Tag: parenting

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2020

The year started on a fun enough note. Had plenty of adored people around. There was music. There was dancing. There were hyper kids. Loads of alcohol flowing as well. And lights flashing…the whole shebang!

And then we crashed, bleary-eyed, into bed only to be woken up at what seemed like an ungodly hour but it was actually well past the crack of dawn. Bang into the new year I realized what a smartass a 10 year old can be.

I have…sigh…had a rather favorite coffee mug that’d been a part of my everyday routine for more than 6 years. It was nothing fancy. Just a bright yellow mug with Homer Simpson’s face on it, full of his usual goofiness. I’d bought it during my first ‘mom’s weekend away’ trip with the bestie and it was intended for Red. I don’t remember how it became mine, but it did. So the mug broke fairly early in the morning although after I’d bonded with it for what turned out to be the last time and I was more than a “bit miffed”. He-who-shall-not-be-named had butterfingers as usual and had broken the mug just near his feet while not having any slippers on (as usual). Shards were everywhere and Homer was irreparably broken.

After having realized there were no more storms to come, TO saw me sweeping up the broken pieces and looking sad while doing so. In expressing solidarity with his “favorite mother” he stood in attention, clicked his heels together, saluted and hummed a mournful tune. I have never been more caught between looking stern and controlling my laughter at the same time. Laughter won out. Kids..whaddya gonna do!

Speaking of…guess what the kid who kept whining during most of the train journey to my hometown say when I asked him to shush for what must have been the n(nth)th time? ” Oh! so uptight!!” I’m fairly sure I goggled at him while he cackled and ran away like the sprite that he is.

I’m not setting too many goals this year barring one- minimalism. Wherever possible. Wherever…and of course targets will be set to travel more, read more, do new things and make more good memories.

May 2020 find you all in more states of contentment and as little tumult as possible.

Cheers!

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Alexa…Get Me A Gun!

I got too busy catching up with my folks and forgot to publish this last night.

A little girl who’s become a part of our family of 3 was paying us a visit this evening. Needless to say with TO turning 10 and his cuteness factors dipping day by day; a chirping and twirling child always scores higher on the Awww scale. And they know it too!

TO was busy utilizing some unscheduled screen time when his little friend dropped by. After giving her some toys to play with, he snuck back to the living room to watch some inane crap that he’s very fond of these days.

When I asked for a quick sitrep, the little one promptly ratted him out and smugly waited till he came to play with her. Ah..girl power!

They played, they made a dinosaur park, fenced with dominoes and then they started tormenting my poor poor Alexa.

Now our Echo Dot’s a Gen One and getting on in the years. After going back and forth trying to decipher TO’s accent and then just going back to her factory settings, she now had to contend with understanding chipmunk. Because that’s how fast and perpetually talking 3 year old girls sound like.

Today Alexa had to shuffle between Baby Shark, Faded and Bulleya, which she kept interpreting as Imagine Demons’ Believer. After getting barked at by an increasingly annoyed munchkin and being spoken to by a giggling older child, Alexa gave up the ghost and just rebooted. That’s how she lets us know she’s not going to take our shit anymore!!

Soon after I was dropping a reluctant munchkin home. I’d already disappointed her by not forking over chips before dinner time and limiting the cookies to plain vanilla ones and nothing worth licking in leisure.

She was a bit miffed with me and to recover some ground with her I told her Red’s birthday was coming up and asked for gift ideas. She said, “Give him a gun. A big one.” Seeing my surprised face she added, “Give him some polos too. They come in green colors and they are nice to eat. Polos and guns are the best gift ever!”

There. It’s settled. Red’s going to have the oddest 40th birthday ever. Tons of polos and hopefully a gun. But maybe El Munchino isn’t too far off the mark. Look at Red instructing the flesh&blood in the fine art of aiming and shooting. Ah..out of the mouths of babes…

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Saturday Morning Conversations

I crashed by myself last night…was listening to music, sorting out playlists…everything you need head space for and which can’t always be done effectively with someone staring at you with googly eyes and asking, “what are you doing?” for the millionth time.

I avoided weird bedtime conversations but couldn’t avoid them during the next morning when someone decided to wake up and smell the roses with unbounded enthusiasm before his mother got caffeinated.

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Imagine having slept off to music spanning the decades along with conversations with friends on and off till the middle of the night and then waking up to the most #dafuq question one can imagine first thing in the morning viz, “How old do you think De Villiers is?” And on seeing my glazed, semi-blurry vision starting to go the angry, snorting bull way, TO preemptively turns his face skywards and says, “Why me?!!” Nothing quite like having your angsty moment stolen and impersonated by the person who brought it on in the first place.

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So on we went with the good morning kisses and inane questions till my brain cried out for coffee once more. Red being the coffee guy at home was hollered at and he promptly went and made some for HIMSELF and not me. There’s only a few things a woman can say to her husband at such times and I tell back on Barb#1 aka ‘ I gave you a kid, can’t you even get me a cup of coffee?’

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We are fond of our drama in this household. Be it me trying to bury myself under the covers so I don’t have to hear my kid drone on about some ODI post which Tendulkar decided to retire from cricket

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or trying to bargain for more screen time or me giving the evil eye to the placidly coffee-sipping spouse who’s going to need me to find his stuff for him soon; this is just how we roll.

Slainte!

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Conversations From The Back Seat

TO’ school’s set to reopen come next Monday (does a mini jig of joy). I like my kid being at home provided he doesn’t get into that mode of where he wants me to generate things for him to do and then proceeds to shoot down each and every one of them just because!

Anyhoo, yesterday we drove up to his school in a lovely semi-cloudy weather and got him kitted out for the academic year. On the way there he kept fiddling with my phone and kept changing songs like it was a speed dating event. So I kept a strict no-phone only radio policy for the ride back home. Apparently retro English and Hindi music just don’t cut it with kids who’re growing up listening to DJ Snake and Maroon 5 *rolls eyes* So we decided to chat instead. And when I say “we”, I always mean HE and HE alone.

So there we were, zipping down a good, smooth road and then comes the question, “Did Tony really die?” Now I know who the Tony is but we’re trying to teach the brat to be specific in his talk so I asked him who Tony was. In the meanwhile the radio decides that playing Ecuador would be a great idea! So there’s foot tapping music going on, a finger poking me on my shoulder and talk of some random Tony dying…all in a day’s work. By the time it emerged that Tony was actually Tony Starke and I reminded my child that it was actually a movie and not to take everything too seriously he’d moved onto something else. This is what he moved on to. Our conversation takes me to lala land sometimes…

TO:”Hey Ayu, I want to move to New York.!” ME: Cool baby…it’s a fun place…but why New York though? TO: Because that’s where the radioactive spiders live. DUH!!

Sebastian Whaaaa GIF - Sebastian Whaaaa Maniscalco GIFs ME: Ummm…there are no radioactive spiders. And if you want spiders you can stay in India, why go to New York? TO: BECAUSE.AYU. THAT’S. WHERE THE TALL. BUILDINGS. ARE. DUH! DUH!! ME: Ok…walk me through this. You want to be Spiderman?! TO: DUH! Yeah!! ME: Stop saying DUH it’s annoying. TO: Ok F-I-N-E!! But I want a spider to bite me and swing from tall buildings. New York has tall buildings.

New York Skyline Animation by Kürşat Ünsal | Dribbble ...ME: That’s true…but if you really want to bitten by a spider and turn into Spiderman maybe you should visit your grandfather (My father-in-law who lives in a less urban set-up) and just walk around the gardens there..there’ll be loads of spiders to bite you. [Yes, I did honestly say that to my only child].

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TO: Wonderingly…do they have a science club there though? If I don’t have a science club then I’m just going to get bited and not get superpowers. ME: You should ask your father…he grew up there. Am sure they had science there. TO: But he doesn’t have superpowers…I need radioactive spiders. Do you promise to send me to New York so I can get bit? ME: I promise baby. Be quiet now because there’s too much traffic for me to navigate through. TO: Ok Ayu…you drive, I’ll sit here and think of spiders.

 

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Retroblogging#67

For anyone who’s wondering about the sudden jumps in the numbers on the blog posts, let’s just put it down to outright artist license and move onto the good stuff. Here’s another post which brought a smile to my face because life has interesting ways of teaching us lessons..

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Vengeance is mine, and I will repay.”

Or something to that extent I imagine must have passed by an old chappie’s lips when four loud, boisterous kids from his neighborhood would filch his precious stack of clothes pins and make them disappear day after day..

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The more he complained to his neighbors (the parents of the brats) the more clips kept disappearing. They’d go off the clothes line and end up in the oddest places, like the water tank. Which after a point of time seemed to verily have more clips lying at the bottom than coins in the Trevi Fountain!

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Anyhow, he’d rant and rave and often cuss at them, not that they gave a hoot! It was fun to see the crusty old man finally move his potato sack of a body off the swing and lumber after them. Else it was the swing where he sat, day after day and made it squeak and squeak as if it was his life’s purpose.

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The brats didn’t know that the irritable man who always told on them was actually retired and wanted nothing more to sit on his swing and sip from his stainless steel glass of booze that would remain undetected in that wettest of dry lands. So the sight of children causing a ruckus put a cramp in his guzzling plans indeed! And if he stayed compliant and ignored them, he would have to face the task of answering his not so little woman who would wonder about the regular disappearance of her clothes pins.

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Cut to present day- one of the brats is grown up now. Somewhat. When she finished her laundry today and went to hang up the innumerable little things that her child goes through daily, she found that she was YET AGAIN short of clipsies..!
How she gnashed her teeth and wished that for once her beloved dumpling would throw something else off the balcony or find other things to confiscate instead of the oh-so important clips…

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And while seething and doubling up the clothes (since there weren’t enough clips to go around) she thought of a curmudgeon whose clips she and her fine companions would to love to chuck into the water tank or use as marks to get badams off the tree.

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And then it came home to her…what goes around definitely comes around. And there was plenty more coming her way…!

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Retroblogging#23

Another one that caught my eye from the days of yore…

Right from the time my son was born, I was struck by how delicate he was. I knew babies are vulnerable and helpless but this one seemed to embody those qualities and more. He was a thin baby, weighing just on this side of an acceptable birth weight but he never lacked spunk.

That ‘scrawny’ baby’s learnt to run now and also balance himself on his toes to reach heights hitherto out of his reach.

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One thing that’s absolute about children is that you NEVER know what they’ll do next. If you think there’s a line they haven’t crossed yet, they always manage to cross it and then some! So if you threaten your kid with that ‘last straw that breaks the camel’s back’, you’d better be prepared to have a whole herd of camels waiting out there because your offspring will find plenty more straws and with it plenty of camels’ backs too.

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I used to think of little children (infant to toddler stage) as being fragile but it’s us as parents who’re the fragile ones. The kids are resilient and how! They fall, they bleed, they sprout bumps here, there and everywhere and they still keep going even after the tears have left tracks on their face.

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And speaking of tracks, while you may not need therapy to get over the minor cuts and nicks on your child; it definitely takes some doing to see your child hurt and you not being able to prevent it. And some things do stay with you. Whether it makes you a better parent or a hovering one is anyone’s guess.

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And by the time you’re over the initial trauma and your monkey is again gallivanting off for newer places to fall down from; you tell them what’s sure to become your motto in life- “Don’t cry! You wanna cry? I’ll give you something to cry about if you dare do something like this (fill in blank with your pet peeves about your kid) ever again!!!”

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And you go on. Both of you…sometimes with one chipped tooth, a brief black and blue mark and you with a near-paranoid obsession for stuff your child could hurt yourself on again. But you do go on.

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And before you know it, they’re onto newer things, more things they could make hurtful for themselves and with you still trying to be their life-long safety net and catch them before they fall. But that’s not to be…what is to be their ever-growing curiosity, activity and ability to bounce back each time.

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Amen to that! The rest will keep I suppose 🙂

P.S: At the time of this blog being posted MLM’s graduated to TO and has had 3 surgical interventions (nothing critical) which includes one broken hand being reset. And we’re still chugging along! Phew…

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A Chat With My Niece

I recently spent some time with my niece who lives in the US. We see each other when I video chat with her mom and every now and then she chirps in my ear and tells me what she’s been up to and then skips away to do her think like little girls do.

This time around I had the pleasure of introducing her to slime. Her mother didn’t share my enthusiasm or hers but what’s a childhood without gooey, icky stuff that grosses other people out?

When I spoke to her yesterday after she reached back home she very clearly told me she wanted more slime. I asked her what colors she wanted and she started listing them in her twangy speech, “I want wed (red), blaoo, yellow, green, pink, purple..” I interjected and said, “so you want all the colors, right?” and pat comes the reply, “No! I want red, blaoo, green, yellow, pink, purple!”

That’ll teach me to get between a rainbow-loving girl and her color palette.

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Bloglet: Boomerang Bantering

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

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Pointy Elbows and Drool

Everytime you think you’ve reached a time and place where you don’t have to be a crabby cakes about your kid, they prove you wrong!

Of late TO’s been climbing into our bed. Resulting in either one of us sleeping on our own somewhere else (bliss) or us getting through the night but with pokes and prods and occasional limbs flying about.

Early this morning but still at a time I choose not to be woken up at, someone went poke-poke at the soles of my feet. It was TO asking me to make room for him, his pillow and coverlet.

I made room for him and then did a quick recon of the room he’d been sleeping in to see if the fan or AC had still been left on. We apparently have mood lighting in this house you see- when one leaves a room and *if* they feel like it, the fan and lights get switched off. Else, they don’t.

Anyhow, I came back to my room within a few seconds and found a small child could take up a ridiculous amount of space; yet again. I squished him up and moved him down towards Red (who always sleeps like a baby I might add resentfully).

I kept dreaming of the world being all cold and wet and me baby proofing the house for some reason…putting those cone guards on the edges of tables and sharp pointy things and then realized why that particular dream had come to me…TO was sleeping with arms akimbo and his rather pointy elbow had caught me in the ribs! To add to it, he was drooling. Everything one likes to wake up to an extra hour early, for no good reason.

This parenthood stuff is a doozy!

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Oh My Angst Hurts

The Offspring (TO) has been introduced to the world of peer pressure. He has met the “popular” kids, met the jocks, met the goody two-shoes and is trying to fit into the whole ecosystem as we speak…erm type.

Being of a slightly more touchy disposition, TO is at times inclined to want to change schools if he doesn’t have a good day or have a bad experience. Of course the very next moment he can be on top of the world as well. Am told such is the world of children.

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This morning his reason for not wanting to get up and go to school was due to the kids he had a falling out with. He gave us more details while having his milk. The conversation went something like this- TO: ” So I’m not friends with X anymore. Me: Why? TO: She doesn’t want to be friends with ME. Me: (making sympathetic face) Whhhhyyy? What happened? TO: She says stop following me around. Me: Well…do you follow her around? TO: (looking sheepish)..only a little bit. Me: Well then, don’t follow her. TO: (huffily) ok fine!

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The rest of the conversation consisted of words irritating, annoying, irritated and annoyed and why the middle finger is *not* to be shown and at least a 1000 reminders to finish his milk and go for his bath.

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Turbulent Thursdays anyone? And to think that we have yet to navigate through the choppy waters of puberty. God help us.

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