Yet another family tradition

Just like carving pumpkins at their cousins place or doing portrait photos after every new dress up session during the Navrathri festival, the Traveling Narayanans seem to have come up with yet another family tradition.

The IBM Children's party that celebrates the holiday season in style.

This blog has photos of the kids attending this party over the last 8 years now. This year the tradition was almost broken because the little one is sick. However she did brave her misery and came with us to take a short break and enjoy the usual activities. 

First, the caricatures by Big Al ! He was almost ready to close and was wondering how come we missed it this year.. 

This year we also made two separate collages, one for Jr. and one for the little one so we can frame it 

The little one is not a baby anymore. You can see her face change all too clearly in caricature!

Here are the rest of the photos.. 

the little one posing like Mona Lisa..

Decorating reindeer cookies with frosting ..

Getting animaloons from the clown..

Then there was the last thing on the list.. Face painting!

Finally, the picture with Santa! This Santa worked for 30+ years at IBM and retired. He reminds me of my own grandfather for some strange reason. Same matter of fact tone when he speaks, same smile.. can't pin point it.. but he does! The team there took this great picture and gave us a printout (this is a photo of that printout)..

Yet another year has gone by! The kids are looking beautiful every year and daddy has gone down.. what happened to all that hair!

Look at the photos from our very first party 8 years ago and you will see what I am talking about. 

It is great to have a blog where you can see how things transform over time. Even when my memory fails me and that seems to be happening more often these days.. the blog is like a search into my own head!

I digress as usual. 

Christmas is almost here. Here is to a wonderful holiday season!

Merry Chirstmas and happy new year to all of you from the Narayanan Family!

Traditions and Gorillas

In the mid nineties a friend at RPI told me a story (he said it was an experiment, but I am not sure if it was really done or just a story).. so let's just call it that for now.

It goes like this. The scientists put three gorillas in an enclosure which was moated on three sides and on the fourth side was a tall metal gate which was electrified but not locked.

Initially the first gorilla attempts to open the gate but gets a shock so it comes back to the middle of the enclosure. Same thing happens to the other two gorillas. Soon there is a baby gorilla born in the enclosure. They also add another new gorilla to the mix. When these two new additions tried to go towards the gate, the other three pulled them back with a lot of warning. 

Soon the original three gorillas were long gone and new ones were added to the enclosure. The fence was not electrified anymore, but not a single gorilla made it out. If anyone tried, the others would stop them from the terrible fate about to befall them. 

Now there may be many morals to that story or many inferences from that experiment on behaviour, but my takeway is that sometimes traditions are just formed along these lines and we do things out of context to present day just because our parents and grand parents did so.

Now why bring up all this now? This week has a special day in it.. aka Valentine's day. So "tradition" has it that the kids give a "Valentine" to all their classmates, irrespective of wheather they like the person or not. 

This translates to us buying a bunch of cards, envelopes, pre packaged trinkets and putting them in envelopes and getting them to school. They have nicely segregated the Valentines for boys and girls.. so if there are are 20 kids in the class and you have 12 girls, you have to buy two boxes of 20 valentines. 

To make things interesting, the envelopes and the trinkets don't always fit and we cannot seal the envelopes easily with the heart stickers provided. If there is one item on the shelves this week that has no concept of quality, it must be the valentines.

In spite of all this, the joy on the kids face doing this activity is worth the griping over the quality of these things. I am not sure if we will ever eliminate this "tradition", given that it provides much needed jobs to a bunch of factory workers and also given that it keeps the paper and pulp industry going again.. well, one can always try to find a silver lining in this somewhere ?! 

Every year I suggest skipping this tradition for our kids but don't succeed in it. We also have a shoebox for each kid where all the valentines they received over the years are stored.

The good news? The middle schooler does not have to do this anymore. It seems to be like trick or treating. Once the kid goes to middle school, this is seen as an activity for "small kids" or as Jr. puts it "it is for kids", which is a hint to us that she should now be counted with the adults. 

Happy valentine's day to everyone in advance. May your weekend be filled with cards, candies and flowers and at the least, lots and lots of love!

Customs that make sense..

Recently we visited Seattle for my nieces first birthday celebration. There was a formal Hindu ceremony followed by a Western style birthday party with a cake cutting. There was a short break and the birthday girl got her head shaved off and her ears pierced! 

What shocked me was that when we went to the local hair salon, we were told that they are banned by law from using a razor to shave off the scalp of the baby! In India we do not cut the hair for the baby and the first haircut is a shave, usually done in a temple that they family prays to. There is a lot of goodness in doing this. The hair grows thicker when you are a kid and we are told that this is a tradition that dates back thousands of years. 

Pretty sure some western scientists would have "studied" this in their way to come to a conclusion on hair growth rate, density, eventual impact on long term hair loss, does this apply to male pattern baldness etc. etc. Many Ph.D's have possibly been generated, for all we know!

Why ban this is beyond me! The birthday girl brought back so many memories for me as she looks a lot like our little ones, especially Jr. when she was the same age!

The photographs below are Jr. at 10 months, the little one at 8 months, my niece on her first birthday all on the day of their Mottai's !

They are all soo adorable! Sometimes I wish to bottle up my kids and freeze them at that age. 

At least we have the old photos and videos to replay those moments and enjoy!

Here are some of the old and new photos..

Jr's mottai in Gunaseelam Temple near Trichy in Tamil Nadu 2003! We had gone there as a family to pray there after my brother's wedding. She is sitting on his lap and my dad was very happy that his kids were all there in one place after many years!

Look at the size of the mosquito bites on Jr.! That was and is her only complaint when we mention "India trip"!

The little one had two.. one here at 8 months and one in India in the summer vacation when she was five!

The first one was a shave but not with a razor everywhere. I did it for her after the hair salon did a #1 cut. We did put the hair in the temple almost five years later. The thing sat in a ziploc bag for all those years!

The second time she was the star of the show. 

This is something that all kids get, both girls and boys. The boys more often.. I remember my brother and myself getting head shaved off 4 times when we were little kids, almost every alternate year! Here is a picture on one of those India trips where my nephew is sporting "the look". The kids were all troubling me that day for a pose!

Now to the latest diva, my niece! 

She was amazing. Sat there so peacefully and watched her hair fall. Think she was relieved to see it go! 

and here she is with Jr. after she got the earring!

The little one wants a second set of earings after watching her cousin get new earings..

We are now searching for an old photo where my father, me, my brother and sister are all sporting a clean shaved head after a temple visit! Will post it if we find it...

Gods for a day

The kids got treated like gods, quite literally on Monday when we went to a Gujrathi family for Navarathri celebrations. 

The ladies in the house line up all the little girls aged 3 to 10 and wash their feet, put flowers, perfumes on them and then do a prayer with the girls treated as the deities!

Needless to say this is followed by some amazing food...

It was a great experience for the kids and they blushed at all the attention.

Truly happy that they are getting an all Indian experience and are not restricted to a simply south Indian Golu tradition. Only in the bay area!

To each his own

One thing about the festival season in a south Indian brahmin family is the clothes.

Well, the guys get to wear their silk dhotis and the ladies come dressed like cute penguins in their madisaar saris!

It is an extra long saree (almost 50% longer) reserved for special occasions (usually red color) that they wear in a different way than the casual sari.

San will always be my hottie! She has always been cute to my eyes from the day she walked down the marriage hall and challenged me to be her husband. It was like a bull fightress with the red cape challenging a bull. To this day I am madly running around her, still unable to hit the mark!

To get back on track with the post, there is something about the madisaar sari that is a turn on. The casual San in her jeans and kurthi somehow magically transforms into a madisaar wearing hottie. It is possible that deep down somewhere the image of a madisaar mami is similar to how Hollywood movies portray the woman in her white wedding gown for desi boys like me!

Indian ancestors seem to have perfected the art of packaging. Cover almost everything, expose without really exposing, and let curiosity take care of the rest..

Well, as long as San keeps her "Koorai pudavai" in good shape and wears a madisaar once a year, she will still be my hottie when she is old and gray!

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