What You Say Vs What They Hear

I keep wondering what is it that makes my kid do the opposite of what I ask (read threaten/yell) him to do.

These are the very regular occurrences in our house:

• Stand still gets interpreted as be anything but still.
• Be quiet or HUSH= keep chattering incessantly.
• Just a minute/second= I want it NOW!
• Give me a minute to catch my breath= peppered by demands.
• No iPad/TV = GIVE iPad/TV NOW!
• Let's eat dinner= I want JAMP (jam).
• Let's each lunch= I want chips!
• Let's brush your teeth= eating the toothpaste.
• Rinse your mouth properly= water trickling out of the corners of the mouth with zero rinsing having taken place.
• Enough ketchup= squeezing out another massive glob of it.
• Eat properly with the spoon= eating with both hands in one go and looking absolutely simian in the process.
• DON'T=DO
• ENOUGH= NEVER ENOUGH
• I'M ANGRY WITH YOU= thousands of kisses rained on my face as a bribe.
• GO STAND IN THE CORNER= slowly inching away from the corner and smiling like an evil monkey.
• Let's not put the Play Doh on the sofa= rubbing it even more into the fabric.
• Don't write on the walls= put handprints with paint instead.
• GO TO SLEEP= STAY UP AN EXTRA HOUR JUST TO SPITE ME.

See what I mean!

Clearly I live in the Land of Opposite and MLM is King!

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 wallops the weekend packs...

After a long time I just took off to spend time with a few friends. After a looong time.
The time off was utilized well and packed with laughs and catching up as was expected but there was waaay more excitement waiting for me back home.

Red was babysitting and in the process of sitting with the baby (who does everything but sit in one place) he noticed that one of the darts was missing a small tablet-like magnet from it's bottom. And he looked high..and he looked low. And came to the conclusion which any parent of a toddler will- his son had swallowed the magnet. What helped this New Age Sherlock Holmes come to this deduction was the fact that the aforementioned toddler had been sucking on the dart with gusto a while back.

So Toddler-Parent#1 called up Toddler-Parent#2 and spoke of the near-calamity. T-P#2 called up the pediatrician and her Doctor-For-All-Seasons&Illnesses friend and found that they both recommended getting a xray done of the greedy gobbler's chest and tummy to make sure that the magnet was indeed in the tummy and not taking a nap in the throat passage somewhere. And off they went.

Incidentally the child in question was his usual self..he didn't seem to be "stuck" to anything in particular or have a more magnetic personality than usual...sorry...fatigue forces out my non-funny bone.
Anyway, after battling through the hordes of parents waiting with their sniffling, crying, whining,tantrumy,quiet-as-a-mouse chilren our turn finally came just so the doc could write down the kind of xray needed for MLM (Mommy's Lil Monster). Talk about being rigid and cautious. Malpractice anyone?

The taking of the xray however, was another doozy. Red and I had to get MLM in a position reminiscent of a person being stretched out on the rack with Red holding the hands and me the feet. The position took 15 mins and more poses than what a fashion photographer probably puts his anorexic models through, whereas the actual xray was over by the time I blinked. Talk about an anticlimax.
So MLM cheerfully waved the xray tech bye even with tears streaming down his face and hiccuping into the bargain.

Long story short- no magnetic. No harm. No foul. No emetic needed. No laxative either. Nothing!!!

But at the end of the day I had a brainstorm (which, if drunk enough or stressed enough I WILL try) that I could feed MLM enough of those tiny magnets to create a strong enough magnetic pull from within and then stick him up on the refrigerator door and go about my business! He can wave at the whole world from his elevated position and work on his magnetism all in one go :)