5 years

5 years!

Somehow it feels like a milestone. Feels BIG! As  if the babyness is now truly gone forever. You go to school happily now, do your homework as soon as you come back,play big boy games, don’t always want me near you. I feel that our relationship is changing as it should no doubt. Knowing and doing are two sides to the coin. bitter sweet… that’s how my mind feels.

That’s enough about me. Lets talk about you instead.

You, you have become a non stop chatter box. Chitter patter all day long. From the time you wake up till when you sleep, non stop. You sit in  the loo and talk/shout at me and expect me to respond from the kitchen. Most of the time we are telling you “Mowgli please keep quiet for one minute!” and you reply “okay.. pashe Mowglinu one last thing parayatte…” and it goes on and on and on. What is there to talk about so much? I wonder.

 

Food and you still are not on good terms with each other. When everybody else Oohs and Aahs over my cakes and cookies, you refuse to even nibble at it. You give me orders to bake a chocolate cake, train cake for your birthday, but you never even ate a piece … Well… I suppose its just a matter of time. The genes will do their work!

You are still so innocent. Look at me amazed at how I know all the naughty things that you do in the school bus. ( its very easy, I’ve told him that I’ve installed a secret camera in  the bus. So these days I just ask him “Why did you do that?”. a sheepfaced look and out comes the list.) Santa Claus, Fairies and Magic. You believe in all that and I’m loving it. Just waiting for you to start reading on your own and then we can go crazy officially!

You are one Style diva. In your words, Button shirt and jeans and cooling glass.. “appalanu style aavane”. The other day we went out with you dressed in a Yellow shirt with Orange pants and a maroon tie. You were so confident in what you believed were the perfect clothes, we had no choice but to quietly tag along. You’ve also started to mirror what your dada does.if dada is in shorts, then you will also wear shorts. If he is in jeans, then it is jeans for you. If he wears a helmet, then you also want one. From being mama’s boy, you are slowly morphing into  idolizing your dada for everything.

 
What I feel is that in this year, there were times when you were clearly frustrated with us. By our unwillingness to buy everything you want, by our insistence that things need to be done THAT way in THIS house. You are at that stage when you are questioning authority and trying to find your identity in the process. There are times we understand and behave accordingly. But you also need to understand that 10pm after a really really hectic day is SO not the right time to get assertive!

Sometimes its pretty hilarious as we both look at each other with similar mulish expressions… The identical stubborn cleft on the chin , the perfect ‘look’ willing the other to blink first! 

Oh, I almost forgot the tears! Tears at the drop of a hat. For anything and everything. Praying that its just a phase and you will soon snap out of it. Till then its downright irritating and has us grinding our teeth most of the time!

 How would you adjust with Bambi? That was something we were very worried about. Now after 18 months, I can safely say you are fine! Right from waking up the other as soon as one gets up, to dragging her along for all your harebrained schemes, to fighting with each other every other minute! You both rock!!! 

As Vianne Rocher says in Chocolat, life with you is

“Happiness. Simple as a glass of chocolate or tortuous as the heart.

Bitter. Sweet. Alive.”

God Bless! 

And I thought I was well read!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen *


2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien*

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling *

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee *

6 The Bible *

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

Total: 5



11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott *

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller *

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger *

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger *

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

Total: 4



21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell *

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy *

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck *

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll *

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

Total: 4



31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis *

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis *

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini *

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden *

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

Total: 4



41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown *

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery *

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

Total: 2





51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel *

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon *

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon *

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez *

Total: 4



61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas *

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville *

Total: 2



71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens *

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno – Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

Total: 1



81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker *

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White *

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom *

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle *

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton *

Total: 5



91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery *

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare *

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl *

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Total: 3

JustBooks... here I come!!!

Srilanka Travels

Long overdue posts coming up….

First THE vacation!

What can I tell you, except that with so many people envying us this trip there had to be a glitch! The glitch here was that I who never fall sick, got the fever. And what a fever. 104 degrees on Sunday evening two hours before our train to Chennai. Kids safely at in-laws place. My parents giving me glaring looks. Dad grumbling that “this is not an entrance exam that you  HAVE to leave. You can always do this later”. After all the planning that we’d done, do this later? No Ways!!! Armed with tonnes of medicines, we said our goodbyes and got into the train. The journey to Chennai was a blur. I remember people making room for me to lie down, almost fainting in the Volvo bus, throwing up at the Chennai station the next morning. Its all very vague. The only thing I remember very clearly is me telling random people “I’ll be fine. We have 9 days there. There is no way I can be sick for 9 whole days!”.

We reached Colombo without further mishaps. Colombo airport seemed like a resort with all the tropical plants and greenery around. Have never seen so many orchids together. Met our driver and officially started our FIRST vacation post kids! Onward to Dambulla. Keeping Dambulla as a stopover, we did Sigiriya and Polonnaruwa the next day. I was feeling much better, almost like myself. Climbed up 1500 steps..the view was definitely worth it! A huge palace atop a rock. Interlinked pools, murals, shining walls... Magnificent. Saw a lot of ruins with numerous Budhas’. Sitting , standing, lying down. What was common across all the statues was the serenity exuded. Calm, peaceful. Its as if nothing could matter. You could stand there for ages looking at him. Over enthusiasm invariably results in a fall. Very predictatably the BH fell sick. 

[The entrance to the palace on the top of the rock]

For the next 4 days that’s all we did. Fall sick in turns. In between lying comatose, we managed to visit Kandy and Nuwaraeliya. Fortified with various antibiotics and analgesics, like resolute tourists we climbed every rock, scaled every metaphorical peak and saw everything that these places had to offer. Kandy had a traditional Srilankan dance performance which was amazing. Vey similar to theyyam, the dancers wore various masks and sang as they danced. Beautiful performance. Not to miss.

We were getting better and better, marked mainly by how our appetite improved. By the time we reached Nuwaraeliya, I was fine and ravenous. Days of not eating properly had made me so irritated with life in general. A mini hill station. What struck us both was how beautifully everything was maintained. Clean. There were bins all around and everything was very tidy. (Colombo, though was a different story!)

[Murals]

[Swimming pools with a view for the royalty]

The road to Nuwaraeliya was beautiful flanked by vegetable farms on one side and the hills on the other. Roadside shops burst with fresh produce. Lettuce of all varieties, leeks, cauliflowers, cabbages it was a tantalizing sight. Reinforced the fact that we had to get our house in the hills. Ended our trip with three days of relaxation at the beach. Bentota. Snorkelled, gorged on sea food, slept, walked on the beach, relaxed. Then off to Colombo for one last day of frantic shopping. It’s a very lovely country and really friendly people. The food was very similar to Kerala food and there were no delicacies per say.

[1 day old baby turtle]

The whole trip, in  spite of the fever, was just pure relaxation. No shouting Mowgli Mowgli every second minute. No worries. Eat, drink, read, sleep. Bliss. We did miss the two imps, the BH more than me, and preponed our flight back. I for one was pretty happy with not having to rack my brains over what to make for breakfast, lunch and the like. There were things that they would have also enjoyed like the trip to the turtle hatchery and playing in the beach. But that’s okay. We normally take them along wherever we go and for kids their age they have travelled quite a lot. Hoping that this turns out to be an annual affair. Maybe not so long. But at least a week without kids. Just seeing the expressions on people’s faces when we told them “we have two kids” made this trip so worthwhile!!! ( most of them thought we were honeymooning! Hohoho)

Mowgli and Bambi had a gala time at the BH’s place and at mine. Barring one or two times when they missed us, the rest of the time they acted as if they never even knew us. Bambi was initially reluctant to come to us, but after some time she cooly shifted loyalties from my mom to us. Mowgli, on the other hand, hugged and asked us the usual million dollar question “ what did you bring for me!”

The trip ended on our anniversary with the BH gifting me a sapphire. :-)

Cheers to years of togetherness.

Seven years down..

Many more to go...