Tag Archives: bringing up kids

Nuts To You!

Posted on by

People tend to see shapes in the clouds, some even see things with their eyes closed but I think TO kind of took the cake today.

After he got home from school today and was having his snack, he suddenly said ‘Mustache’. For a second I thought he meant I needed to schedule an appointment with the beautician and then he said, “Look Ayu, there’s a moon and a kidney.”

By then I knew it wasn’t me he was referring to…phew! And then he pointed at the jar on the table that had cashews. And pointed out where the mustache, kidney and moon were.

So why am I not gloating over my child’s sense of abstraction and imagination? Well..a few minutes later when I asked him to pick up his socks off the floor and put them in his hamper, he needed help finding them. Guess where they were? Right at his feet!

Oh me, oh my. Kids!

Summer Reveals

Posted on by

TO tells me a lot of stuff but he doesn’t always share stuff I want to know about…how he’s doing in school, something new on his radar or just things he’s thinking about.

Now that we’re in the vacay mode, he’s sharing stuff from his school backpack. His drawing book came out today and he came and showed me stuff he’s made all year long. All 3 pages of it.

So here’s a glimpse of the “mindscapes” of a child-

Bloglet: Boomerang Bantering

Posted on by

Every now and then I use slangs with TO and often it comes back to me in a very amusing way. He was using selective audition with me today when I was asking him to do a couple of things around the house. I rolled my eyes at him and told him not to be a doofus. And bang comes back the reply, “You’re a doofus!”

I walk off and mentally tell myself to wait for it and sure enough comes the query,”Ayu, what’s a doofus?” I tell him it’s a silly person and he mulls it over and says, “Ok..you’re a doofus Ayu”.

Ah..summer holidays..such a joy!

Blissful Calamity: November 2010

Ye Gods…

Posted on by

My child is currently anti-clowns. Especially Pennywise. Apparently he snuck a look at the new IT and it creeped him out big time. So Pennywise is the present symbol of everything that’s bad in his freaky little world.

Today after he got back from school he was using me as a trampoline and I made a scary face and did my scary laugh to get him to leave me alone. Apparently I was too successful because he called me Pennywise.

Knowing how he feels about the character, I made my sad face (I have a whole gamut, I’m not like Zoolander) and he immediately rushed to mollify me saying,”Don’t be sad..you’re just like Pennywise…only nice.”

Yeah..just call me Gymbo.

Morning Bloglet

Posted on by

Monday to Friday my child looks at me as the incarnation of the Wicked Witch of the West+her flying monkeys all rolled into one. 

Weekends I do the same to him when he gets up before I want him to. 

Cue Elton John singing ‘Circle Of Life’ in the background.

9

Posted on by

Red and I completed 9 years in our parenting journey. They have been a lot of things but never dull. 

We were handed a longish and skinny baby who filled out quickly enough and we couldn’t stop nom-noming on his cheeks, his nose and all his little limbs.

You have never been digustingly mushy and annoyingly gagworthy till you have a kid. The most absurd nonsense erupts from your lips. Goo-goo gaga seems normal. You string together the weirdest rhymes and play horsey and never think of your dignity at all.

Your offspring could be a bald, drooly, raspberry-blowing run-of-the-mill infant and you beam the instant you lay eyes upon him and think…isn’t that the most beautiful baby the world ever saw?! And the annoying baby talk starts all over again while the baby in question gazes at you in mild exasperation.

Time passes…baby gets weaned off, learns to poop at the right time, the right place and thankfully in the right way. He goes off to school and you keep watching for tears and separation anxiety; never realizing you’re the one going through it. The child will bounce back sooner than you.

Kindergarten gives way to grade school and then a laptop-toting 9 year old tells you exactly what they want for their birthday right down to the guest list, food menu and how they want to celebrate.

The next day you’re dragging their butt out of bed so they can get back on the school grind and the child is suffering from a post-party hangover. They are stuck to the floor doing a 500-piece dino puzzle and you’re giving them a minute-by-minute update of how late you’re getting and how the bus won’t wait and you see the same tot who looked at you with fuzzy eyes and no idea of how the world works. He’s not really 9..he’s still your baby.

Awww

Backseat Diaries

Posted on by

MLM and I went to see Antman&Wasp today. We’d made plans ever since we saw the trailer online but I had some unexpected travel come up and the movie date got pushed back. It’s a testament to his affection that he waited to see the movie with me. Of course his father wasn’t keen on another superhero movie after I dragged him to see Deadpool-2 so going with me was kind of a moot point.

But I digress. After the movie, a gushing offspring started off with his commentary and critique of the movie from the backseat. He told me if he could ever be Antman then he’d definitely want me to be his Wasp aka partner because he loved me so much.

You’d be lulled into an “awww” right at this point except this child has my and his father’s DNA in equal measure. But sometimes it seems like those sets of gene are pounding my contribution to a pulp.

So I was told, after someone surfaced for air, that while I would have made a good Wasp, I wouldn’t fit into the costume because I was so fat! And all this said in the most matter of fact way as possible.

Adding fuel to the fire was an advert which was shown during before the movie started targeting good food habits by the way of reducing sugar, oil and salt.

I was asked why didn’t I reduce all those things? If I did I’d become thin and maybe be able to fit into the costume for Halloween…next year.

I swear this kid is geared up to be the most loving nemesis in the history of the world.

A Blog A Day- Day#1

Posted on by

I’ve been telling the offspring to buckle down and do a couple of things but being a parent means leading by example (or so we pretend we do) so I’m going to try and hit a few targets of my own. Expect grumblings from time to time.

I want to blog more. I love to write and I’m not picky about what I choose to write about. I’m usually reading something or the other, thinking about doing something and make plans for future trips and travels galore ergo loads of food for thought or bloggy material.

So this is going to be my honey-do list/things-to-do/bucket-list galore and inshallah by 31st December, I’d have done at least 100 consecutive blog/bloglets and been able to cross things off on the ever-growing lists that my brain throws up and Red ducks very nimbly.

And on that note I felt a gaze searing to me and looked up to see MLM staring at me. Locking gazes me with he said” Cookie”. Brief. To the point and hungry.

So here I go to get him a cookie. Come back tomorrow for day two of my A.B.A.D challenge.

Alexa Mornings…

Posted on by

Red bought an Echo Dot for th house last year. Suffice to say it’s the digital pet. The offspring has bonded with Alexa quite a bit. I keep hearing his voice trilling , “Alexaaaa” on and off right from the time he’s up in the mornings.

Echo Dot has more capabilities that can be tapped into if you’re an US-based user. Lesser so in India. But apparently this year Amazon Music will be making its entry into the Indian market and then this kid will really go wild. Now there’s a Bluetooth sync with my phone and the songs which are saved on a separate song app or on my phone can be played. But we have to be far more hands on. And we’re all about remote management in this house. If we can just park our butts somewhere and just ask for songs to be played, it would be a pretty darn good thing!

This morning the offspring woke to a house with an absent father (courtesy a business trip) and he sat and pouted about missing the parent for a bit. And in an effort to cheer himself up, he turned the house into a dance club, playing Bollywood hits before 6:30 am. All courtesy Alexa.

Where’s the parental settings people? Is that in the next upgrade?

In the meanwhile, Kala Chashma gets looped sun up to sun down just because Alexa can!

Yo!

Priorities

Posted on by

We have a Gopro mini camera. The offspring loves it because he can take it underwater. I love it because it helps me not lug the entire camera gear I tend to normally take.

For a totally amateur photog I have quite a bit of gear; which we discover only while packing.

We’re vacationing in Kerala now and I got the head harness for the camera so we can have fun in the ocean and have our hands free at the same time.

MLM aka the offspring wore his swimming glasses today and mounted the camera on top much to Red’s dismay because in the water the brat turns into a much more slippery customer to tackle. To add to that, the added weight of the glasses and the camera kept hampering his foray into deeper waters. Phew!

When Red complained to me about bringing the camera along I told him clearly, ” When in doubt, save the kid first and then the camera.”

Here endeth the lesson.