Fear at four

I usually play some word games, joke around, tell some crazy stories to Jr. just before she goes to bed. It is a magical time for me because the two of us share a world that only the two of us can understand in those five to ten minutes. Anyone walking in on our conversations would think we are aliens talking in klingon or some such thing because we use a lot of words that we created from gibberish.

Jr. usually tells me all about her day and her plans for the next in a few sentences. A few nights ago, she tells me :

"daddy? I don't want to have any dreams daddy! I don't want to think about anything after I go to sleep. Can you make the dreams go away please?"

Here I was trying to teach my little one to be a dreamer and she hits me with this !! Jr. is dreamy by default, always in her own world, looking back and lost in thought as she walks forward, walking into walls, doors etc. in the process, a fact that has been noticed at home and school, something she probably inherits from my mom!

So, what would prompt Ms. Dreamz from wanting them to go away? I have not touched this topic for fear of bringing the bad dreams back, hoping that they will go away on their own or she will get used to it.

The funny thing is, I started thinking about my own childhood experiences. I used to get nightmares often. I have apparently had daymares too when I was young. My parents say I used to wake up during my afternoon nap in the weekends and cry! What happened after some time ? Did I learn to control my dreams, divert them, deflect them ? or somehow learned to turn them off and go into deep sleep ? I wish I remembered, so I could pass on some valuable infomation to Jr., but I draw a blank!

I still dream and sometimes they are horrible. I just turn in the bed to face the other wall and a bad dream disappers, or at least there is a pause (vaguely remember reading something in National Geographic a long time ago, that suggested this method). Other times a visit to the bathroom or drinking a glass of water disrupts it (maybe the bad dream was my body telling my mind to go pee or drink water, or else bad things were going to happen!).

For now Jr. is going to get a story on the benefits of dreams and how one or two bad ones are just a way to contrast the good ones. Something along the lines of "how can you appreciate light if you dont know what darkness is ?".

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Whats Dora got to do with Baanaas ?

It was a quiet weekend after a long long time. Just too tired to go outside and do anything, and that implies some quality time with the kids in our very own backyard. What started as a cold day ended up as a windy but sunny evening.

A day well spent, taking pictures of the flowers in the backyard, pushing the poor macro on the old Canon S30 to its limit, flying a kite (or attempting to) with Jr. and thinking of old times with a glass of tea in hand.

Jr. got this kite as a goody bag gift at a birthday party. It is not the solid paper kite we are used to as kids in our younger days in India. They make them out of polythene now and the whole kite can be rolled into a little tube. You place a plastic crossbar across and use a quick connect tie in the middle (it is a clip on) and voila, ready to lauch. The fact that the kite has Dora the explorer and her trusted aid, "Boots" the monkey is an added plus. Unfortunately the experience ended when Dora got stuck on top of the apple tree!

The whole experience brought back so many memories. When we were kids, we got to fly kites only when we went to the beach. All this changed when the owners of our rental house decided to do some construction. The guys who did the construction were very friendly and they taught me and my brother all about "Baana kaathadis", a type of short tail paper kite on a bamboo frame which is not that easy to launch but once it is up there, you get a fantastic kite flying experience. The budding scientists that we were, the Mandaveli brothers spent every summer perfecting the art of Baana making not to mention our disastrous experiments of adding glass powder to coat the strings.

We used to run across streets, go across rooftops just to catch the kite that has been cut loose in our neighbourhood! It was only a few years before the government put a stop to kite flying in the city what with people driving two wheelers getting their necks cut on these glass coated kite strings. These days there are fixed days in the year like the "kite festival" where people convene in open grounds to fly kites. Somehow Kite flying is not a popular pastime in the US today. Do not know why.

I felt young again today flying that Dora Kite and that made my day!

The photos of the flowers and the stranded kite ...

The little green stuff is baby grapes! The whole bunch of grapes is smaller than a leaf. We will be tasting them in a few months.. Yum Yum Yummy...

Little-ita!!

Jr. has learnt from daycare that when you add "ita" to something it means "little one". I do not know exactly which spanish words were used to teach that.

Armed with this newfound knowledge she has been ita-ing everyone and everything.

She ita'ed her name, her sisters name, said things like tableita, umbrellita etc., and then realized that Sangeetha was already a "ita". Of course she did not realize the spelling difference between "ita" and "eetha", but that is not surprising since a lot of people here in the US mispell my wife's name as Sangita!

Then she came up with a brilliant one.

Daddy, I am going to call myself "Sundareetha" because I am Sundar and Sangeetha's baby!

I was so impressed.

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Too much love

Jr. got a homework assignment from her school. They gave her two germinated seeds (just germinated!), in a cup with her name on it.

The goal: Learn how plants come from seeds.
How : go home, ask your parents to put some dirt in the cup, put the seeds, water it and watch it grow and as bring it back to school.

I promptly put some mud from the backyard, planted the seeds, while mommy watered it in front of Jr. and grandma pitched in by saying "sunlight is very important. lets keep it on the window sill with the rest of the plants".

Jr. of course was learning another hidden lesson, zen style. The plant does not grow instantly. Every 5 minutes she would go look for a plant. After my repeated answers of "it takes some time to grow", she reduced the frequency to every hour or so..

The next morning, she went first to look for her plant! Still no plant. She was disappointed. I told her "Trust me. In two days there will be a plant!".

Four days later, this is what we have in the cup!

Yes. Looks like the seed has become fungus fodder!

Looks like Jr. is not the only one learning lessons here. Apparently, with the responsibility of not disappointing the poor kid, all the adults in the house, have been showering love on Jr., by indirectly showering the cup with water! Three people watering the seeds everytime they go near the kitchen sink was too much for the seedlings!!

Lessons learned :

Jr.:
Plants maybe grow from seeds?
If they grow, they need the seed, soil, water, sunlight.
It takes a long time for plants to grow, longer if grown by adults.
I hope all the other parents did the same thing with the seeds!

Mommy, grandma :
From now on only daddy does these activity homeworks.

Daddy :
My name is in the mud now, literally!!

I am sure there will be a lot more plants to grow, butterflies to incubate, cakes to bake etc. etc. in the coming years. Hope I get better at supporting those projects!

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Clever Marketing..

Most of you have seen Jr.'s sweeping craze in my previous posts..

The broom we got from India has started shedding, because Jr. has the habit of sweeping rough concrete with that broom! So everytime she is done brooming, we have to follow up with come vacuum cleaning.

She kept insisting we buy her a toy vacuum !! I did not even know if one existed, but obviously she had prior information about the existance of such a toy..

Last week we actually found the toy! You have to hand it to these guys. The thing looks real, runs on a battery and has the light and sound effects of the real Dirt Devil. I am sure they are more than making their revenue projections on the toy vac than on the real one !!

ps. I would have posted a pic or video of Jr. doing the vacuum. But recently the baby's sickness, accidental injuries as well as Jr.'s tantrums have all been statistically correlated to their pictures and video's appearing in the blog with a Karl Pearsons coefficient of 9.99 x10^-7. Most statisticians would argue that it isn't much of a correlation and they are independent events, but then if you multiply this coefficient with the weight factor for the wife/MIL (which is around a million, compared to the weight factor for me, which hovers at <1.0), the picture changes quite dramatically. So dramatic, that it might shut down the blog, again. So, I will have to stay content with talking about Sun TV programming, Chennai news, etc. for the time being.

pps. Saw Vadivelu as spiderman in the "Vyapari" movie review on Sun TV. He is indeed funny!! Hats off to Vadivelu!

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