Three years ago, everytime we would go to any restaurant with a two year old Jr. (and we went to a lot of restaurants because San was pregnant with the little one), we would sit down to eat and just as the food arrived, Jr. would say "Pee pee" or worse "Poo Poo" promptly followed by "Daddy, lets go!".
All attempts by mom or grandma or other sympathetic relatives(when present) would fail. It would HAVE to be daddy who gets to stare at pee and poo before he goes back to the dinner table.
Jr. singlehandedly contributed to my reduced appetite (still does), and in a way kept my weight stable. In retrospect, maybe it was gods way of keeping me healthy, since I was not doing anything else by way of diet or exercise!
Now that we go out to eat with Jr. AND the little one, get to use the "I cannot take a five year old to the mens room!!!!" excuse and make her go with San. Well, almost always! Once in a while if it is a small restaurant with a single restroom, the job bouces back to me.
That said, we went and visited a new Indian restaurant called "Peacock" (I am not going for any pun here. Will write BARR soon). Jr. did the announcement, just as the waiter was walking towards the table with the food, and daddy had to go with her this time.
Being nothing new, just resolved myself to fate and walked to and from the restroom, patiently answering questions on, how come I took her to the mens room and how come there is only one potty but it still got called a men's room, etc.
That part went well. You are thinking "Hmm.. That part went well? How could it get any worse?". The little one just left us speechless!
There are villans in movies who make a lot of noise, overact, do gruesome acts, etc. etc. but somehow they look like sissies when compared to the calm, collected and cold blooded killer who kills without batting an eyelid or making a noise. If Jr. is the former, the little one belongs to the latter category.
She took a glass of water, put some biriyani into it, rubbed the table with a napkin, put the napkin into the glass, pulled it out, then put a few spoons of raita and channa masala into the glass and stirred it, added some more water, threw in a piece of naan, stirred it around with a huge spoon while standing from her high chair and turning everyones gaze towards her as she made the clanking noise with her spoon, and then went on to..
Drink the water(?!) or whatever it was in that glass!
She did all that with no emotion, no smile, nothing. Just sitting on that high chair like Dr. Jekyll and eventually standing up to do the Mr. Hyde stuff.
My mother in law always said "the little one takes after her father for all the bad things". Sure I was a legend in my toddler days. Stories of my target practice on ground floor residents using shoes and chappals dropped from the first floor, or my attempt to convert the living room into a swimming pool by closing all drain holes, doors and dumping buckets of water in the top floor and insiting that my brother swin in three inches of water, are still circulating in Madras.
The little one just makes all that pale in comparison to what she does. Earlier this week, we heard vacuuming noises in the kitchen. When we went to look, the little one was vacuuming the floor with the toy vac and surprisingly the floor was extremely dirty. She had put her hands inside the garbage container under the kitchen sink, pulled out the tea leaves(which were dumped in there after filtering tea), added some other garbage for good measure, and spread it on the floor so she had something dirty to start with!!! Funny thing is that the toy vac does not actually have any suction and it just spread all the garbage, around the tiled kitchen floor!
What do you do, when your house is clean, but you have the innate feminine urge(?!) to vacuum like your mommy? You spread real garbage back on the floor and practice!
Took us 30 minutes to clean up that kitchen floor (Yes, I did think about it.. but it would not have been a good Photoblog!).
Jr. is an angel by comparison. In any case, dad's days as a legend are numbered. A new star has been born!
God help us!
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Sunday, March 30, 2008 at 10:34PM 
