Milestones

The mil is one of the most tenacious women I have known. She is as hardy as they come. She is multifaceted. She can easily converse in 6 Indian languages. She is the president of her Mahila Mandali back home. She wins Rangoli competitions as well as debating competitions. Playing hard and winning are not new to her. She rode on buses to attend debating competitions in high schools (in the early 60s) in neighboring towns, much against her dad's wishes. I have never seen her express her feelings freely other than in some situations with her daughers. But she shed a tear today. Today, was the Scout's first day at daycare.

This blog might be the only thing that is not infected.

Everything and everybody in the Average household has a cold right now. The littlest one is being the bravest about it.  This also is the first cold of his life. He still is doing everything that he normally does on a given day including creeping and crawling around, tasting unidentifiable objects, yelping with glee at the sight of taatha and such. The rest of us are sniffling, gargling, saying "ayappa, can't take it no more" and in general tearing each others hair apart. The GI (who has a thing for creating and using slangs) sums it up best when he says "We are WOOST"*. 

* -- Woost

       Pronunciation: Like boost

       Function: Adjective

       1. goner 

I'm glad I married a morning person..

despite the well-meaning advice from an aunt to not do so, me being a night owl. And I'm glad because: the GI buys fresh bagels and croissants on weekends even before I see the first light of the day. He irons my clothes and packs my laptop on weekdays. He does the daddy duty for the Scout who (uhuhuh!) wakes up at least 2 hours ahead of me. So here's a big yay to the early riser in this house for once!

Coming soon: "I'm grrrr I married a morning person.. "

Harry Potter (and the Half-Blood Prince) happened with the co-workers. I liked the movie and couldn't agree more with BRangan's review. This is the second movie I'm watching in the theater since the Scout was born. The first was Star Trek, watched with the GI where I drooled over Spock (more the character of Spock, than the actor) while the GI drooled over Uhura (less the character and more the you-know-what :P) while Scout was home with the grandparents. The GI and I are also thinking of catching 'Up' on one of our days off (when Scout is in daycare) and that would be our round up of movies for this summer. 3 movies within the first year of the baby. Is that something I should be ashamed off (for going to a movie without the guilt of not being with the baby) or is that something I should be proud off for being there and doing that? I ask because when new parents meet there seems to be this boundary between 2 groups of parents -- the one who actually get a sitter to take care of the baby while they go do their own thing and the other who condemn such action as if it were sinfully wrong. Never has parenting been more analyzed than by the current gen parents, methinks. Me, right now, is happy to just go with the flow.

What's with husbands and their unending love for their mom's cooking?! :) On a scale of 1 to 10 I rate my mil's cooking to be 9 on the taste-scale, 4 on the health-scale and 5 on ease of preparation. While I rate my cooking to be 8 on taste, 7 on health and 7 on ease of process. The husband mostly agrees with my scoring as well. Yet he will profess his love for his mom's cooking even before the vada she is deep frying turns the slightest shade of golden brown. ;-) At the same time if I used as much oil or coconut or masala in my cooking I'll be gently admonished by the hubby for cooking and eating unhealthy. He gets away with it if I'm willing to humor him but most other times he gets a "oh, yeah? No vada for you" and that usually sets him right until his mom fries the next batch of vadas. :)

The combat crawler

We have a cute, cuddly, combat crawler in our midst. The Scout (I know, what an apt name in this context!) has started to crawl exactly like how the GI's do in those war movies. Upon siting an object of interest across the room, he musters up all his energy to combat crawl till the object is at arms-length. Then he stops and lunges for the object, stretches and tries to grab it with his finger tips. It is "oh, so cute" to look at but sometimes I feel like just giving him the object that he is vying for instead of having him put all this effort from all the way across the room. Thank God he doesn't seem to have inherited my lazy bones yet.

I was mistaken for an Amway..

and ouch, that hurts! So I was in the local Indian grocery store doing my weekly run. I noticed something that looked like fresh Aware kaaLu (it is a very sought-after bean in Karnataka and is not available fresh in the grocery stores here as far as I know). I wanted to buy some and impress the hell out of the mil who wouldn't hesitate to give an arm and a leg for a bunch of said beans. But I wanted to confirm that they were in fact the said precious variety. So I asked this guy, who was carting a bagful of them, what they were called. The vagueness of his answer (he said -- "it's just some beans") and the speed with which he disappeared out of my sight made me suspect that he considered me an Amway candidate* and so ran for his life. I'm impressed by the impact these Amway agents have made on the average desi shopper.

* -- For those of you who have had the good fortune of not knowing what Amway is, they are a "multi-level marketting" company in the US who hire agents to market their products, who lurk in popular stores and introduce themselves by making small talk with other bakra desi (mostly) shoppers in an attempt to hire them to become agents for Amway. Their aim is to start with small talk (weather, "native place", "mother tongue", shopping preferences and such) and the end goal is to steal your phone number so they can latch on to you and suck you dry. So anytime you get a somewhat stupid question from a fellow desi, please run like the above person did. To my credit, my question was by no means a stupid question. I should know because for sometime in grad school, I couldn't differentiate between toor dal and channa dal, then how can I trust myself to recognise the rarer kinds!?!?

The busy bees

I'm busy but I hate to admit that. When people ask me "How's work?" I usually reply with an "Alright" or "Pretty good" etc.  Never a "Gosh! I'm so busy I can't breathe" even when that is true. I find it amusing that some people get a lot of mileage from ranting about how busy their work is, how hard their boss is making them work or how their colleagues are slacking off while they themselves are slaving away. I find it amusing because when I'm busy it is usually because I have chosen to be busy either because I want a promotion (or some such concrete end goal in mind) or because hard work actually *gasp* makes me happy and makes me feel like I deserve my dinner that evening. So why do some people crib about their busy lives?