funny ha-ha

Of Middle Fingers And Snakes

I recently changed my ride from a hatchback to an MUV. When I say recent I mean just a few hours ago.

I was picking up the offspring from school and he was happily frolicking in the backseat, bouncing with joy and making crinkly sounds in the plastic covers that I’d not had a chance to take out as yet. All in all he was a happy camper. And as the case is while he’s camping happily, he asks me a series of ‘Do you know’ questions. Today was no different.

We started with a question trap that I’d inadvertently fallen into when I told him I’d seen a monitor lizard cross the street very close to his school. After interrogating me about the size and the gaping maws and the venom of the said reptile, he gave me a disdainful look when I told him I’d only paused briefly while trying hard not to squish the lizard when it scurried off into the bushes. It, unfortunately, hadn’t stopped long enough to give me its life history and venom potency details.

Then began the story of reptiles and their offspring. We spoke of ovi and viviparous snakes; something I’d rather not have spoken of at all. All while I was enjoying the smell of a new car, listening to songs on brand new speakers…which apparently is the most apt time to speak of baby cobras.

Anyhoo, on special request he agreed to stop talking about king cobra babies hatching and killing grown people and then he threw me for a toss! Here’s how he did it-” Hey Ayu…do you know a boy in the 2nd grade showed someone the middle finger in school and then he got into trouble?!! Have you shown (he said showed but my grammar mode refuses to let me be ungrammarly) the middle finger to anyone?

And this is where you cross the realm from being a good, honest parent into one who lies to their kid because isn’t 8 too young to be flippin’ the bird?! Or talking about it?

I told him piously that NO I hadn’t and what did showing the middle finger mean anyhow? I was told very solemnly that it’s a very bad thing and kids can go to jail for saying it. And that’s when I had to know more about this oh-so taboo word that sent kids to jail. So I did a dramatic,” Oh no…really??!!” And pat came the reply-YES!! It’s worse than saying F***!! I never say F*** because you told me that saying F*** is a bad thing so I never say F***. Ever!!”

I think some days the universe has a smartass mode it activates just to give parents their comeuppance and to prevent them from being smug-knowitalls!

Tech-Savvy Woes

I’ve written earlier about the advent of Alexa in our lives. Red was in the market for good quality speakers and was considering buying Sonos and then suddenly got his head turned by the cute lil dot that now talks to us in a STRONG American accent and frequently gets our song choices wrong because she doesn’t get us much. And that’s funny because the offspring has his own twangy accent that sounds kind of like Alexa and yet they don’t always communicate correctly.

Properly enunciated crisp diction rings her bells though. Take for example, MLM wanting to hear Ra.One’s Chhammak Chhallo. He yelled out into the general direction of Alexa, “AlexaplaymeChamakChalo” and pat came the reply, “I’m sorry. I am unable to understand you.” El Brato grumbled, “Stupid Alexa” and then yelled out to me, “Ayu…come and tell Alexa the song I want to hear. It’s not listening to me.”

And there I was, speaking to the dot, yet again, telling her to play Chhammak Challo, said with tight lips and no hint of any accent anywhere. And she popped up saying, “Here’s ChamakChalo from VishalShaker”. I swear there was no difference between her and MLM but someone must have a hearing problem somewhere so I’m still running interference for them both and waiting till he asks me to tell her to play ‘Rashke Qamar’. Last time he asked her to play the song she played Paula Abdul’s Rush Rush

For my troubles, I get to hear the dratted song on loop till my brains start to leak out of my ears. *rolls eyes*

Signing off!

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V-Day Bloglet

I woke up a sleepy male this morning with a nuzzle, a hug and a kiss and told him I loved him. He replied by saying, “Me too. Can I watch the iPad after I come back from school today?”

Be still my beating heart! Such emotion will sweep me away…

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A picture from the days of yore when I didn’t have to wrestle him down to kiss him silly!

Zeus Had Elves

I swear you can’t make up the kind of stuff that resides in a child’s imagination!

Most of my talks with my kid start with him telling me something he’s heard or read or seen. The stuff he’s read and seen is more reliable given the way his mind processes information. The stuff he’s heard tends to often have a lot of comic relief because his mind was at warp speed while his ears were trying hard to catch up.

So today’s backseat session began with him telling me about the story of The Happy Prince. After getting to the near finale he told me about the God who asked his elves to go down to earth and collect the Happy Prince’s heart and the swallow (or something along those lines).

Hearing me go, “What the…” he says ” Yeah…the God..I think his name was Zeus and he had elves”. Now Oscar Wilde with his cheeky humor is laughing somewhere but even then he might find the idea of Zeus with elves as incongruous. So I asked the offspring again, “Zeus had elves? Like Santa?” And after a few moments of pondering comes the reply, ” No, not elves but those fat-baby flying thingies.”

Oh Lord…angels preserve us. Or the fat baby-flying thingies at the very least. Amen.

Loose Lips…

Yesterday while running an errand I got blocked into a narrow lane by an imbecilic cabbie who had parked bang in the middle of the road with no thought for anyone else. Apparently when you have to take a whizz everything comes a poor second.

So there I was, getting more annoyed by the minute with bystanders trying to help me find my way out of an impossibly narrow space between the badly parked cab and a tractor. To make it worse, some of them mumbled, “lady driver” because a male driver would have pulled off a feat worthy of the Knight Bus and squeezed through the wedge of space available, nevermind if it spelled the death of their car’s paintjob.

As always, adding to the fun was my kid, who from the back seat kept offering me his helpful tips about how not having come out of the house at all would have been “so good” and how stopping for chips on the way back home would somehow miraculously solve all the problems.

Cut to 20 minutes later. Errant cabbie comes back post-pee, unapologetic and does a “talk-to-the-hand” gesture when I start giving him my “I want to squish you under my foot like the worthless slug you are” look. I guess I might have muttered a word that rhymes with duck and luck in a sotto voce manner. And guess who heard it with the windows half down and being a few feet away? The same child who can’t hear me when I’m yelling for him to clean his room, my loud voice booming through the whole house!

And this morning the little monster comes upto me in a moment I’ll always remember…he had a ridiculous toothpaste mushtache around his mouth, crud in his eyes and told me in a fake whisper, “You said the ‘f’ word yesterday”. My knee jerk reaction was to say, “No, I didn’t” followed by “What’s the f-word anyhow?” and he told me, enunciating it clearly enough for me to have a WTF moment.

And being a parent caught doing something wrong, I lied like a trueblue hypocrite and said, ” I said fudge…not the other thing”. And bang comes the question,” What’s fudge?” And I told him in great detail, trying to distract him from pondering on the original f-word. And it seemed to be working as well, till the monkey boy came back to bathroom door, whispered conspiratorially and told me, ” I know you said the F-WORD!!!” and he laughed a mini-villain laugh and scampered away.

Oh FUDGE!!!

Sunday Morning Bloglet

I did not think that I would have occasion to ever write the words: I woke up with a penny stuck to my leg. But the universe and (almost always) ny child conspire to have me say the most unlikely things in life

Happy Sunday people.

Here’s to more currency being found on your person and preferably the kind you don’t have to exchange before you can use.

Salut!

Bedhair: A Quick Look

Have you ever had one of those days when you got up, stumbled to the loo, turned on the light and thought,”Dang! My hair looks awesome!” How’d it get like that? No? Well, that’s understandable…the likelihood of bed-hair looking good rather than freakish…well the odds are against it.

I can categorize my bedhairiness ranging from mild to oh-my-god-give-me-a-hat.

It can manifest in a mild cowlick a la Dennis the Menace that I either ignore or pat down with some water to the slightly creepier Bride of Frankenstein look. 

Btw, I chose Mrs.Frank as a reference point because a) Einstein’s hair is just so passe b) I am graying these days ergo…

Anyhoo, bedhair is only troublesome if you have to meet people. Especially people you don’t know and have to make small talk with while some other work is on-going in the background.

Nothing is makes conversation falter more than having a head of hair is which partly curled inwards and the rest is staticky and pretty much pointing every which way it wants. Some days there’s just not enough hair serum in the word.

I remember a scene from the movie Moonlight and Valentino (not worth watching) where Elizabeth Perkins wants to look more attractive for Jon Bon Jovi and gets her hair styled to get a “I just got down from a bike” look and when she sets out on a date with JBJ, he of the less than perfectly styled head of hair, rolls up the windows because he doesn’t want his hair to end up looking like hers.

But away from all the references, the way you wake up in the morning, makes a huge difference to how the rest of your day plays out. You can go from happy to hilarious to hillbilly in a manner of seconds. The worst situation is when you think there’s an intruder standing right behind you- your hair looks *that* out there!

So, slightly vain people…oil your hair a bit especially if it starts to frizz, don’t comb it with 90 brush strokes like you read you needed to do before bedtime. We’re challenging a lot of the gyaan the 90s threw at us and always keep a spray bottle handy…it’ll either help you calm your hair down or jerk you awake to see the intruder you thought was lurking behind you, was just you with an angry head of hair and grumpy countenance.

P.S: not a single bad hair day can compare to this lady though…so take heart…