26 October, 2012

Why My Child is My Snoogums-Boogums

Remember this little ditty? 

Well I know of plenty of people who went bananas over it! And some who wanted to throw overripe bananas at it because it was gagworthy to them. But all in all I totally agree with the lyrics and they apply to my child in toto!

After all you have to be a pumpy-umpy-umpkin to keep doing these wonderful things:

  • locking the neighbors in at every possible opportunity and then forgetting to unlatch their front door.
  • leaving bits of Play-Doh in places where they're nicely stuck and difficult to take out.
  • chanting for KFC's Popcorn Chicken the second the car leaves the parking area.
  • laying claim to everything at home as his own especially MY iPad!
  • asking for lip(stick,balm,gel) everytime I open the doors to the dresser.
  • taking my wallet out of my handbag and going through every damn thing in there and mixing up my cards.
  • howling like a banshee when a favored object is taken away.
  • being a drama queen- a really bad drama queen.
  • fake crying in public.
  • lying down on the in the aisles of shopping malls when ice cream/balloons/escalator rides are denied.
  • staying up LATE into the night and keeping me&Red up as well and then promptly refusing to get up at a decent time in the morning.
  • getting the bathroom wet, wall-floor each time he has to spend time on the pot.
  • digging out bits of styrofoam padding from his carseat and eating it like it's popcorn.
  • making a mess and then saying, "LOOK! Chhee-Chhee"!
  • playing Angry Birds all wrong and still enjoying it immensely!
  • being all full of vim&vigor the moment I'm dead tired on my feet and essentially a zombie!
There are more points to add there I'm sure but these are the main reasons why he's the apple of my eye!!
















13 October, 2012

Calling All Gummy Bears

NOT the creepy green glooby one that wears yellow briefs but these...these beautiful little creatures who you relish biting the heads and limbs off and still get a warm toasty feeling from gobbling up by the handfuls.

Gummybears are a very different kind of candy. They are fun basically. You can't resist giving them a squeeze before popping them in your mouth, you pick out the ones which catch your eyes (kind of like jellybeans) and they are a delight to bite into and chew the heck out of!

Now some benevolent people have decided to make Gummybears nutritional (while doing nothing for the health of our teeth in the long run) by infusing calcium,vitamins in them and lessening the feelings of guilt in people like me a tad bit for eating them by the dozen.

The fun part of it still remains because all sorts of characters find themselves into gummy mode- the last time I went through a bottle it was full of the Flintstones. And let me tell you it was FUN!!

Then there are those BIG gummies which are roughly the size of 10 regular-sized bears clumped together and 10 times for fun.

So where am I going with all this? Well I researched the sourcing of gummies in India a bit and found that I'd end up living on the sidewalk if I had to get them regularly from a set-up like Amazon. So I wrote to one of the companies that manufacture the healthy gummies asked about their retail operations in India.
Long story short, I now have position of 2 bottles of "gummybears". I air quote full of sarcasm because while my child is happily munching on them, those bears are out and out frauds!! They are far more closely linked to the jujube branch of foodstuff than the gummy ones. And everyone knows, jujubes are one thing and gummies are something entirely different!

So while I'm mildly happy (weak YAY) that my child will NOT be fussing about nutritional supplements, I am quite miffed (strong hmmph sound emanating from my throat) that the gummies that were promised aren't what they are supposed to be.

A gummy is a gummy and there're no two ways about it.

While I sit here typing all this out and semi-pout, the one thing I know that would act as a pick-me-up is nothing else but a nice, soft, squishy, blue gummy bear. I'll even take one without the healthy crap and just bite it's beary lil head off and let the happiness flow through my veins.

Everyone's lives need a bit of gumminess!

12 October, 2012

The Joys of Being the First One..

First one what? Well, the first one in many cases!

Take my current little reason for being happy, cheery at least; I'm the first one up!
I am always the first one up in this house but usually I'd be less inclined to linger and read the paper or even think about blogging. I have some time on my hands and I'm relishing the joys of having the house all to myself.

I'm realized something, except for people at work (and when my folks are around), my family doesn't do the whole 'good morning' bit. Red gets up when I call him and is always bleary-eyed and scratches various parts of his anatomy while yawning like those lions from Animal Planet. He curls up on one of the sofas or takes the newspaper and seems to just transitions another awake-sleep.

Definition: awake-sleep- when you are actually awake but for all practically purposes you are sleeping since everything that's happening around you passes you by(especially your wife's comments). You are semi-supine and in a mild-vegetative state.

Red usually doesn't come alive till the first sip of coffee hits his throat- been there, done that, totally sympathize! But in the time that he's quasi-comatose anything I say or do will be met with a blank stare, if at all and would never even make it to his short-term memory.

MLM wakes up with a warbling, whining,grumpy, happy, giggly (take your pick) kind of an attitude and usually rolls around all over the place so I can't pick him up from bed and get him started on his day. Depending upon how much and how well he's slept the previous night, it's either a tug-of-war or some gentle persuasion that gets him out of bed and usually sprinting towards his toys.

So, why am I happy right now? Well...I'm up. Those two are curled up asleep and I get to decide when I wake them up. Am enjoying the sounds of birds chirping, the sights on the road, the smell of coffee awaiting me while I finish this post and most of all because till the bell rings and the maid arrives it's a state of suspended animation for me.
That bell ringing is like the starter gun signaling the mad dash that the morning will assume till I again regain tranquility by sending them both off to work and school and revel in me time.

TGIF indeed!!

06 October, 2012

Rewind the last 3 week

Well, maybe not rewind, a retrospect more likely but am not at my best at 5 in the morning.
Especially since I haven't been able to sleep courtesy a non-killer but persistent headache nonetheless!

Today marks 3 weeks that I got back to working. Woo hoo! 3 weeks!! Yay! bring on the pension plan already!! Now, now...3 weeks may be miniscule, taken in the backdrop of the whole work cosmos waiting to devour working parents but it's been a BIG 3 weeks for us as a family.

It's helterskelter in the mornings and I fully expect Charles Manson to come in and just add to the riot! The Biodiversity week (everyone clap now that Hyderabad is in the cynosure of all eyes...polite, bored (forced) clapping follows) has lead to heaps of problems for those of us not so bio-diverse.

The traffic jams, the mini-craters in the roads, the constant police vigilance and the mounting road rage just adds that "something" special to your mornings when you drive off to work and try to get reintegrated with the gerbil race. Eh?
We are not rats! Well...this time around am determined not to be a rodent so I will pick cute, fuzzy innocuous critters who can also race. But are gerbils rodents too? Never mind ..too early in the day to get my Darwin groove on!

The mornings are the worst honestly! Breakfast has come to signify getting some solids into the offspring who for some reason feels the time lag between getting up at 8 am rather than 7:30 is massive. And then he MUST have his bubbles! I mean how can we be sure that all the nooks and crannies are clean if they haven't been doused liberally in a bubble bath?
So by the time the school van arrives, at 8:30 no less, we need to get the child up, get him brushed (have you smelt morning breath on a kid! Yikes!!), bathed, fed, clothed, packed for school and out the door in time.

Now adding to the fun of all this newness of my new innings at work was Red's transition to a new org after having worked with his first (and only company till recently) for nearly 10 years. So there we were..all 3 of us with totally 3 things to do and places to go to- me to work, Red to a another place and MLM to daycare.

Here's a breakdown of how it goes:

I rush out the door by 8:15 so I can get to work by 8:45 at the very latest. If I get out at 8:20, I may get to work only by 9:15, yup! The office seems to move further way in those five minutes. I put in a cd (a medley of retro rock for the last 2 days) once I hit the first red light and bring out the eyeliner for the second light. The Gods that Change Traffic Lights are benevolent enough to wait for me to apply it comfortably so I don't end up looking like a raccoon while entering work.
My hair is still in it's bed-hair stage and will submit only once I get into work and not before. I try not to brush my hair in the car. I shed more than a lab these days and all I need is for the hair to mingle with the dark upholstery or for the offspring to get sneezing fits from it.
Note to self: Vacuum car over weekend anyhow.

So I get into work, with trusted coffee mug in tow and take life-altering sips before facing the rest of the world. Then come afternoon I start making calls to the daycare to see if MLM has eaten, how much and what he's currently up to. Then I head out to pick him up while he's semi-snoozing, conked out or chirping like he's high!
These days the new object of his affections is a blimp that's been put up recently and he keeps pointing it out from his car seat till I notice and say, "OOH! NICE!" Not acknowledging aforementioned blimp keeps him repeating it till I look at the damn thing and comment with some amount of life in my voice. It goes something like this- LOOK Mamma, LOOK, LOOK,LOOK,LOOK,LOOK,LOOK,LOOK! Stop it! I can't look I'm driving for Pete's sake! LOOOOOOOOOOOK!!!! BALLOOOOON! Ok, ok...pretty balloon! LOOOK MAMMA LOOK!!! OOOH...Nice balloon...look how it goes side to side (at which juncture he starts singing "Gymbo the clown goes side to side...all day long!"). And finally peace prevails.

We get home and I've barely parked when all sorts of potty-peepee emergencies come to this child's head! So we rush and often leave the school bag, daycare bag, my handbag and sometimes groceries for later. I barely get the door open and he rushes to his toys instead of making a beeline for the loo like I'd have hoped. Any efforts at trying to elicit information about previously stated emergencies only brings out demands (not requests, DEMANDS) for snacks, juice, paints and everything that doesn't belong in a loo.

So, emergency balloon deflated, I lock him at home for 2 minutes, pop back down to the car and haul up everything like a beast of burden and look around for a jumbo mug of coffee. Can you guess what happens when  I finally plonk myself down and take the first sip? Yup! He has to go to the bathroom. This time for good. It's the big stuff now. So on we rush, him telling me to get the toilet seat as if I'm some kind of a newbie mom. Once the deed is done, hands are elaborately washed, not so very subtle signs are given indicating a bubble bath is preferred, yet again, and I finally sit down to my neglected coffee.
And I swear this child waits for me to sip at the drink before unleashing something else on me! And this time it's, " Siddharth eat. AAH!" followed by an open mouth and a finger pointing inside in case I haven't cottoned on to the idea that's being conveyed.
And snack time follows.

All this while my coffee seethes, simmers and fizzles out but I drink it anyway because I need caffeine more than oxygen!

But hectic as some parts of life have become- it's been pretty damn good to clean the cobwebs from my head. Thinking again, thinking on things pertaining to more than child care and child rearing, what to make for the lunch and dinner. I still do all that but earlier I'd got hemmed in by these things and wasn't able to stretch my mental muscles. That process has now started. And boy! are those muscles tired.

And it's largely due to the fact that the daycare demon has been conquered. Not that daycare is preferred by MLM but he's not fighting it the way he used to earlier. He's marked his territory there I guess :) and the morning rush leaves me a bit winded but I get enough time to unwind in the afternoon and all through dinner leading up to bedtime. That I'm a total, complete zombie if I don't conk off by 10:30 and once I sleep I need a hydrogen bomb exploding to get me to ask, "huh..whahappan, is everything okkk...zzzzz".

Red usually laughs about these things the next morning, that is until I try to shoo him into leaving the paper behind and going for his bath, not to leave the house without eating anything and not leaving the wet towel on the bed!

Such is our life. But it's a nice little life and we're all surviving. So far.
AMEN.