We are still carving pumpkins

Five years ago, when the little one was still inside mommy's tummy, we had our first encounter with pumpkin carving!

There were grand plans to start a new festival called Walloween and daddy's road to becoming a congress lobbyist to promote Watermelons, which unfortunately has not materialized!

Daddy is still with his day job and the years rolled by..

The little one who must have been sensing things from the inside is turning into a maestro carver! We were initially apprehensive of handing the carving blades to a not yet five year old, but she was so confident that we decided to let her have a go at it.

The result was amazing, to the point where daddy exclaimed "She is my true heir to the carving throne!"

Jr., who is more of a carving critique than a carver herself decided to do her bit as well this year.

Mommy supplied us with all the pumpkins thanks to her employer having a contest of sorts at work. Daddy coached mommy on the fine art and she won a nice prize + a free pumpkin to go with the prize...

We also had the cousins over to join us with the carving today and did the lineup photo.

Today in Tamil school there was a parade for all the kids. 1000+ kids all dressed in costumes doing a parade after Tamil class was over. It was quite a sight.

We did do the local trick or treating over a half hour period before the little one got scared by a small dog. They had elaborate scary mechanized ghosts, skeletons etc.. a fog machine and eerie sound effects and she braved all that and went to the doorbell (while Jr. stood far away in fear), but the sight of the small dog that licked her knee, sent her scurrying!

All said and done, it was a relatively quiet and nice Halloween.

The Pumpkinography will continue..

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Books Books Books

We go through an average of 8 books per child per week. Mostly thanks to the local public library.

As usual the books are spread on the living room carpet and the house looks like some trinket store on North Mada street in Mylapore during off season where the store owner spreads everything too thin to make it look like he has many items.

An inventory of sorts is done by the kids (mostly the little one) to verify that all books that she picked were indeed checked out! Then the books are all put back in the bag and are brought out in the order in which they were prioritized. Top seeded books come out first!

Keep telling myself to write reviews for some fantastic books that come our way and some books that are really not tasteful for 5 or 8 year olds that end up in that section of the library or at least drop a short note in the blog about the books.

Never seem to take that note to self very seriously...

These two are so good that they need a mention.

The first one is "Miss Nelson is Missing". A fantastic book (which also happened to be the play that the little one got to see as part of her school Kinder field trip). She can read the entire book (has probably memorized it by now).

The funny thing about this book was that it was part of the blue book project for Jr. two years ago! However Jr. never understood the surprise in the book, or forgot about it. She had a "oh.. so that is what happened" light bulb moment last week on doing a second read.

The second book is "Sometimes I like to curl up in a ball". This is a rhyme or "intro to poetry" book that is very well written and beautifully illustrated. The wombat is incredibly cute and both Jr. and the little one love this book.

There should be a service (maybe it exists already?) where all books for kids get two questions..

a. how old is your kid?
b. on a scale of 1-10, how does your kid rate the book?

with that info we can figure out the ideal age group that loves the book and how much that age group loves that book on a scale of 1-10..

On a similar thought blockbuster/netflix etc.. have a rating scheme for movies. If only they had the age demographic to go with it we can go straight to

"movies rated by people in your age group" ranked by number of stars... that way the movies favorited by young teens won't be recommended to me strongly by Blockbuster!

As usual, I digress for purely selfish reasons.

These two books are great for 5-8 year olds. Now that is a wide spectrum these days considering 3 years is a big gap in that age group when it comes to book trends based on our observation in this house!

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Ikebana show - Wow!

Did not know much about Ikebana till today. Still don't, but at least got introduced to the concept at the Flower show at the local community center.

It was awesome!

The arrangements looked picture perfect to the point where Jr. and the little one kept asking "Are they real flowers or fake?" over and over again.

Are these real daddy?

how about these ones. are they real?

I learned something new today. My kids are uncomfortable around "perfection" or the notion of "perfection"..

Was taking pictures of the arrangements and the flowers in the arrangements and in the process learnt a lot about changing zoom lenses fast. Finally decided to do multiple rounds of the show...

with wide angle
with telephoto
with macro!

see results..

this one is with the sigma lens maxed out at 200mm taken at ISO 1600, f6.0, 1/60 sec.
Autofocus makes a big difference..

this one with the 50mm macro lens at ISO 1600, f5.6, 1/60 sec. The macro lens was on manual focus and it has a real small depth of field but where it focusses, it is unbelievably sharp and detailed. Should have taken a tripod with me and it would have been better..

The next bunch of pictures are taken with different lenses..

The bud and the flowers are either zoomed in or magnified with macro. You can see the image differences..

For those local readers, it is open tomorrow also. Definitely worth a visit.

A big thanks to the organizers and participants in the events for this visual treat.

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