Didn't find it?
RSS feed from Feedburner

 Subscribe to this Blog ?

 

Sundar Narayanan's Travelog

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

 

Just another spider on the web
Squarespace
Powered by Squarespace
Archives
Blog Index
The journal that this archive was targeting has been deleted. Please update your configuration.
Navigation

Entries in mommy (3)

Sunday
May122013

Mothers day

Every day is mother's day.. but when you live in a world where only one day is made special to mothers, one tends to go with the flow!

The kids made a cake, decorated it and let Mom cut it. By the time they were done fighting over who gets to write what on the cake, mom had pretty much given up hope on the cake's cuttability if such a word exists. 

Apparently it came out good and the three of them ate a sizeable portion of it. Daddy was happy to just play photographer as all those colorful things on top cannot be good as they are all some concentrated form of sugar!

In case you are wondering why Jr. has a big "bindi" aka "pottu" smack dab in the middle of her forehead instead of the tiny dot right between her eyebrows (mommy style).. she was posing for me earlier!

You see, these days it feels like I am 14 years old again because Jr. has a scary resemblence to my sister at the same age be it both at certain angles or her mannerisms.  To prove my point here is the picture of them around the same age, give or take a year difference!

Same controlled smile, same donna kaadhu, same collar bone showing, same type of earring choice.. just simply scary! Don't think I ever yelled at my sister that much when she was at that age.. but feels like I am making up for that by shouting at my sister's look alike! 

Here's to Mom's! If someone made a movie called "Mom's" the tagline should read 

"MoM's - terrorizing sons and daughters since the beginning of time"

My mother still has a superhuman ability to remote control me from the other side of the world. Not that it is a bad thing because chances are San has that magical ability and will exercise it when time comes on Jr. and the little one! Daddy Narayanan is counting on it!

On a side note, it feels like I have 34 mothers now. Every teacher at BYSJ reminds me of my mother. Almost makes me think that that my mother is giving them some secret coaching classes on how to push me past my limits. They all pick on me in class, somehow know I am trying to take it easy on some pose and call out my name and say "smaller step", "higher", "more".. and I go "how could you have possibly known that I did that? Touched my head to the floor with that wide a stance only yesterday and it was not your class. How could you possibly know! How?" .. that kind of thing happens only with Mom, because she has eyes on the back of her head and can know! 

Hope all those mom's out there had a great Mother's day. Tomorrow is unfortunately... just another day!

Sunday
Mar242013

Daddy gets a trophy.. among other things!

The blog has seen a long break. It has been a rollercoaster ride for the Traveling Narayanan's if we can say that.

First we had a nice Saturday evening last week with dressing up and going to a temple. Even clicked a gorgeous snap of the little one as she was shy and blushing when I complimented her on her paavaadai (frock).

Then like San says "Don't cast your admiring eyes on her.. bad things happen!" (what she says in Tamil is "kuzhandhaikku un kanne pattudum") and who knows maybe that is true.

San left on a business trip to China the very next morning and she pretty much took the family luck with her. The house has been seeing things like never before to the point where we look like the Indian village after the Sankara stones were stolen from it in the Indiana Jones movie! We need our Sangeetha stone back.. We demand it!

The little one came home Monday with a 103 fever and missed school for most of last week. She also passed on a cold and sore throat to daddy and grandma. Fortunately Jr. avoided her little sister for as much as she could and that saved her.  

To top things off, daddy went to the dentist with pain for the black tooth and ended with a double root canal and a bad prognosis for both front tooth. Apparently the last root canal was not sealed off properly and the black tooth was not black because it was dead. When my local dentist removed the plug, everyone pretty much reeled back from the rotten smell that came out of the tooth, except for me as I was in the chair and could not move my nose away from my open mouth! It was a small logistics problem that no yoga pose can accomplish. There is a 50/50 chance that I will lose both my front teeth in six months or so I am told. If things work out, the tooth will survive and hang in there.

Dentures at 40?! Not so looking forward to that. Again, we need our Lucky girl to come back from China..

Every morning the scene in the bedroom looks like this..

That and a big pile of blankets and comforters that need to be laundered, if the little one decided to throw up her dinner in the middle of the night. I figured that it was better to leave them in a balled up pile and do laundry in the morning than do 3AM laundry. Just got tired of it.. and believe me when I say this.. we do a lot of laundry in this house. Every week we wash 35 towels just for Yoga!

Finally we got to the weekend after making it on a one day at a time mode during the week and there was one bright spot. Yesterday, it was time for Daddy to go get his 60 day Challenge trophy! That was for doing 60 yoga classes in 60 days in Jan, Feb and early March. 

Daddy did make it to almost 73+ classes in 73 days and then it stopped early this week. Well, it will start again.

Jr. took this photo after the little one suggested "Appa, you got a tropy. But you should put a picture of you doing yoga now and show people how well you are doing, before putting the trophy picture". Well, have definitely redistributed weight around, a lot of fat is gone and new muscle is there. I am reasonably sure that if it were not for the Yoga marathon, would have fallen ill a lot more what with all the sickness going around in the house and everywhere in the bay area in general. At one point 8 kids were out sick in the little one's class including her.

Definitely recommend the 60 day challenge to all Bikram Yoga practitioners. We spent Saturday evening listening to the stories of all the folks who finished the challenge and it was truly inspiring. Daddy got to say his story also and he pretty much stopped short of doing a demo, throwing the little one in the air and catching her. There is still a lot to improve if you look at the picture above. Yes, the hamstrings and core are strong enough to lift the body off the ankle, but if you see the symmetry in the shoulders and the legs, it is clear that there is a lot of compensation going on to keep the balance. Well there is a lifetime of yoga left to correct these things. . .

 

 After we listened to everyone tell their story, there was a raffle and guess what? The kids won the raffle. I say the kids because at one point my MIL was worried about the kids going to bed late and the little one falling sick again.  They both insisted they stay for the raffle and I quote the little one "I think today my luck is going to change. I am sick but we are going to win!" and Jr.'s ticket was the winning ticket! We got a bunch of Yoga goodies as part of the raffle. The shirt which two years earlier would have been two sizes too small.. fits daddy perfectly! 

We really missed Sangeetha at this Challenge party. There was no trophy, if she had not pushed me to go. Three days into the challenge she even said "are you just going there and sitting down for a lot of poses or are you doing your very best?". While she was only kidding, that gave me the idea to track down how many poses I actually miss in the Challenge and was planning on doing one extra class for every 26 missed.  She also took a lot of the pick up drop off duty on days where my resolve was wearing down a bit so I could switch to evening classes instead of morning for a full week.  So technically she gets a tropy for supporting it.

We are just a couple of days away from Mommy's return trip back home.

On a funny note one of her co-workers asked her "I heard you are a vegetable. Is that true?" and she knew the co-worker meant "vegetarian" but was not sure how to answer.

Later in the week when she found out that the little one was sick, she went to some local Lama temple as part of sightseeing and prayed to the local god..

I am reasonably sure that her prayer went something like this "Dear Lama god, please make sure my little one stops throwing up fast. she has been throwing up too long" and the Lama god went "okay.. I got this one. Let me stop. You want the little one to throw up long and fast.. Done!"

It might have done us some good if she had a translator before she went into the temple.

Well, we are counting days and that is all there is to it. Our luck will change when she is back. We know it!

Sunday
Feb032008

A view of the future

If trying on grown up undergarments is bad, it gets worse...

(the secret video.. shows a door for almost a minute, but that is what secret video's are all about. Listen to the soundtrack for hilarious dialogues)

All this reference to babies has to do with peer pressure. Let me explain. Everytime, one of her classmates announces a baby brother or sister, or we go to see newborn babies of office colleagues, there is peer pressure on the real mommy in the house!

Typical conversation in the last few weeks:

Jr. : Mommy, can I have a baby?
Mom : No. when you grow up and become a big girl, maybe.
Jr. : When I am 10 years old?
Mom : aaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrghhh!

Jr. : Mommy, when is your tummy going to get big?
Mom : Not unless I eat a lot and put on weight..
Jr. : When will there be a baby in the tummy?
Mom : !! What part of No don't you understand?
Jr. : But, Mrs. xyz (a teacher in her school) is having a baby! and she already has kids..
Mom : Enakku maamiyaare vendam di, nee podum!(I dont need a mother in law here. You are enough to drive me up a wall!)

Add to these, the embrassasment of Jr. asking any women we know "do you have a baby in your tummy?" and they feel like strangling her! I bet this alone keeps the women who have recently put on some weight from visiting hour house!

In a fit of what can only be called 50% rage and 50% exasperation, mommy was heard cursing the little one yesterday.

Here is as close a literal translation as possible:

"I am cursing from the bottom of my heart, that you also have kids, who are exactly like you, and they trouble you, just like you trouble me! Only then you will know what I am going through now!"

On further investigation, found out that this curse runs in San's family and generation after generation, the moms curse their girls along these lines and the grandmoms smile, knowing that their curse came true!

Who knew?!

In any event, it is too late now. The curse has been passed on to one more generation.

ps. The MIL driving one up the wall reference, is more of a cultural thing. San gets along real swell with my mum.

.