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.

The new lexicon...

Times change and with them things assume new meaning or undergo quite a bit of metamorphosis.
Take for example Moi. Earlier I'd just have been one of the many women who are raising a child. But today, am so much more. I am a label. A new breed of people if you will. I am...wait for it...a S.A.H.M!! Ta da!!
A Stay At Home Mom for the doofuses out there who aren't upto date on the new lingo.

And while on the topic of the new lingo let's take a stroll through the garden of phrases and words that the SAHMs espouse or have thrust upon them.
These are random and not in any particular order of importance.

• Baby-sat: very simple one indeed! It doesn't indicate the past tense of someone taking care of your baby. It means just what it reads like. Baby. Sat. The thing you were so happy about at when around 5-6 months of age your baby first sat. But it's the last thing they want to do now and just act like their feet have springs attached on the bottom.

• Friends with benefits: again..simple. You are friends with some who benefits by association of playing with your baby and being hugged and kissed by the darling munchkin. And YOU benefit by palming off the precious bundle onto someone else while you deliberate how strong you should make your coffee to get through the rest of the day!

• Toilet training: a tough one. To get your child to do and also what it implies. For you it means conveying to the child, "handle your own doodoo in the long run. Mommy's cleaned enough bums to merit shivers at the sight of a wet wipe" :(

• Nanny Cam: ostensibly for spying on the nanny to prevent any harm from coming to the child and making sure the nanny isn't some kind of a Satan worshipper while you're away. But actually it's the pleasure of knowing that while you DO pay for it, someone also pays dearly for the joys of spending days on end with your dear little poochums.

• Mother's helper: can be anything from a bib, a spoon, but usually ends up taking the form of a television and hypnotizes your offspring so you can detox and count to 10 in your mind and possibly implode rather than explode.

• The first word: a misnomer if there ever was one. It starts out slowly but rapidly spirals into so many words that you never end up having the last one. 

• The last word: uttered by your child when he/she finally sleeps off for the day. The last word is followed by blessed peace and a realization that there is indeed too much noise in the world around you.

• Clean: a word on household cleaner bottles and a word you used to know but haven't been able to employ in a while and probably won't be till your child goes outside the house for long periods of time.

• Spanking: something that hurts you more than it hurts the spanked one and you usually end up apologizing for the booboos that you caused. At the end of the day, its your fault.

• Colds: hell on earth as far as toddlers are concerned. The house resembles a Mardi Gras parade with the amount of tissue paper confetti that gets strewn around. And you keep fervently wishing for the dreaded mucus to go and infest elsewhere but not in that particular nose. It's also known as Damnation without Relief- For the parents.

• Threats: what you make a few times every day/ hour/ minutes (take your pick) and what your child will counter by picking up the phone and telling on you to parents or parents-in-laws and make you look like Cruella De Vil!

• Sleep: a thing of the past. Nuff said!