Back in action!

In my last post, I cribbed mentioned something about how some men prefer to be babied comforted by their spouse when they fall sick. I may have sounded otherwise but I strongly believe there isn't anything wrong with this. It is completely justified and even if your mate ends up catching the infection, big deal.. We are married to be together in rain and in sun, and to share each other's sorrow, and well, at times.. illness. But I guess the Lord did not take my innocent banter in good humour, no no.. I mean I failed to convey it properly and got punished royally for that slight of mine. Hours after I posted that one, I caught viral infection and was in the same bed, under the same quilt and on the same medication as my dear husband, albeit with a much higher temperature. All this just a day before Diwali!

Now that Diwali holidays are over and a couple of working days have been missed as well, I am back at work after a cool fortnight(remember wfh etc..) and no doubt, it feels so good. At least till 4 pm after which I grow drowsy and bored and hungry, sigh! The day has been good so far, I have read blogs, chatted with friends, exchanged emails, played pool, took a stroll on the office terrace, relaxed in the cafetaria, caught up with colleagues and worked whenever I had the time and inclination. This is in stark contrast with, and so much more exciting than my life at home on weekdays, especially when the husband is at work.. it is dull, uneventful and my little daughter ensures that I do not get too much of either rest or peace.. She is a lot of fun but I still enjoy her father's company more :)

As parents..

My husband is down with viral fever, and I am working from home the whole week to double up as a nurse. There is not much actually that I am required to do, to nurse him I mean. We have a full time maid, who looks after the baby, and can take care of him as well, but these men I tell you.. they simply refuse to grow up. All he wants right now from me is to sit next to him all day, stroke his hair every 10 minutes, enquire after his well-being every half an hour, offer him some eatable as frequently and argue and insist every few hours that he takes all his medication in time which he would have done as punctually, minus the fuss, had I gone to work. So while I put my precious life, and career to some extent at stake, the baby is deemed to be more vulnerable to the infection and put out with the maid. She is presently talking to her Auntie, as she is taught to address the lady. Let me clarify, she is blabbering away merrily, making little or no sense to us. There are few words that we understand, and she uses them continually to make the conversation interesting if not very intelligent. I hear her through the door left intentionally ajar, and all I get is umpteen repetitions of 'Papa' & 'Mumma' laced with gibberish. I point this out to my husband and we eagerly watch out for a third word, which never comes up. And suddenly, a realisation dawns on us, rather reinforced since we ought to know it already, as to how important we are to her. Her life completely revolves around us, it fills up with great pride, and a greater sense of accountability to know we mean the world to this charming little person who mentions us no less than a hundred times in a 10 minute long conversation. It is an absolute bliss to have somebody all for yourself! But, as my husband remarked with a perceptible quiver in this voice, or was it the fever, it is for a really short period. In less than 6 months, she will start with a play school and then she will have lots of things and more importantly, many more people to talk about..

Switching places..

It is a Saturday evening and we are back after an early dinner. The day was lazy, an uneventful one and we are not the least inclined to sleep. Somehow that always happens to me, I am never drowsy when I have nothing to do. Not surprisingly, the converse is equally true. So me and husband decide to play cards. Daughter dearest has had her meals and is playing contently with her set of blocks. But as soon as we get the cards, even before we can shuffle them, she loses all interest in her blocks and takes away the pack from us. Now, anybody with a 20 month or older kid would agree there is not much that can be done in this state. We simply leave her with the playing cards and start thinking of alternatives. Not a big issue, really.. we settle for monopoly. I acknowledge it is not much fun with just 2 players, but then compromise is the way to peaceful co-existence, ain't? We start dividing the paper money between us, and before either of us reach $20, baby Ninja strikes again! Our little lady mixes business with pleasure, quite literally. She takes the paper money, and title cards and shuffles them both with the playing cards. We exchange furtive glances, the big question looms large before us. What next?? Surely, as parents we cannot accept defeat, at least not this early in life. Husband suggests that we play carrom, but even before he finishes the sentence, we both giggle in a knowing way and drop the idea. We know that will not work. My daughter has a slightly different way of playing carrom. She simply climbs on the board and sits in the middle, with the carrom men all around her. Then she showers individual attention on each man and knocks them all out very conveniently, without as much as touching the striker. The battle is getting serious. And exciting. Rockband is actually a nice option but for the fact that it is almost 10 pm, and the neighbours are not that understanding. Not that we care for such uncooperative neighbours, but the closest one happens to be our landlord as well.. and so you can imagine.. sigh! Both of us sit grimly, on the verge of an imminent defeat when my husband comes up with an idea. The best he has had in a long time.. or so I think :P We decide to beat the little kiddo in her own game. Yes, literally again. So while our daughter plays with our pack of cards and monopoly set, we settle down with her set of blocks. We bet on designing the weirder stuff with those blocks. Since it requires little creativity, no brains and a lot of oddity, my husband invariably wins :) The picture attached is that of the 'Train Tower', I am not sure what that means, that he made. A closer look, and you can see our little imp too, submerged in a sea of cards..

A Golden Moment..

It is a moment which has the billion strong nation basking in a golden glory. India has won its first ever Olympic gold medal in an individual event, and the first since 1980. Abhinav Bindra has made us all so proud! It was just yesterday that I was thinking of writing a post on sports, and how both my father and husband were going gaga over the Olympics when there is hardly any hope for us, especially after the dismal performance of our shooters on the opening day itself. Procrastination is really not the big evil it is made out to be :)

I am sure each of us is feeling like a winner at this hour. India couldn't have asked for a better Independence Day gift!

Paltu..

Paltu is my daughter's dog. No, its not a real one but a stuffed toy. And they share a Calvin n Hobbes relationship. For all the eight and a half months that I carried her, I strictly refrained from reading anything remotely related to Calvin. Not because I have already read it all, Calvin fans would agree you can never have enough of the little imp and his stuffed tiger. He enthralls, amuses, surprises, delights, at times even disgusts you, but you just can't help loving him. I avoided Calvin because I did not want my unborn baby to be influenced by him. Everybody enjoys little naughty kids but the parents, and I shiver at the thought of having an over-the-board kid like him. My efforts, however have not paid off. Already, my little one has started doing things that smell perilously of Calvin, the most prominent being her love and excessive attachment to this stuffed dog, Paltu. Now, I am not saying it is weird or anything other than normal. We all have imaginary friends as kids and often discover them in our toys. She carries Paltu everywhere and even sleeps with it. Fine. She talks to it, or shall I say 'him' in long sentences, scolds him by pulling his ears and pampers him by hugging him close or at times by giving little pecks on his nose. Fine again. Now listen to this. She demands that her nanny put baby cream all over Paltu's cloth-n-fur body, and then dress him up just like Her Highness after every bath that 'she' takes. Also, Paltu has to be seated on a high chair and fed as much as she is. Poor thing, he now has turmeric stains all over his mouth and nose. And then, if being smothered with baby cream and eating rice-dal was not enough, Paltu now sports my contact lenses too. The moment my little lady got hold of the discarded lenses, she immediately went and put them in his eyes. Hmmm.. looks like I am not the only one myopic in this household...

Will you step into my 'parlour'..

I hate going to the parlour. Any girl will get it in the first go, but for the benefit of the male readers who by now, must be already wondering why I hate icecreams or video games, I am talking about 'beauty parlours'. The term itself sounds kinda weird to me, as some of the other classic terms associated with the business and hence, acknowledged and accepted by ladies nationwide. What sense does 'eyebrow' make to you? Or better still, 'underarms'? They strike terror in my heart... Nazi's treated Jews better than these parlour ladies treat their clientele.
I enter the parlour with a heart beating really hard, and they greet me with the kindest smile. But these angels turn into draculas the moment they get down to business, eager to sink their greedy teeth in my 'uncared for' skin. The best part is that they always succeed in persuading me into getting done more than what I would have planned and been prepared for. I would just go to get my eyebrows tidied, and return with the whole body waxed. Or if I go for a cleanup, I would get coerced into a 7 course, one-and-a-half hour long elaborate facial. I am not sure about the glow that they promise would come in a couple of days, but it surely leaves me bored to death. Still, I must admit I do feel lighter, with all the excess hair, dead skin, dirt and grime with black/white/grey-heads gone, along with some real hard cash. The irony of the whole thing is that all of these will come back real quick but the money won't, sigh! The trick is simple yet highly effective. While I get my eyebrows done, one of the girls there would comment on how dull my skin looks, and suggest me some facial. And during the facial, somebody would ask me if I would want to get my body hair removed, since it is so overgrown. I would reluctantly agree, just to cover up for my embarassment. Besides, it is not just wasting time or parting with money that hurts me so much, there is some solid physical torture involved. Plucking one hair at a time from the eyebrow is the most gruesome form of torture. Pouring hot wax all over you, and then plucking bunches of hair in multiple jerky efforts stands next. Infact I have heard of similar technique used with prisoners of war where their hair and nails are plucked ruthlessly to force military secrets out of them. At times like this, I try to recall all the not-so-good things that I have ever done, and suffer in silence hoping God would count it against my sins. Anyways, even as I write this, I am sure I need to visit the parlour soon. And it might be as early as tomorrow itself. So long..

Engineering begins early..

I have been awfully busy and slightly lazy the whole of last and current month. Not writing any new posts, I couldn't even publish an already completed one. No, posting doesn't take much time but I want to put a picture with that post like this one, and that has to be trasferred from my camera to the computer, and subsequently to the blog. Quite some work, isn't it? But I would really like to share this little incident that left me thoroughly amused. My daughter has this little, rather noisy toy, with a bear pedalling down having a drum in the front, which has several tiny aircrafts that revolve around an axis, simultaneously dipping and rising too. What I could make out of this is that the bear is vending airplanes on an icecream trolley kinda thing, and singing a little too loudly to attract customers. Sounds terribly weird, ain't? But my little lady loves it. And though the bear is quite capable of travelling on a pair of duracells, she likes to carry it around in her arms, dropping it often in the process. One such fall broke one of its legs, and the drum in the front couldn't rotate anymore, creating an irritating mechanical noise in the effort. This quickly got on my nerves, and I pestered my husband out of his couch to fix it. Since it had to do with daughter dearest, he promptly swung into action armed with his tool box. Now, my husband has this truly remarkable quality of treating the smallest of mechanical chores with utmost importance and he took to fixing this toy with lot of seriousness and zest. An engineer working on NASA's to-be-launched-asap-spacecraft cannot work with more precision and concentration. He carefully removed the intact leg, studied the mechanism there and then started on the broken one. After what seemed like an eternity, he finally got up putting everything together, and declared positively--'This cannot be done!'
Me: Why?
Husband: Mechanical + technical + laws of physics == gibberish.
Me: There should be some way to do it.
Husband: More gibberish.
Me: Why don't you try putting some glue, or probably tape?
Husband: Won't help. (Supplementary bullshit.)
Me: What if I skim the trash and get you the broken leg back?
Husband: Grrrrrrrrrrrr.......#$^%&*@#$... Do it yourself!
Me: !!! (rush back to the kitchen)

By this time, the baby had lost all patience, and she walked off with her toy to another room. And seeing the way she was forcefully twisting the drum trying to make it rotate, I thought the bear is on its way to eternity..



I didn't see the toy again till the following evening when my husband suddenly remarked with a twinkle in his eye and perceptible distrust in his voice, 'She has fixed it!'. The drum was rotating perfectly. We continued to stare at the toy, the bear was pedalling down merrily, singing loudly and following suit with a huge grin was our budding engineer.