Karthigai Lights and Christmas Deepam

In our house we have a tradition. On the day of Kaarthigai Deepam (the day we light oil lamps and pray to lord Kaarthikeya and eat Pori Urundai's), we also put on the Christmas lights. The Kaarthigai day in the US also coincides with my star birthday in India as they are around 12 hours ahead and overall turns out to be a great experience.

In summary, I get to eat pori urundai's every year for my Birthday!

The oil lamps come back in the next two days but the Christmas lights stay on till the New years!

This year daddy Narayanan aka limpy Narayanan was given an ultimatum by the kids. Either get on the ladder and put on the lights with help from mommy and the kids or go hire someone to put on the lights, NOW!

With a lot of help from the three of them, the lights were up after an hour..

We also celebrated with the kids lighting lamps (or switching on battery operated lamps that look like real lamps)and placing them inside and outside the house!

Good eats..

Notice daddy's slight paunch. 15 days of eating, limping and no calorie burning and trying on pants a tad smaller on the waist can do that!

A full moon night as always for Kaarthigai and this year it coincided with an eclipse in many parts of the world. The moon as seen at 400mm and ..

and back lighting our house..

We had one busy day. Children's party in the morning. Lighting up the house in the evening!

This special day was made possible thanks to isolation from the internet. We are now planning to cut the internet cable on festival days as a policy!

Hope those of you who celebrate Kaarthigai, had a great day yesterday!

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5 years in Caricatures

This week was travel week. Daddy managed to limp along and spend the week out of town and came back limp intact late Friday.

The kids were overjoyed to see daddy and promptly declared that they had a surprise announcement for me. The IBM Children's party was Saturday morning and limp or not, I had to come because most likely Big Al will be there and we will do our caricature collage!

So off we went and spent two hours at IBM..

By now we already had four sets of pictures showing a constant theme!

Our annual Santa picture, courtesy IBM..

Grandma helped the kids make their X-mas hats and Gingerbread cookie decorations.

The kids posed for me in the backyard after coming home, without me having to beg them to pose!

and the best part..

Next year the plan is to make this one giant collage and put it on our hallway. It might cost us a fortune to frame this one but will try!

Once again, we thank IBM for organizing this every year and Big Al for showing how the kids change in his caricature world!

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Too much Lollu (mischief?) . . .

The kids have now discovered email.

Jr. always had an email account. Now that the little one has an email account they are way too into communicating by email.

This has led to some ridiculousness in the house with the ipad (with keyboard) being taken over by the kids to check email every 5 minutes!

Apparently the keyboard is easier for email typing than the swipe on screen keyboard.

There are also some funny conversations like this one..

Jr. : Why did you spill your food on the carpet?

LO : I will let you know by email!!!

Me and San : WTH !!!

This takes the cake..

Jr. from Computer room : I have sent you an email ! have you received it yet?

LO from living room (literally 6 feet away) : I am checking it right now. I will send you a reply soon..

Or this one :

LO : Daddy, I have no new emails. Can you send me one please?! (she is sitting 5 feet away!)
On the bright side the house is quieter with the kids on the computer but at this rate their social skills will take a nosedive in record time.

It is also truly amazing to watch a girl who has just turned 6 figure out email, use the features, ask inquisitive questions which would give some valuable feedback to email providers and get totally engrossed in it to the point that she checks email every 10 minutes!

Tomorrows technologists in action !

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