A few words..

After the last Asia trip, I came home okay. Then we ate at an Indian restaurant, which we have only visited once before more than a year ago and both me and MIL ended up with food poisoning. Wife and kids did not get hit although the little one complained of tummy pain, went into a fart spree and then declared herself okay. MIL and me were not that lucky. She was throwing up and I was feeling like an over pressurized cannister that did not know how and when it was going to explode for most of the weekend. 

So my yoga attendance in the last 5 days has been spotty at best. Finally made it back to class this evening. Walked in with low expectations but as usual there is the "now that I have made it past that door, better make the most of it" philosophy that kicked in and started doing the best I could.

It was almost the end of the class and we were doing the final stretching pose on the floor when the teacher mentions my name and says "pull your little thighs just above your knees up and towards each other and then stretch"!

Was trying to process that on the fly, given I have never heard anyone say that to me or another student before. 

The first question was "what are little thighs?" then my brain went "it is something between your real thighs and it is above your knees.. so even if we don't know what that is, just pull whatever muscle you can pull up and towards each other in that region!" 

So I tried to locally clench something in that area upwards and inwards and sure enough, like magic, my body went down a good six inches lower and towards my feet! It was MAGIC !

When we got a chance to do the second set, gave those "little thighs" a big inward curl and was able to repeat the stretch!

Have been doing this for 5 plus years. All it takes is a few words to click at the right time in the right way and there is a world of a difference in the result. 

Have come to the conclusion that teaching yoga cannot be an easy thing. Even if a person can do the poses and internalize how to use their anatomy to make changes, it is very difficult to communicate that cause and effect to another person using mere words. 

For all I know, what was moved may not be little thighs, but the learning continues. 

USB stands for..

One of the new pre bedtime activities with the kids is "Playing" Snapcircuit!

When we were little, our favorite playing was a "mechano-set", which was a bunch of steel parts with screws, nuts and bolts and we could make mechanical models of automobiles, airplanes etc.

Somehow we never got introduced to the electronics plug and play games. Now that I get to relive my childhood with the girls, this is really fun for me as well as for them.

Trying to teach them I = V/R and forward vs. reverse bias on an LED is fun. They like to do more of the mechanical

follow the book

make the circuit look like the picture

turn on slide switch and see what happens

method while I insisted on making them read the instructions first, then build the circuit and read the explanations for what they just did. After figuring out that they were in a rush to finish "making" all 300 circuits, put the brakes on.

Now the bedtime quiz is not what we call "Tamil Mirugam and Ragam" (the bedtime quiz was a hodgepodge of questions that were either about Tamil-English and vice versa translations, animal trivia or Carnatic Music Raga identification) anymore. Every alternate day is Snapquiz!

Questions are like :

What is S1 and what does it do?

What is an IC?

What is the unit of measuring resistance?

If you increase the resistance in this circuit from 100 Ohms to 1000 Ohms, what happens?

etc.

Both the kids are now very receptive to the Snapquiz and are answering the usual questions very fast. Now the question bank is increasing slowly. 

Recently I asked them "What does USB stand for?" after the little one mentioned that "all power comes from USB's!". Guess she is used to charging all the devices she uses using an USB cable and she thinks the B in USB stands for some battery!

Jr.s' answer? "Use it. Succeed with it. Bring it everywhere!" . While that was the most creative BS way of saying "I don't know!" she did crack me up and got a lot of hugs and kisses for making us laugh.

Then when they heard the correct answer was "Universal Serial Bus" the little one goes "What does USB have to with Cheerios?"..

We have ways to go and there will be many more "snapquizzies" in the days to come to figure out the relationship between Cheerios and USB.

Training day

When I said, Jr. is going to be trained "Jason Bourne style", I was not kidding!

What deserves mention is that daddy fails in this game 50%. Jr. fails 15-20% !

I might actually fail Kindergarten today!

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