A duh moment..

is what I've been having for a while now...and today was a maha 3 stooges moment! Minus the boinky music.

I had a face pack on and the offspring was trying to either lick it or touch it or basically just ascertain if it was mommy under the funny color. Anyhoo, suffice to say it that he did not get any of the stuff on his lil stubby fingers. But among the stuff in his path to reaching my face was a comb.

I promptly put it out of reach and forgot about it. Now it would be prudent to mention here that am blind as a bat and without glasses I was batty all the way!
By the time the war paint came off I realized that the comb was stuck behind my ponytail and it was THAT particular item that the son and heir was making a beeline for.

Quite a DOH! moment all in all but I guess banta hai...after gadzillions of subterfuges to hide things from him I keep finding those things all over the place. when I least expect it. 

The one thing they NEVER tell you about being preggers and after is that it addles your noggin like nothing else ever! And if you're anyhow lost somewhere between diaperland and baby mush then the addling is just insult to injury.

But my expression of surprise at seeing the comb perched in my own hair was a wonderful tribute to all that is dumb and Larry, Curly and Moe!

Back again...

Am a little older. Duh! Not much wiser. Duh again! But the happiness has been growing. Yay!

Happiness aka my child is nearly one and hasn't turned into one of those hellions that mothers warn you about. Sadly, only the middle-aged mothers who have sons dating girls unapproved by them warn you about male children being the spawn of the devil. Or something to that effect!

He has gone from a scrawny child to a dumpling and now has lengthened out just right and has a sparkling smile (for girls mainly) and knows just how to manipulate. That is childhood am told.

So from gently cradling his wobbly head, to inducing him to go potty in the lil turtle with the red hatchback, to bamboozling him into having his medicines, hogtying him to clean up his congested nose; we've traversed pretty far. His father and I that is.

And now on the brink of his 1st birthday, all I can remember is an infant dependent on me entirely and each milestone he's attained. Some funnily and some with difficulty.

Would I go down this road again? Ask me after he graduates summa cum laude from somewhere. Hopefully I should have some clarity by then. :p

e-HOW brings you."HOW TO MAKE A BABY LAUGH"

Step #1-You will need a baby, preferably. Else anyone with a less than requisite IQ for their age range will also suffice.

Step#2- Put baby on his/her back and facing you. If baby refuses to face you, move right into baby's face and make like a solar eclipse till all the baby can see is you.

Step#3- Let go of all inhibitions, sense of importance and any positions attained at the office.

Step#4- Prepare to open and close mouth like goldfish, make spluttering sounds, even farty ones and basically sound like a clown on uppers and downers all at once! If that allusion doesn't ring a bell, think of Darwin and emulate a simian. If holding a banana will help draw forth your inner monkey, go for it!

Step#5- Don't spare the baby, if need be tickle till they puke the formula!

Step#6- Take a hit from the oxygen cylinder kept handy (did I skip this step?) since all the shenanigans will invariably leave you forgetting to breathe. If a woman, fall back on Lamaze learnt during birthing classes.

Step#7- If all else fails and desired decibels of laughter aren't elicited from baby, move away and let the baby watch the ceiling fan rotate. Guaranteed to bring forth gummy smiles and the kind that make the tots go boinkers!

Out of the Mouths of Babes....

"The real menace in dealing with a five-year -old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a five-year-old"

- Jean Kerr

And now imagine that the child in question isn't 5 but a bit over 1 and rapidly gurgling away in his own lingo. That's what Red's father discovered a few nights back...

I was blogging and overhead this conversation between the FIL and the offspring-

They were watching Animal Planet air a program on tigers. In Telugu tigers are called Puli and dogs are called Kukka. My son recognizes other animals well enough when he wants to, but watching them live or moving about on t.v. somehow makes everything a 'kukka' in his eyes.

So he exclaimed, KUKKA! The FIL said no no, PULI and the tug of war between KUKKA and PULI went on for some more time till FIL cried uncle and gave up.

So Kukkas ruled the day and the kid won.

I could've told my FIL that but why ruin the fun?

It's good to see someone else get licked by the human energizer bunny for a change!

Retribution...

“Vengeance is mine, and I will repay.”

Or something to that extent I imagine must have passed by an old chappie's lips when four loud, boisterous kids from his neighborhood would filch his precious stack of clothes pins and make them disappear day after day..

The more he complained to his neighbors (the parents of the brats) the more clips kept disappearing. They'd go off the clothes line and end up in the oddest places, like the water tank. Which after a point of time seemed to verily have more clips lying at the bottom than coins in the Trevi Fountain itself!

Anyhow, he'd rant and rave and often cuss at them, not that they gave a hoot! It was fun to see the crusty old man finally move his potato sack of a body off the swing and lumber after them. Else it was the swing where he sat, day after day and made it squeak,squeak and squeak as if it was his life's purpose.

The brats didn't know that the irritable man who always told on them was actually retired and wanted nothing more to sit on his swing and sip from his stainless steel glass of booze that would remain undetected in that wettest of dry lands. So the sight of children causing a ruckus put a cramp in his guzzling plans indeed!

And if he stayed compliant and ignored them, he would have to face the task of answering his not so little woman who would wonder about the regular disappearance of her clothes pins.

Cut to present day- one of the brats is grown up now. Somewhat. When she finished her laundry today and went to hang up the innumerable little things that her child grows through daily, she found that she wasYET AGAIN short of clipsies..!

How she gnashed her teeth and wished that for once her beloved dumpling would throw something else off the balcony or find other things to confiscate instead of the oh-so important clips...

And while seething and doubling up the clothes (since there weren't enough clips to go around) she thought of a curmudgeon whose clips she and her fine companions would to love to chuck into the water tank or use as marks to get badams off the tree.

And then it came home to her...what goes around definitely comes around. And there was plenty more coming her way...!

The hard and soft of it all..

Right from the time my son was born, I was struck by how delicate he was. I knew babies are vulnerable and helpless but this one seemed to embody those qualities and more.

He was a thin baby, weighing just on this side of an acceptable birth weight but he never lacked spunk.

That 'scrawny' baby's learnt to run now and also balance himself on his toes to reach heights hitherto out of his reach.

One thing that's absolute about children is that you NEVER know what they'll do next. If you think there's a line they haven't crossed yet, they always manage to cross it and then some! So if you threaten your kid with that 'last straw that breaks the camel's back', you'd better be prepared to have a whole herd of camels waiting out there. Your offspring will find plenty more straws and with it plenty of camels' backs too.

I used to think of little children (infant to toddler stage) as being fragile but it's us as parents who're fragile methinks. The kids are resilient and how! They fall, they bleed, they sprout bumps here, there and everywhere and they still keep going even after the tears have left tracks on their face.

And speaking of tracks, while you may not need therapy to get over the minor cuts and nicks on your child; it definitely takes some doing to see your child hurt and you not being able to prevent it. And some things do stay with you. Whether it makes you a better parent or a hovering one is anyone's guess.

And by the time you're over the initial trauma and your monkey is again gallivanting off for newer places to fall down from; you tell them what's sure to become your motto in life- "Don't cry! You wanna cry? I'll give you something to cry about if you dare do something like this (fill in blank with your pet peeves about your kid) ever again!!!"

And you go on. Both of you...sometimes with one chipped tooth, a brief black and blue mark and you with a near-paranoid obsession for stuff your child could hurt yourself on again. But you do go on.

And before you know it, they're onto newer things, more things they could make hurtful for themselves and with you still trying to be their life-long safety net and catch them before they fall. But that's not to be...what is to be their ever-growing curiosity, activity and ability to bounce back each time.

Amen to that! The rest will keep I suppose :)

to meme or may-may?

Call me stupid (seriously, DON'T!) but my understanding and pronunciation of the word "meme" was derived from the the word "me" and that most of them seem to be personal and usually in the 1st person-or so I thought.

While making the offspring's breakfast this morning I happened to talk to Red about doing a meme for the monkey and he burst into gales of laughter and almost pranced about in happiness that he was able to get me on the wrong foot about the definition and pronunciation of a word. I AM a bit particular, I'll admit, about the way words are uttered and it's a source of irritation and amusement amongst my bunch of goofballs.

Anyhoo, Red told me with the right amount of condescension and amusement that the word way pronounced as "may- may" but not stretching out the "a" sound. A short one. And he told me that was NOT about a list of things circulated only about the self but pretty much about anything and anyone.

I love a challenge! Always have! So here we are, logged in and checked up on the meaning and pronunciation of the word. Only to find that it's "meem"! Whoda thunk it?

But as always, I need to have the last word even blogged as it were, and say that at least my mispronounced version was closer to the actual one that his was!

In your face geekboy!!

PS: My meem on my child will spew forth shortly. After I go and find out which other words I've been mispronouncing :) 

A Dreamy Epiphany...or...

I really don't know about other people but my dreams assume different formats. It's almost always audio-visual but sometimes it's so real I can nearly swear I had some tactile experience of sorts. And then some!

This morning I woke up with James Hetfield's voice rumbling about Turning the Page. I had to shake my head twice, vigorously to make him stop the chorus bit.

Now I may need to be medicated, but wasn't last night. I didn't sleep much again and have a head cold and am cantankerous to boot but the song came right at me...almost like a bat out of hell one might say.

I finally stumbled out of bed to find placid and disorganized domesticity scattered all around me. A more discordant image there couldn't be. Or could it?

My BFF1 or as someone once labelled us " emotional Siamese twins"; always believed strongly in Freudy boy's regurgitations on the Unconscious and Repression. And I too believe in them to a large extent, but only because it's happened often enough for me to know that the mind holds onto things with a scary adhesive quality and seldom lets things sieve through. Associations can be sparked within seconds and the even the most tenuous of links can lead to a chain reaction of thoughts, memories and result in a Technicolor explosion up in the ol' noggin.

But I do remember very clearly what I thought of when I first heard the song a while back- it seemed to just build up from a rumble to a full-throaty proclamation of simply turning the page. And what is the act of turning the page but moving onto something new, moving ahead? And a lot of moving on and sifting through clutter is required for periodical renewal of the self methinks.

I suppose our own preferred wiring lets the voice within range from metaphorical abstraction to literally the writing on the wall. Or in this case- Mr. Hetfield. But boy! Whatta way to wake up.
I don't want to repeat this one...but I guess it beats the 3 Tenors doing a jugalbandi and conveying the same message.
 That would've landed me in the nut house for sure!

Salut!