) and urulai kizhangu kari ( potato curry ), that enlightment, kind of enters your heart pretty quickly!

Here we are sitting in a foreign country or for that matter even in India where every day is becoming a rat race, I am really skeptical how long will it take for the enlightment to come?! In the mean while there are going to be lots of confusions and questions in the minds of our children. If we want our children to always remember their roots and if we want them to be proud of their lineage these are the few things I think we must do(at least this is what Iam doing right now. Whether it worked…we will know by 2020! ):

• Talk to the children about your childhood and how you did things as a family.
• Celebrate every small and big festival. India’s independence, diwali, ramajayanthi, hanuman jayanthi, (or what ever religiously appropriate festival there is, you know what I mean), don’t leave out anything. Celebration doesn’t have to be a grand affair. Plan it out in the weekend and do something small that signifies the occasion. Typically in our house hold we celebrate even ammavasai (no moon) day and karthigai every month. Though they are young to understand, I keep telling my kids that in India typically we go to the temple, we don’t eat leftovers and we do pooja at home. Though I don’t follow everything to the dot, due to practical difficulties, I make sure that I keep at least a couple of bananas or a small glass of milk and do a small pooja.
• Take time to pray together. Make a time, for instance, get up in the morning and convene before a deity’s picture and some heart felt prayer, “Dear God, make my day a great day. Make every around me happy”.
• Talk to your children’s teachers. Explain to the teachers the significance of a festival like diwali, holi, rakhi…etc. Ask them if a few moms can join together and make a small presentation about the festival. This gives the other children in the class to understand what our culture is all about. That is a big validation to our children.
• Call India and make the children get the blessings of the elders in the family on the day of festivals.

In a nut shell make the effort. Remember if you don’t take things to heart neither will the kids.

PS:

More suggestions are welcome.
I am a Hindu and I have given my perspective. Iam sure people from other religions face similar problems. I would love your comments on the issue.