Of Christmas, carpenters and baking!

Eet is indeed that time of the year again, when the air is ringing with promise, people are beginning to look (a wee bit relaxed), holidays are around the corner and Jim Reeves is back on the air waves! Whatever you do, whatever you say, whichever part of the world you live in, Christmas season does bring in some joy even if it is in the guise of escaping from yet another year of drudgery!

Well yours truly is also feeling a little bit of this cheer - just about enough to take the edge of the minor irritants in this bliss. As I mentioned in my last post, the last few weeks have been spent in shuttling the kid and self all over town in preparation of the concert. Needless to say, the concert was quite a success what with these lil ones and their absolutely divine voices and impish ways -they don't even have to try! ( Its a wonder how we grow up from being such wondrous creatures into the disillusioned skeptic adults that we are! Sigh!). But here comes the clincher : the little kidlet has to perform the concert all over again this week for the BIG school assembly - which means another few days of frantic shuttling, over-tiredness and general unhappiness - did someone say too much of a good thing??

In other news, I finally found a carpenter to do my 'chutta' kaam - small shelves and other such overlooked necessities to help keep kidlet's room a wee bit organised. But unfortunately, this guy has just descended from some zombie land, he has dilly dallied for more than 3 weeks now and I am really at my wits end. I cannot fire him at this point since he has some advance monies + where the hell am I to find a replacement? The irksome part is the politeness of it all. I have made umpteen calls to him and all sort of threats, shouting and berating is met by stoic politeness over the phone. I am so bloody annoyed. I spend a lot of time just 'following up' with people - gives me a darned headache!! Whatever happened to people just doing the work they are getting paid to do?

However, the silver lining in this all, as always is - is food! Yay! The Oven is back in action and this past week my adventures have included : focaccia bread (hard, uninspiring), Banana muffin (delectalicious even if I say so myself!) and eggless fruit cake (so-so !)...Now for some shortbread cookies and pie - oooohhh....I adore the warm smells of christmas baking - cinammon, nutmeg and spices!!!

Have a great Christmas y'all - may the peace and joy of the time descend on you :-)

Goodnight and Godbless !! (Felt like saying that - its actually morning here!!!)

Tiger Moms? Nah, Tiger Tees ;)

Have been pretty rushed last few weeks..reason being - hold your breaths - my daughter's school concert. Well, before you rush to the conclusion that I am one unworthy non-appreciating mother, please be informed that my kid is all of 4 years old. And she has been practicing for the said concert for the last three weeks - one hour a day. Which is reasonable until you consider that school hours have also been increased by said one hour! Now the last bit is when it gets irritating - the last week before the concert the kids need to practice for '4 hours' everyday in a ice-cold air-conditioned auditorium. And as it goes without saying, tempers are frazzled - teachers want nothing but perfection - sheeps have to stay still, no pulling of sleeves, no itchy-scratchies and of course you gotta sing and dance in tune!And the kids? They hate it.

Now Im a little bit confused - the audience for this concert is going to be made up of adoring parents, grandparents and the like. This is not likely to be an audience which is going to be super critical in its judgements - indeed whatever the kids end up doing or not doing - they are likely to be faced by a beaming, adoring audience no less. So why this Kolaveri, di?? (Sorry, couldn't resist!!)

I get the argument that children need to know discipline and not all song and dance - is well - all song and dance. Yet, they are the performers , and they need to sense the joy in what they are doing -and that point is getting missed somewhere in all this.

Well, my kidlet unfortunately has also fallen ill at this opportune(?) time and has missed out on some of the all important rehearsals - and she is hardly feeling bad about it!! Which is as well for me - I get spared the school run - and she gets spared some tiger teacher(the tiger tees in the heading, if you were wondering) time !!

P4_Gandhi ji ke zamaane mein!

The reference to Gandhiji is rather glanceways since my thoughts are more with his three bandars!! Hear no Evil...See no evil..you get the drift...

But heaven knows that it is pretty appropriate bandariya like behaviour for me nowadays - given that at every multimedia interface that I happen to be involved in with along with my daughter (very highly-faltu way of referring to TV/News/Movies/Radio/Internet....) I find myself scrambling over to cover ENT (Ok, not throat, nor ear..errr...ok more like ears and eyes and soon it surely will be mouth as well). There is just SO MUCH of inappropriate content all over the place nowadays that becoming insensitive to violence is like almost the least of my worries! This has hit me totally unawares, because till very recently my kid used to watch only CBEEBIES - highly annoying till you realise that what you have been missing is worse - significantly! To start with there are adverts - noodles,foodles and the like I still can get but VIVEL beauty bar???Why does Kapoor babes bathing ad find place in a supposedly kiddie channel? Media planners seriously - please !! Though - putting Harpic ad - stroke of genius - now that really helps kids gulp down the food, eh?

Anyways, not that the programming itself is that holier than thou - even if it wasnt - and if you could overlook the fact that you are watching decades old japanese animations dubbed by southindian accented adults trying their darnest kiddie accents- even then - there are kids having crushes, cockroaches(no love lost there either!!) squashing each other to nothingness, and generally "making su-su"(honest dialogue from comic) over all childhood innocence.

Then of course there are the movies - that we are not allowed to take our children to -but we can freely watch trailers of - intentionally or unintentionally across all medias possible. So here we are saying hello to Vidya Balan's boobs all over TV/Papers and not to mention the hardly subtle orgasming in the Ooh-la-la song! Honestly - try suddenly changing channels on the car radio when your kidlet in all innocence is grooving to The-Tea-Picture :((

Aiyo - censorship just excites curiosity - I do find it very funny when my husband tries to distract the kidlet when there is some kissing happening - as if she doesn't know - weren't her eyes open when the lips moved close? And what with the length and the sound effects of these kisses nowadays...hhrrrrrmph ...I could just go on about the insanity and the inevitability of it all!!

How do you do it? All you Moms out there?

P3_the undomesticated life

I have deep respect for women who are truly domestic godesses - and they seem to abound in this city. I have yet to meet a mom who is as harried, worried, scurried and messy as I am. Honest -and I will not even go into the missing beauty parlour procedures that are all but a distant memory here!Here I am blogging right from under a to do list a gazillion meters long!

Now heres a confession - not so long ago - to be precise - a month ago we moved house - and soon after the husband announced, "funds are low till such and such date - please go slow on the spending!". Was I irritated? A little bit. But hallelujah! if there was an excuse for not having work done (of which, if you have ever moved house you know there is no dearth of!) here it was. But horrifically ( yes - me ingrate) that such and such date is past and all the plumbing-carpenting-dusting-rearranging-reupholstering madness beckons me with arms open wide! Not to mention the house we currently live in is the size of my delhi house shoe-box (ok, exaggeration - but mild!) - so whichever workman/men enter they leave behind a trail of dust and weird prints in the most unlikely places, leaving me the wretched to swab the floor every night!!

Not to mention the husband travels most of the time - so Im supposed to be the home manager. Its not supposed to be tough no? Especially with so much help - I have someone to cook, clean and accompany kid for playdates etc. Whatteezeet that Im doing so wrong that I feel underwhelmed and behind most days???Grrrrrrrrrrr....

P2_Bug in the air!

I have never in my life used/heard the phrase "bugintheair" so much! really!! In Bombay it feels like there just should be a byline which says "Mumbai - where there are bugs in the air" like if you folks have ever visited Haryana via Delhi there are giant boards which proclaim "Haryana- yahan doodh, dahi ka khaana!". No kidding about either - former or latter.

Ever since we moved to the city almost 4 years ago I find myself becoming a very bugged bug- warrior with each passing month. There seems to be no end to it! The number of pediatric concoctions in my medicine cabinet have gone past being a phase date, if you know what I mean. I totally do not buy the, "It builds their immunity" argument either. Whatever the reason, I dont really know, I am losing sleep way beyond what I signed up for :(

Of late I have actually become pretty bindass (Bambaiya, right?). After having spent the whole of last night listening to my daughter hacking away in her sleep I just checked her forehead once for fever, asked her if she felt like going to school, double checked with Dad, and bundled her off. Flashback a year or even a few months ago I would have been a mental wreck bawling away at how my poor baby is sick ...And honestly though Im not proud of my transformation - what to do?

Keep Calm and carry on? Till the next bug then...sigh-0-nara!!!

P1_Hello again!

Its been a long time since I entered the blogger world. But the lure of typing out my own newspage ( which arises every few years !!) has brought me back.

The first ever time I blogged was way back in 2006 - wow! It was full of random thoughts - I remember doing posts on nursery rhymes and my current hairstyles!! err...moving on I believe there was a phase on expat living and then obviously the theme that drowned it all - motherhood! Subsequently some surreptitious blogs on weight loss were started and abandoned with equal gusto (Sigh or what!).

Goodness only knows what I am going to blog about now:) But it seems to be a fun time to be around - everyones online - including my mother.On Facebook where else.

My guess would be that I'll be blogging about (fingers crossed - tightly noosed in by a non-expanding rubber band!) my current life, which is currently being lived out in mumbai as a SAHM to a 4 year old cutey - yeah! Would rather not fall into the housewife-ly rant since its been a while since I zoned out of the perfect-home-wife trip!

But what I am sure I will be talking about is - maids! Man, is this city in the grip of an epidemic or what - any bleddy conversation you have with any bleddy body - it all comes down to the domestic help. It almost appears that there is no domesticity possible without the help!! And so I am sure that among some of the blog posts will have that as a theme - how to avoid it in the blogger world - if you cannot avoid it in the real?

And then ofcourse schools, pre-schools(yikes!!), mommysaurs (they exist and are not extinct yet) and you get the drift.

Signing off in anticipation of all that and more - Nidhi

PS: I think I will be cheesy Big B style - P1:Post 1!!