A little-big boy and his imagination

Ads has always been a very imaginative kid. From the time he was around 2 years old, he indulged in a lot of pretend play although until Y came along he always expected someone to keep him company while he played. He's also passed through a fairly obvious and predictable trajectory as far as interests are concerned. Chronologically, they have been - construction equipment and heavy vehicles, emergency vehicles (fire-trucks and so on), tigers and other big cats, reptiles, dinosaurs, outer space, birds, and now cricket and superheroes!

Something that I've noticed with a lot of boys is that when they get interested in a topic, they dig deep and turn into a veritable encyclopaedia of knowledge on that subject! Their interest verges on obsession. I have never ever in my 7 years of being a mom (which is about when I started noticing these things!) seen a girl jump in so deep into any subject! I can't believe my sample set is too small or skewed - has anyone else observed this?

So, anyway, getting back to Ads. The joke around our home is that whenever you need to find Ads, just follow the sounds of what we call the Dish-bish. A vocal potpourri of explosions, snorts, roars, grunts and yells that express the imaginative space he is occupying at that time - a tiger stalking and hunting it's prey, dinosaurs fighting or Iron Man and Cap'n against a common enemy :) The package is generally accompanied by a lot of hand gestures and kicks so beware anyone who's at arms-length at the time!

Ads has been the recipient of many an amused and/or astonished look by onlookers when he goes Dish-bish on buses, trains and other public places. I still remember two little boys about the same age as him as we de-boarded at Jaisalmer railway station. We were heading towards the station exit. Ads was in his own world, utterly oblivious to the fact that we had landed at our destination. I walked behind him, holding on to my suitcase with one hand while steering him with another and ensuring he didn't bang into people. These 2 little boys watched, jaws dropping, as he approached them, eyes open but in a world of his own, making strange gestures with his hands, funny sounds with his mouth and with myriad threatening expressions rapidly flitting across his face :)

Every time he goes into his zone, the three of us collapse into giggles which take a while to penetrate his consciousness but when it does, he gets really wild with us :)

Another weird, funny, endearing thing about my boy!

Undecided

Still not sure which is my favourite spot in the new house.

This...

In the living room

Or this.....

In our bedroom

Though the fact is, I've barely had time to relax in any of these nooks ever since we moved. Mostly the reading gets a miss while they get used plenty for cuddling up with the kids :)

New city, new school and some ranting

I haven't slept well for the last few nights. Anxiety and a list of imagined and real afflictions reminiscent of first-trimester pregnancy symptoms have contrived to keep me tossing and turning all night; and tired and listless during the day.

The reason? Both kids start at their new school today. A week ago, I made sure S had cleared his calendar for the morning since he would be dropping Y off for her first day while I dropped Ads off (they are in the same school but different campuses). Yesterday I took Ads and one of his good friends (since he may appear often in these pages, let's call him V1) for a recce around the school. We looked at the class lists and found to our delight that Ads and V1 were in the same section! The icing on the cake was that one of Ads' friends from way back in Noida, who studied with him in kindergarten and later relocated to Bangalore, is also in the same section. This discovery brought a huge smile to Ads' face and eased my fears to a large extent.

This morning, we left at 7.15 am. Wading through heavy traffic as is usual in Bangalore, we reached the school at 8 am to find a scene of total chaos. I wasn't sure I would be allowed to escort Ads into his classroom, but I was confident I'd be allowed to hand him over to his teacher somewhere in the grounds or auditorium before leaving. Instead, we had the Principal at the entrance, bellowing instructions to the parents in his stentorian voice, in a most undignified manner. Children were being hustled inside the school while parents were sternly stopped at the door. Before I knew it, Ads had been pushed away from me and handed over to someone who handed him over to someone else and after that I don't know what happened because he was lost in the sea of uniforms. There was no kiss, no hug and no goodbye even! I went up to the Vice Principal to ask if I could go in seeing as he was a new student and all but she smilingly refused. Other parents reassured me that there were plenty of staff to escort the kids to their classrooms. Since I knew Ads would be having a couple of familiar places to eventually meet with in class, I let it go but the disorganized way in which the whole thing was conducted left a bad taste in my mouth. 

Back at the preschool, where Y starts LKG today, S reported that it was as chaotic but since that school has a much smaller strength it did not seem so bad :) Y cried a wee bit - but her class teacher picked her up and told S to leave and they would handle her, thank you very much.

The day was jinxed during pickup time as well. First, my driver was nowhere to be seen at the allotted time and his phone was not reachable. Just when I was going to run upstairs for the spare car key and drive the car myself, a friend (V1's mom, whose younger son also studies in the same school), offered me a ride. By this time, we were running atleast 10 minutes late and I was biting my nails as we snarled in traffic - being late on the very first day is so not on!! Then I almost had a cardiac arrest when I called the school to tell them I was running late - the front-desk guy (a nincompoop if there ever was one!) told me Y had been sent off in the school bus! This inspite of the fact that we had explicitly told the administration and the class teacher that Y would be picked up and dropped off for the first 2 days. At this point I had no choice but to continue onto the school because my friend had to pick up her son. 

I barged into the school premises, spitting fire and brimstone, only to find Y calmly seated with her teacher. Whew....I have seldom been this relieved in my life!!!!! The teacher who seems a nice calm sort of person reassured me that she had no intention of sending Y on the bus since she knew I was coming to pick her up. Obviously the front-desk guy had given me the wrong information without even bothering to cross-check with the teacher.

A couple of hours later, I was in the car again to pick up Ads - more scenes of confusion there. Clearly anybody can walk in with no identification whatsoever and pick up any kid with none the wiser.

While the kids had a good time on their first day, I can already anticipate many more rants and raves from my end given the lax administration - but let's hope I am proved well and truly wrong!

When a child sleeps too little - and a mom says too much!

Ads has always been a restless sleeper. Many days, he is over-stimulated and unable to fall asleep soon after hitting the bed. Plus he dislikes sleeping. Many a time, we have have conversations revolving around what a waste of time sleep is.

The last time he complained about sleep being a waste of time, I told him: The body needs sleep in order to rest and recharge itself. 

He said: what'll happen if someone doesn't sleep for a long long time?

I replied (hastily and thoughtlessly as t turned out): They would be really really tired and they may even faint or die.

I could have bitten my tongue out even as I said this but he said no more and I moved on, hoping he had not paid much attention to what I said.

Fat hope.

A day later, he comes to my room at night, very agitated and in tears.

Amma, I can't sleep. I'm going to have such a short life!!

Now what do I do with this boy???

Hindsight

Sometimes it takes a 6-month old niece to be snoozing peacefully on your shoulder for 45 minutes to realize what you missed with your own kids when they were babies.

Flashback to S reclining for hours on our lazyboy, Ads and later Y fast asleep on his shoulder, encircled in his strong warm arms. I would repeatedly ask him to put them down in the bed so that he could get on with whatever else he had to do. 

He would reply, simply: I don't have anything to do that's better than this.

As my adorable niece breathed softly into my neck, I craved for a few more such peaceful hours with her, while my kids squabbled noisily in the background. I really hadn't got it the first two times, had I?

Seems like you need a third kid to bring that perspective into a mother's life :)

New books

Of course I'm cribbing about having to do it....

But there's a certain pleasure in fingering the books for the new school year, and settling down with cellotape, scissors and pen to cover and label the textbooks and notebooks. 

The scent of new unsullied books, and the sense of a new beginning.

Plus we have been issued recyclable covers for all the books, which is nice but also weird because I thought brown paper was also recyclable? But it's a vast improvement over the plastic covers that we were given last year. 

Living it up in New York - Part 2

It is nearing the end of our 2-week stay in New York. We've reached the happy stage of having ticked off all the touristy must-dos. I took the kids on the Water taxi ride and went up to the Top of the Rock. We've gone to Central Park not once or twice but three times. We have gorged on some seriously good food. Some really tasty pizzas and pastas and some excellent Mediterranean. Yesterday the children had falafel for the first time (Ads has actually tasted it many times before while we were living in this country but he's forgotten) and they absolutely loved it. 

Before S went back to India, we did a leisurely 2-day trip to the Niagara Falls in upstate New York. While it was too cold there even now, this late in spring,  for our tropical constitutions, a trip to the Falls is a must-do. The town of Niagara Falls itself is quite unimpressive but the falls themselves are so awe-inspiring that they make up the deficit.  

These days, we are taking things easy. There are tons of other things to see/do yet, but I'd rather capitalize on the extra time to really get into the skin of the city; a luxury afforded by a longish vacation where room and board are largely taken care of! We aren't rushing around trying to pack everything into a few days. This is the first time that I'm experiencing the magic of slow travel and I'm absolutely loving it! NYC isn't a beautiful city like some others we've visited - San Francisco, Sydney and Vancouver come immediately to mind. It's far more like an Indian city, Delhi or Mumbai for example. It's a city not to be merely seen or admired for its dramatic skyline. It's a city to be experienced for its raw energy, to be walked around in, a city to have its quirks uncovered and have its layers peeled away, one after the other. 

It is such a cosmopolitan place that my new game is to figure out which country the people I meet or cross on the street are. Sometimes, its really easy, because they are speaking on the phone or among themselves in an easily recognizable language - Italian, or French or Spanish. Most times, its hard- like the cleaner at my friend's place whose English accent I was trying to place and who turned out to be from Guyana!

As for the children, they have been troopers. Which they normally are, of course, but given the amount of walking one has to do in this city, I had braced myself for some serious whining. My kids are too used to going everywhere by car or cab and they've hardly ever done any serious walking. But hey presto, they have been walking for hours here everyday without complaint, eating whatever is offered to them happily and for the first few days atleast, keeping pace enthusiastically with the packed itinerary.

Finally, the biggest take-away has been the quality time spent with my friend J. This has been our longest time together in the same space since we were roommates during MBA. Even though we've been meeting on and off over the years, nothing does the trick as much as extended time spent together, and I'm so glad to know that we've made the most of it.
I'm sad to be leaving so soon, but hey, the vacation hasn't ended yet :)

Living it up in New York - Part 1

We arrived in New York City more than 10 days ago. I was a little tense before we left Bangalore. The husband having flown the coop, so to speak, several days earlier (on work), the whole project of packing, cleaning the house, clearing the fridge, and locking up while being on track to catch a 4 am international flight fell to me. Obviously and fortunately, this was something I'd never had to do before and I was a little paranoid that we would land up at the airport at 2 am to find that I'd left our passports behind!! As it turned out, we managed to board the flight in one piece except that as I was checking in at the Emirates Counter, I realized that I'd left my phone behind in the cab! 

Very luckily, the cab driver was someone we knew and I spent most of my waiting time at Bangalore airport trying to contact S through a pay phone so that he could alert the driver about my phone. 

Several hours of snoozing, eating and movie-watching later, we landed in NewYork, passed through immigration and hailed a cab to Manhattan, to the place of a dear friend and college batchmate, J. Day 1 was a light one (by our standards!). I took the kids to Times Square - ToysRUS, the M&M store, the Disney store. We walked around along with the teeming crowds, gawked like all the other tourists, ate lunch and were back in the apartment by afternoon. In the evening, I took the kids across the road to Hudson River Park where we walked by the waterfront, raced against each other and smelt the flowers (quite literally!).

S arrived the next day and it was such a lovely day (sunny and cloudy in turns with a sharp nip to the air) that we decided to spend it outdoors in Central Park. The cherry blossoms were in bloom and to say they were incredibly pretty would be an understatement.

View of the skyline from Central Park

Cherry blossom tree

Blue skies

The turtle pond

That evening, S and I took some rare and much-needed couple time off to catch a Broadway show (my first!) - The Phantom of the Opera. Later, we also walked around Times Square to incredulously take in the flashing neon lights and wonder at the mass of humanity abroad at 11.30 pm :)

Next day's stop was at the American Museum of Natural History. In the interests of accomodating varied interests, S volunteered to take the kids for the day to the museum while I took off with my friends to walk the Brooklyn Bridge and wander through Little Italy and Chinatown, capturing sone of the flavour of this lovely city.

Part II coming up in a day or two :)

In our own beds and happy (mostly)

The kids are now officially sleeping in their own room every night. A huge milestone for us! The one most affected will be the husband who cannot imagine how he will manage to sleep every night without his two babies to provide warmth and comfort.Yes, there appear to be THREE people in the house needing night-time comfort and cuddles! Fortunately for him, he left for the US just a day after the new arrangement came into force and hasn't had a chance to experience withdrawal symptoms yet :)

'To compensate, I'm dragging a kicking and screaming Y to bed every afternoon for a nap. It forces me to rest a while in the middle of rigorous summer days spent entirely with the kids and gives Y some much needed downtime from endless bickering with her brother. The bonus is I get some soft cheek-to-cheek time with my little girl not to mention a few moments of girlish giggling and exclusive cuddles uninterrupted by Anna.

Last night I woke up to find Ads snuggled up next to me. I woke him up and tucked him into his own bed. In the morning, he claimed that he only came into my room because he wanted some cream for a mosquito bite and that I had dragged him into bed to sleep beside me! I have no recollection of what happened but it sure looks like I am experiencing some withdrawal symptoms of my own here! :)

Bumpy-bumpy

Anna, do bumpy bumpy. 

Y orders her brother every few minutes in the swimming pool. Resigned, he stops whatever he is doing (which is trying to float on his back, and practising his freestlyle strokes), takes her in his arms, and bounces and whirls her all over the water while his sister shrieks in pure delight.

Duty calls. Even in the swimming pool!