Activity time

In my constant attempts to steer Sid away from the train videos, one day I came up with the idea of Activity Time! While I’m remotely not connected with anything that has the letters A.R.T in it, I can be a decent copy cat. So, activity time involves googling for some interesting (and importantly very very very simple.. ) craft stuff to do. On my way home from work, I bought a few charts, paints, brushes and paper plates and Sid was enthralled by this.

I am a puppeteer

Here are snippets from the experience..

- Sid likes to dip his brush into the paint bottle and almost empty the bottle with 1 dip ..and being the cheapo that I am, I keep telling him to dip very little so it’ll last for the rest of my lifetime. Not that he listens or cares!

- I was okay when he called my caterpillar as snail, but was not impressed when he called my lion as a monkey!

- Somehow any activity with the paper plate interests him more than others.. so now I have to maintain a stock of paper plates at home.. (..called as cascading effect.. or thollai yaara vittudhu)

Paint animals

- At some point, I run out of stuff to do ..or there are times when Sid declares that its activity time at 11:30pm when I am already just pretending to be awake.. these are the times when what I learnt in my biology class comes to rescue..

- I am now wondering what to do with the stuff once you create them, I have this huge folder filled with arty things he did at school and now a few at home, and I dont feel like throwing them but I realize I have to do this at some point to avoid the clutter at home.

 

What we love to do..

Sid’s latest penchant is for puzzles.. he loves to watch me put the pieces together and then the next second he scatters them around asking me to repeat the process, heartless boy! I tried getting him to do it a bit, but for now he is content just watching me do it. One of the nights Sid was coughing badly whenever he lied down. To make him stay awake for sometime and have the medicines we started doing the puzzles and this was at 4am!! Weird when writing about it, but at that moment somehow seemed the logical thing to do, trust me! His periamma also got him a new Animals puzzle with zebra, elephant, tiger, etc. Animals & puzzles are a deadly combination for Sid and every waking moment he drives us mad asking us to keep doing this.

Another favorite pastime of his is to get me read books to him. Remember sometime back when I cribbed about it, well, we have moved on since then and love the story time. One book, which is high on our preference list is called “Elmo says Achoo!” Its such a lovely book to read in which Elmo keeps sneezing and makes things tumble down. The book’s story has a lovely sense of humor and its easy to dramatize it and everytime I say..”Elmo says….” its so cute to hear Sid say “..Achoo..”

The Pepper series is another favorite with us and Sid has torn many pages and I’ve been trying to hold on to the books by using as much glue as I can! God save the books! I’m one who cannot stand a dog-eared book, so seeing my son tear a page into two and smile gives me a shudder. But now I can say I’m better used to it and my heart is not skipping a beat everytime he does it.

Since I’m listing down our favorite books, this Barney book cannot be missed – Its again very useful to teach about the setting in a restaurant and the good manners one should follow there. I don’t think Sid really paid attention when I was reading about the good manners bit, but he has caught the word – restaurant – and uses it so many times now. He also now fancies a pizza and a chocolate cake for dessert. The book is full of colors and it’s so easy to get your kid’s attention to it. It’s also fun to get them to identify the colors as you read the story.

The other day I visited my usual library and this time I decided to pick up a couple of books for Sid too. This proved a HUGE success. So far, I have just been buying books for him, but I completely forgot that I can borrow from the library and they actually have a great collection. So I picked 2 books, one of it was a touch-and-feel book and it has pictures of different animals and when you touch them on the book, it gives a feel of the animal. For e.g. there is fur for a bunny, dog and there are cat whiskers that one can feel. I loved it more than Sid did, he was excited for a couple of days about it and then he was done with it.

The other one was a book titled “GOOD NIGHT Little One” I dont know if a book can get better at visual presentation than this. As you turn every page it introduces you to animals’ homes and where they sleep. There is a question and as you lift the flap, you get the answer. The colors are very striking and the only problem I had with the book was to make sure Sid doesnt tear the flaps especially considering this was a library book. I find that I keep gaping into the pages even when Sid is not around!! It’s one of the most beautiful books I have seen! What a wonderful way to introduce a concept!

Having fun, we are!

 

The restaurant experience..

I’m sure every parent will swear on how the restaurant going experience has changed after the kid(s). So am I an exception.. no! Last week, hubby & I went to have an evening chaat without Sid, and we realized that we’re actually managing to have a conversation with no interruption..Why didn’t I make use of the years before Sid and talk all I had to.. I guess I never knew what was going to hit me even though I had seen others going through it.
Sid, not surprisingly, creates a mayhem when we are in a restaurant. Once, we were so exhausted by his antics even before the food arrived, that we decided we should just get the food packed.. just as we approached the waiter to tell about our choice, the waiter volunteered.. “Sir? so you want to pack the food..?” I guess even he understood what was in our mind just watching Sid play havoc.
Have I learnt my lesson after all the troublesome incidents, you’d think yes.. but no, I have not with the pretence of continuing to enjoy life irrespective of kid, hectic work, etc. The word enjoyment is purely subjective and depends on perspective. This is just like a vacation you plan to an exotic place to relieve you of all stress, and come back even more stressed because of all the planning, packing, etc. But, does one learn, no!
Sid loves exploring whenever we go out for a dinner. We usually opt for a table with a couch, so he can dabble on it a bit without having us worrying he’ll fall off if it had been a chair. Frequently he tries climbing onto the dinner table, and wards off the salt, pepper containers to create more space for himself.. sometimes a vase or a flower becomes his victim, so we promptly hand over the vase to the waiter clearly indicating that we are simply not interested in the paraphernalia. Then he moves on his attention to the plates, spoons & forks and beats the plate kindly with the spoon or the fork to explore the kind of sound that could potentially arise from this activity. At this point, there is a high probability that we have come to the attention of all the people in the restaurant, and mostly the restaurant manager has blacklisted us, and allotted men to specifically keep a keen eye on our table, lest something break.
Sometimes Sid insists on shuffling from my side to hubby’s side with the sole intention of stress-testing our patience and also to make us better human beings. If we hold onto him tight to not allow it, he tries to sneak in from under the table. By now, my appetite wavering and patience stretching thin, I keep throwing glances at the waiter beseeching for FOOD..
Once it so happened that Sid was at his best, but finally we were done and were leaving the place, when many people in the adjacent tables gave us a smile, some sympathetic and some maybe a sigh of relief that they can now eat peacefully. They were just a bit short of clapping their hands.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve tried a few things to let me have a peaceful dinner, and sometimes they come handy.
1) Always have a glass of milk with me, so I manage him till the food arrives and then seal his mouth with the milk so hubby and I can both eat together and not wait for one to finish while the food gets cold. This is the brahmastra.
2) Keep distracting his attention to the various things in the restaurant. Sometimes I ask him to tell the colors of several objects around, or ask him to count the number of lights, etc… Disclaimer: This works for not more than 2-3 minutes but worth it while it lasts.
3) Make a villain out of the waiter. By now Sid knows this strategy so well..that if he thinks he is doing something that’s going to get me angry, he just says.. ‘amma, uncle thittuva’ or ‘amma, uncle adi’. (as in..uncle will scold or beat)
4) Play silly games with him.. I keep playing ‘dosai vathu’ with him so many times.. that the last time I overheard him saying.. ‘dosai vathu.. ammaku oru vai, appakku oru vai.. indha uncleku oru vai, andha uncleku oru vai, indha auntyku oru vai, andha aunyku oru vai’ feeding everyone in the resturant with his specially prepared imaginary dosas.
5) Order something that he can also eat and make a BIG deal out of it. Now he is thankfully old enough to eat some of what we order. I don’t give him any of the oily stuff from the restaurant yet, so usually I stick to soup or bread for him. So, he gets all excited..and keeps saying ..‘thoop’, meanwhile I gobble a few lumps of food.

If you can think of anything else that works for you, PLEASE tell me!

Meanwhile I’m going to continue enjoying(?) dinner at a restaurant.

 

Baby *

This whole weekend I’ve been trying to get Sid to spot baby animals. And also teach him what they’re called.
So, we saw a herd of cows in a street corner, and I was telling him… kutti cow, baby cow…peru..calf.
And so we went on learning about kitten, puppies and Joey
Yesterday night, we were driving around in the car, and he spotted the moon.. he was really thrilled..and went on saying.. moon, moon, white, white.. After some time, he spotted a star next to the moon, and he goes.. Baby star..
Aha! Kids!

 

Sid tit-bits

Sid’s new vocab addition: Calls milk as iggu, not sure how he picked that one! Because he perfectly understands when I say paal. Its like I’m asking in Tamil, and he is answering in French, except that its his own gibberish.

Started color coding objects now – bbbbbb (for blue), purppy (for purple) well, for now those are the only 2 colors in which the world is painted

Sid and I go to the apartment basement for some walk and play in the kids’ area. Sid looks up from the basement towards the top floors and calls out someone in his own babble language, but I know he is talking to someone. I ask him what he is trying to say.. and he looks even more agitated and looks up towards the top and yells for someone to listen! Its the same kind of talk that he does when his appa is taking bath and he is calling for him to come out. This one is sure going to have a temper!