Category: health

Realizations…Bite!

FortunateCaveLeave a comment

I am currently facing a gargantuan task. I have to sort out the images I have with me on my hard drive. The device is running out of space and I know I’ll keep taking more pictures so I have no option but to optimize the usage as soon as possible.

So, what’s the brouhaha about? I should be able to ruthlessly delete stuff, right? Well, it needs to be taken into account that I have certain OCD features which have prevented me from doing this in the past. I am a hoarder *hangs head in shame* so it’s pretty darn tough for me to throw anything away especially images of my child, taken from the moment he was born till the one I took of him yesterday.

As it is with fast moving bodies, you need to click a good number of images before you find the one which isn’t excessively blurry or the one which has your subject looking exactly the way you want them to. So it stands to reason that the human hurricane that he was before he turned 6, has way too many pictures which contain if nothing else, but a part of an ear, a pinkie or the curve of his butt. And it is now my “pleasure” to sort through those treasures and keep the ones which I absolutely can’t do without.

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Did I also mention that I need things organized in a said manner so I don’t have a mini fit looking at images all lumped together? The feeling of seeing a folder arranged into sub-folders which may or may not have their additional sub-folders is *quite* a joy. Neat. Tidy and most importantly, properly labelled. I’m quite the labeler. They make it easy to locate things in life like the trip you took when the child was 2 years old and it was winter. Or the images from when he was in diapers but sporting a bald look. It all adds up…to idiosyncrasies but it can’t be helped. It’s part genes and part malaise.

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Here I go, down the rabbit hole of images…..

39

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So here we are again…had to be, right? Birthdays being the yearly thing that they are. I am happy to report that the girth hasn’t kept up with my age. It would make turning 40 *quite* traumatic.

As time goes by, I find that I settle into these little traditions on certain days; birthday lunches with good friends. Bonding over booze is something that we cannot ever take too lightly. The same goes for importance of Bollywood music as it turns out. More on that later.

A good friend and I made a pact this year to discover new places (eateries) and try them out all through the year. And that’s been going on fairly steadily. I also try to make it for as many of the movies that I want to watch. Just got to head back before T.O gets back though and make it look like I’ve been busy folding clothes and doing laundry all day. Moms aren’t allowed to have too much fun without their kids or so the thought process goes.

Have more leisure time on my hands since I stopped working and most days are a heady mix of streaming something on Netflix and reading. It’s actually become a lot of rereading but books never go out of style. Especially John Sandford.

Book Read GIF

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My relationship with being healthy is an out of sight-out of mind kind of thing. If I’m not focused on it, it’ll never happen. And I end up losing focus very quickly in this area. Note to self: find out if ADD can happen selectively in a person’s life. All I can say is that I’ve not been patronizing unhealthy foods as much as I used to.

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diddly squats

This past year has been one that’s been quite memorable. More facetime (not app,the actual kind) with friends and a bit of travel here and there.

I’ve basically trying hard not to make too many plans. I’ve always been a planner. Long before summer break came about, my suitcase would be packed up and I’d enjoy the process of planning for everything I’d be taking along with me. The little joys as it were.

But while planning is fine, sometimes in planning too much you kind of miss the day-to-day. And the day to day is what adds up to everything else when you sit back and look at everything that’s been done. So that’s the focus now. Plan but at a slower pace and sometimes just let things happen. My kid broke a hand. We dealt with it. He’s now swinging from monkey bars and swinging cricket bats with equal ease. Can’t plan for every eventuality and when stuff crops up, you deal. Simple. Red left his job, took a sabbatical and then got back on to the grind sooner than we thought. The only plans we made uber seriously, were about securing the future for our child and us. Everything else was icing on the cake.

So while I’ll never be the fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kinda person, I’m still going to (try to) take it easy. Maybe. Possibly. I’ll make a list… Sheeesh!

A quick look at the day itself and the night after.

Jager Bombs!

The jingbang who help cut the cake every year

Salut!

The Magic Of Coffee

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Caffeine is defined as ‘an alkaloid compound which is found especially in tea and coffee plants and is a stimulant of the central nervous system.’
I, on the other hand, would call it the life-giving and life-sustaining elixir which enables me to tolerate my fellow man, open my eyes in the morning without wishing a piano fell on people around me; basically not putting a hit out on people who keep me from my coffee.


Take this morning’s scenario- TO has trouble getting up in the mornings. So do I but I have been given the divine duty of getting my kid off to school ergo sleep can be sacrificed for the joy of knowing he’s boarding the yellow bus. Anyhoo, after what seems like eons in getting him to get out of bed and the zombie-walk to the loo where he can brush, he decided that *now* was the best time to lie down flat on a skateboard and S-L-O-W-L-Y roll his way to the dining table that was maybe 5 feet away.

Why, one might be tempted to ask. Well apparently the flesh and blood wanted to have his morning milk ‘on the go’ as it were.

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In such moments, coffee is the most glorious of gifts. It prevents you from turning into a banshee, dumping said cup of milk onto otherwise lovable offspring’s head and as the caffeine enters your system, you feel calm and barely-there tolerance pervade the space around you.

I do agree, I might have a wee addiction towards the bean. It has been my constant support for more than 26 years now. It has got me through many a thing. Kept me from throwing things at odious people and throwing odious people off other places.

A few weeks ago I was asked to cut back on milk and caffeine as a part of a “diet”. That it didn’t work out is a given. I took to lingering in the kitchen gazing at the cupboard where the coffee is kept. I sniffed the coffee powder a few times a day and wished I could mainline it. Yup…total junkie.

But all jokes aside, we all have our crutches in life. Some worse than others. Of all the things I could be doing, coffee seems to be the most benign.

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Channeling Animals

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Today I walked on all fours. In an extremely ungainly manner. Bum in the air, hands flat on the ground doesn’t do it for me. And also makes me appreciate the load my feet carry.

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My trainer occasionally gets his peeps to do various animal-walks. Red’s come back all winded doing a duck walk and apparently there’s no end to the variety of animals that can and will be channeled in the fight towards a fitter body. Here are a few that trainers love to inflict on us poor heavyweights.

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A crab walk

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A bear walk/crawl

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A crocodile walk

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The snake crawl

All of these are designed to impact the body positively; in theory. But doing them is another ball game altogether. Especially when all the body wants to do is curl up and sleep. Image result for hibernating like a bear

 

 

A Forced Hiatus

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I type this out, with the middle finger of my left hand raised and ostensibly flipping off the world at large. But that’s not so. I’m not that angsty. Or am I?

A few days ago I tried to save a silly glass from toppling over in the wind. The wind was gusty and the glass was flimsy. The breaking of the glass and my hand reaching out to save it happened simultaneously. Long story short- there was lots of blood, stitches and waiting in the emergency room, breathing in the hospital smell while the nerve that got nicked twanged on furiously. Ergo the raised middle finger that cannot bend.

I’m currently down with what’s called Neuropraxia. And Wikipedia very nicely and accurately describes it as thus, “Neurapraxia is a disorder of the peripheral nervous system in which there is a temporary loss of motor and sensory function due to blockage of nerve conduction, usually lasting an average of six to eight weeks before full recovery.”

For a person who talks with her hands as much as she does with her mouth (it’s a toss-up which one gets more weightage), it’s been VERY, VERY uncomfortable. Barring the episiotomy that I had while having T.O, I’ve never needed any surgical intervention and I was happy with that. And no…I won’t define an episiotomy! Those who know what it is are already shuddering; I don’t want the general populace cringing as well.

But back to flipping the bird. It’s not fun. It’s not remotely fun because after you exhaust all the middle finger jokes, you’re left with a finger that keeps sending electric-bolts like shocks up and down your hand and sometimes through your body; making your freeze in your tracks like an extended (and sometimes perverse) game of Statue!!

But all my bellyaching aside, it’s great to get some mobility back in the finger. And yes, I perpetually do give everyone in the vicinity ‘the bird’; whether warranted or not. Most importantly, the learning from this has been immense! Always drink whiskey. The glasses are sturdier and don’t shatter at the first contact with another object.

Nuff said.

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Why Life’s Like The Wizard Of Oz

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When I woke up with a weight on my chest this morning and realized it was my kid’s heel on my sternum, it led to yet another epiphany. Life’s like The Wizard Of Oz (hold the Wonderful).

Dealing with kids often morphs us (read me all the way through) into the Wicked Witch of the East. Red usually is the Good Witch and magically smoothes things over with his placid tone and his magic wand (aka hugs and kisses and a nicer, pleasanter demeanor) while I’m all riled up and fit to have an army of flying monkeys to do my nefarious deeds.

See, sleep is important. UBER important. And when sleeping with an adult, despite what they show you in the movies, they eventually disengage and go their own way. You don’t pretzel and spoon beyond a point. You have S-P-A-C-E. Blessed, blessed, blissful, beautiful space.

Red’s travelling now and the brat’s bunking with me. That means that after reading to him and doing a bit of cuddle time I have “space” for all the time it takes for him to fall asleep viz 10 minutes. And then the magnetic pull begins.

I have woken up with an elbow to my eye, a butt in my face or a child sprawled across my torso and me having dreams of drowning somewhere because I couldn’t breathe.

The child in question is damn smart. He gravitates towards the well-padded parent and not towards the bony one. EVER!

This morning was no different. After a night of semi-bingeing on Grey’s Anatomy (I know, I know…) I slept off good and proper and didn’t even have any weird dreams that I could recall. And then suddenly there was a sudden and rather sharpish whomp on my chest and lo and behold it was a child’s heel. Now MLM for reasons unknown to me has a pointy chin, elbows and heels that he loves to dig into his mother’s rather substantial flesh. Love I suppose…

I woke up and quasi-gently rotated said heel of said child off me and onto the bed and added 2 pillows between us for good measure but the moment was gone and sleep had fled. Again. And because am weird, I thought of the Wizard of Oz where my offspring isn’t Dorothy but Toto. The frisky puppy who got Dorothy into trouble in the first place. Frisky and lovable but irksome at times too.

So Toto and I will wait for the Good Witch to get back and then my flying monkeys will rest. Till Toto acts up again.

Y-A-W-NNNNN

The Unbearable Unsightlyness Of Playing

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Let it be noted that if I had to do anything amounting to slightly strenuous physical activity vs being bodily harmed, bodily harm would rule the roost.

The most apt description of my gait, run and overall physical movement is quite akin to the drunken hallucination from Dumbo. I kid you not.

Red has despaired and has moved his focus onto the one person whose hand-eye co-ordination can still be salvaged: MLM.

Why am I so bad at it? I honestly don’t know much beyond that heavy bodies take more effort to move and they sweat a whole bunch leading the heavy individual to feel lightheaded, awkward, clumsy and generally NOT GOOD AT ALL.

It’s not that I can’t hit a ball. I can. But then everyone ducks or waits for chunks of the ceiling to start raining down.

MLM’s latest fancy is playing squash (I thought it was the same as racquetball but the husband snootily told me they were different). He’s signed up for summer classes and we thought it would be a good family activity to indulge in. Well…the jury is still out on that one.

I did manage to get a half-assed rally going on with Red but then the ball seemed further and further away and the racquet didn’t seem to want to connect with the ball much at all. Again..left scratching my head.

But after I unwound myself from a striking pose my body had assumed, I found that these were the postures I was getting into. It goes without saying that none of them are optimum while playing squash.

1) Garden Cupid Statue: hark back to the chubby Cupid statues on pedestals, shooting an arrow but with direction changing each time a ball approaches. That’s my pose when I try and hit a ball that’s got lobbed a bit closer to the ground.

2) Hey! I’m Here: all the people marooned on desert isles usually have one moment where a ship passes by in the distant horizon and they jump up and down, waving like it’s what they were born to do. Well, that’s my hands above the head pose while trying to hit a shot that’s rebounded off the walls.

3) I’ve Fallen And I Can’t Get Up: my pose for a few seconds after trying to come out of the first pose

All along, in the background one would be able to hear deep and furious panting…

And that’s after 10 mins of being on the squash courts.

C’est la vie!