Introducing...

Viola "Lila" Rosalind Ashok

Dinner and a movie

On Sunday night we went on a date with Appu. We took him to our currently favorite restaurant here in Calicut for a speedy dinner - while his little sister napped under achamma's careful watch. Rohan opted to stay home to watch his favorite Thomas movie instead and for once we thought, why not, if everyone is happy.

So it was just the three of us and it really is nice to spend a little time one on one with our big boy - he is already five years old!! When the waiter poured water in his glass he said "Thank you" and I told him "That was very polite, Appu, good job!". His comment was "I've never been polite in a restaurant before". So now he can tick that off his list :)

This is us in front of the steaming hot tagliatelle with cheesy pesto. Too bad I don't have a snap of the french soup in a bread bowl, I really must go back to document that, as soon as possible.

For papa'...

... who should be landing in Chennai in a few hours.
(In fact he is the one who took the photo, last week)

Bye bye Papa', see you soon...

Today papa' is going back to India and that means you can probably expect more frequent posting for some time.

The kids are at daycare today and said their goodbye to papa' when he dropped them off in the morning.

Here they can see them getting ready for school.The first step is convincing the kids to surrender the balloons left over from the birthday party.

Next is convincing Rajiv to wear his new blue shoes that fit just right instead of the green ones that are still too loose and make him fall.

Then, out of the door. But wait... too much light... "I want my sunglasses!" (Too bad, I think we left them at school last week..)

And now they are almost ready to go. Note the birthday banners still on our fence. Nothing is cleaned up right away at our house, it's a matter of principle.

"Bye!"

And just like that, he was gone...

Our street is a zoo

To continue along the line of my "Our House Is The Center Of The World" narrative - see the previous installment here - let me tell you about the few meters around our front door.

Now that is spring we spend more time outside, and so do many other fascinating life forms. There are some creepy ones too, but even leaving those alone, there is plenty to see. Like here:

Let's zoom in a little.

Aha! A large crowd of ants hanging out on the sidewalk. You'd think that's where they live, but it seems unlikely because if you come back in half an hour they will be gone. Then maybe tomorrow they will appear at the other end of the street.

Appu and I think it is a fascinating phenomenon, but Rohan at first seemed to disagree. Here you can see him trying to get us to go back inside the house.

Failing that, he joined us at the ants', taking his yellow bus with him.

A few minutes later he decided to put his hand and part of his body right on top of the ants and so our attempt to connect with nature ended with me shaking Rohan trying to get as many ants off him as possible. They were literally everywhere.

Rajiv remained outside a little longer, using tiny sticks to make a series of bridges for the ants. It was quite cute, but a little disappointing for him, because the ants just didn't want to walk on the new bridges.

I will spare you the details, but there are many other interesting things going on in front of our door. Sometimes there are ducks - or geese - and we get to say goodnight to them - many times in a row.

We see worms in the garden when we pull the weeds and I know there are often toads in there but I never came across one with the kids. The best we could do was going on a snail safari, a couple of days ago.

We read a book about snails, where we learned that they prefer to put their heads out when it's getting dark. We also learned that they are slimy, the have only one foot so they are very slow and they have a strong tongue to eat leaves. So one evening after it had rained and after we had gone for a walk with the wagon we decided to go looking for snail.

There were so many! Rajiv and Rohan remained "safely" in the wagon while we walked to the end of the street and back moving the snails to the side so people wouldn't accidentally step on them. We even saw two tiny baby snails with almost transparent shells. Any we saw many many leaves with wholes on them, a sure sign that our little friends like the local cuisine.

Piccolo Rajiv (The Book) - is here..

When the movie? :)

Anyway, maybe you recall I had decided to get a hard copy of the now abandoned "Piccolo Rajiv" blog. I received the book from Blog2Print a couple of weeks ago and I am very happy, in spite of some obvious flaws.

Here are a few snaps.

Front cover - with the trademark baby feet...

... and back cover: I thought this image from the Canadian winter would be appropriate.

A couple of random images of the inside. There are two options while making the book: you can choose to maintain the exact formatting of the pages as they appear on your blog or you can ask the software to rearrange the photos to fill the space better and reduce the number of pages. I chose the latter to save some money and I don't regret it for a second (I am no designer anyway, so it's not like the perfection of my layouts needs to be preserved at all costs) but while sometime the optimized layout is perfectly fine,

sometimes it is not.

But who cares, right? My only real complaint is that there have been a couple of instances where the text has ended up hidden by the corner of a picture. I should have spotted that in the pdf preview, so it's my fault, but to be honest I just didn't want to spend the time. After all the whole point of using Blog2Print was that it required zero work on my side, and I tried to remain true to that principle to the very end :)

Hello papa'

This was last Saturday. It seems so long ago, it's easy to get used to having papa' around :)

We were waiting next to the window to see if we could spot the car. We stayed there for a while and so I decided to take a little video to kill some time. And right away papa' was here!



Cuddle cuddle..

..check mail..

..open the box..

..and crash.
So we watch a bit of a movie

and then we go outside to try the new balance bike (that just means a smaller than usual bike with no pedals and no training wheels).

It was a bit rainy, as you can see, but one week later the weather has really come around and I am off to spend a little bit of early morning (well, ok, it's 8:30, but still morning) time outside with the kids. See you soon :)

Our window is better than a movie theater

Depending on your preferences, of course.

If you like garbage trucks - we do, especially Rohan - then you can spend all Tuesday morning, and sometimes the afternoon too, waiting for the recycling truck to come, then the regular trash one and the one collecting the yard waste and the truck for the organic waste. In fact you might even consider inviting some friends over and have a party! (No, we haven't done that -yet)

If this had not been enough, one morning - not Tuesday! - we spotted a garbage truck parked for a full ten minutes in front of our neighbours' house. It turns out the driver needed a quiet place to stop and have breakfast. Did he suspect the eyes of all toddlers on the street where directed on him? I think he saw me pointing at him through the window, but I bet he is used to it.

Even better, one morning we woke up to the sound of various different kinds of "thump!" and "clang!" and it turned out that we had a small bulldozer and a few other marvelous machines just a few meters away from our house!

They were changing the pipes directed to the sewer. Well, this time we did have a party. Rajiv waited patiently for his brother to wake up too and found himself a cozy spot to observe the work from inside.

Meanwhile, I called our friends from down the street who might have missed it. By the time Meaghan arrived to stay with the children there were five children between one and five surrounding the hole in the ground. I went to work and left them all there to have fun. By the time I came back home, Rajiv knew all about black pipes.

What is it?

Well, if you are curious you are not the only one: apparently yesterday when the package arrived the two little monkeys tried to open it with (unsharpened) pencils.

I can't tell you what it is yet, but I can show you a pictures of the little brothers in their new Thomas pj's. Too bad they just couldn't sit still, this is the best I've got.

And by the way, papa' is coming tomorrow! We might open the box with him when he arrives, unless he prefers to crash directly on a bed.

Edited to add: ..we did both :)

Concerto di Primavera

May 8th: Edited to add: read more and watch videos here.

Yesterday was the Big Day. It was a bittersweet experience, at least for me and maybe for Rajiv too, but I plan to tell you more in another post. Right now I am at the office and I really can't write for too long, so I'll just show you a few pictures.

The two brothers entering the building. Rajiv was a big help in keeping Rohan safe in the parking lot and inside while my hands were busy lugging around the cello, the bench, the food for the potluck and so on.

We were a bit late but we still made it in time for the tuning. Phew!

This is Genevieve, by the way, Rajiv's teacher.

This was during the concert. Genevieve sat in front of the smallest kids to help them out.

And after :) It was a long tiring loud day, which by the way had started at about 4:30 AM for both me and Rajiv - long story - and even though he did have a nap in the afternoon, at this point he was touchy and ready to collapse somewhere. I just had to make sure it was the bed :)

Sono un genio..

Ho convinto i bimbi a mangiare i broccoli cuocendoli semplicemente al vapore e lasciandoglieli intingere nella salsa teriyaki. I bimbi adorano intingere - qualunque cosa in qualunque altra cosa - e adesso Appu mi chiede ogni giorno se ci saranno i broccoli per cena - ma non ho ancora ripetuto, per non rovinare l'effetto ottenuto con tanta fatica :)

Those in the photo are my two little boys, eating STEAMED BROCCOLI dipped in teriyaki sauce. Why didn't I think of this before?

Why they need to eat standing up, I don't fully understand, but it might have to do with being able to hunt for the best piece in the steaming basket - or maybe they just want to make it clear that they are free to leave at any time, who knows.

The Best Laid Plans

Cliccate sotto su "Read more" per video e foto.


In Case you are wondering - and I know you probably are not, really - I am intentionally borrowing the title from a book about Canadian politics that I haven't even read yet - but it looks good ;)

I thought about what to do for Easter for a while and in the end we did absolutely nothing special, as you well know. One thing I wanted to get right, though, was the eggs. I didn't want to get really good - and really expensive - chocolate, because:

1. The kids really don't know the difference
   
2. If we want to keep collecting the Thomas Wooden Railway we have to save money somewhere -- even if just symbolically
   
3. I wouldn't know where to find really good Easter eggs here - because I'm a European snob

So the choice was restricted to whatever the Valuemart in front of my office had to offer. The boys love Kinder chocolate, but recently I have been very disappointed with the little gadgets found inside them. Not like those of my youth..  The thought of an oversized version of them popping out of the big Easter Kinder eggs left me cold.

Then I saw he official CHL eggs, which promised a pull back Zamboni inside every one of them: Perfect!

If you are not Canadian you might not know what any of this means, so let me explain.

The CHL is the Central Hockey League and ice hockey is of course the most popular sport in Canada - did you think it was curling???

A Zamboni is a large machine, looking a little like a road sweeper, that resurfaces the ice on an ice rink: meaning, it peels off the top layer of ruined ice and leaves behind nice smooth ice. All Canadian kids love Zambonis, just like kids everywhere love all sort of large and mean machines. Why this thing is called a Zamboni was a mystery for me for a while, until I googled it and found out that this machine was invented by Frank Zamboni and his company is still leader in the market. I'm afraid You have to be Italian to understand why all this sounds hilarious..

Anyway, Rajiv has recently become a Zamboni enthusiast, thanks to an episode of Caillou he watched in which Caillou gets to ride on a Zamboni after his skating class. For a few days after that, the toy bulldozer that Appu rides around the house turned into a Zamboni.

So I thought: this is great! We get to do the ritual cracking of the eggs with some cheap chocolate, and who cares about that anyway, and then inside there will be two nice small pull back vehicles that the kids can play with for the rest of the day. While I take rest.

If you have reached here without falling asleep, below the fold you will get to watch a video of the actual egg cracking. Papa' was with us on Skype, which was nice.

Vigilia di Pasqua col sole

You are going to hear a lot about Easter on this blog. Not because it is my favorite holiday or anything like that, but I had four full days to spend at home with the kids and I'm going to share the joy. Only the good parts, I promise: I will spare you the synchronized wailing contests and the I-want-to-go-out-in-the-rain-without-shoes moments.

Unfortunately I don't have any photos of the egg hunt with Kalena on Good Friday - but maybe I can get the video from Anna Marie? Anyway, let me tell you about our Saturday instead, in every boring detail.

I'm not sure you can tell from the photos, but the weather was really nice, the warmest we had so far. I sort of overdressed the kids, just in case, but I wasn't wearing a sweater and I never missed it.

We played for a while on the street in front of our house - it's a dead end, so it's very quiet. Appu insisted that we put together Rohan's new tricycle, but in the end Rohan preferred to walk.

Appu had a blast on his own big trike and kept riding back and forth on the sidewalk.

I asked him to take a photo of me and Rohan and I think he did a great job!

One of the highlights of the afternoon was finding two badminton rackets abandoned on the curb in front of some students' house. They were there to be picked up with the trash, but we rescued them and there was a soft ball too! What more could you want?

We also got a chance to play a little bit with our neighbor Kyle, after a long time.

Then we took mamma's bike with the buggy attached behind for the Rohan and Rajiv to sit in and we went for a short ride. We went through the park and to the office, to pick up some stuff I had left there, and then we went to the grocery store.

My idea of happiness, looks something like this:

If only there was another big bike in this photo...

But let me conclude with a little video, taken earlier while playing on our street.

It's all about timing

Today I told S how to take a "photo" through Skype by using the Grab utility on his Mac.

It just so happens that a few rare events had also just taken place: I had managed to sneak away - almost unnoticed - to take a shower and wash my hair without causing an uprising; the kitchen table had been almost cleared and more or less cleaned to make space for the ritual opening of the chocolate eggs (more about that later); broken down by accumulated guilt I had cooked some proper food for lunch.

As a result of all this, when papa' took the following "snaps", we looked like a regular family having a normal Sunday lunch in a reasonably clean and pleasant environment. It's all about timing :)