All I can say is that for a while, I thought I’m going to stop breathing..After about two minutes that seemed to last like eternity, Sid came hopping from a completely different direction of the restaurant totally oblivious to my state! I think it would have taken me under 20 seconds in the counter and how he managed to dart off towards the other direction is a mystery to me.

A self-note to never let go off his hand EVER again, maybe not even when he rolls over from three to thirty!

Earlier, when he was adamant about something, he would absolutely not budge.. but now I think it has gotten slightly better… if I offer him the metaphorical carrot.  And I am finally learning the art of negotiation that they tried so hard to teach me in B-school.

After a few minutes of trying to get him to the washbasin to brush his teeth, his appa asks..

Do you want to help me get to the washbasin (which just means I am going to drag you to it..) or do you want to do it yourself?

And that DOES seem to do the trick as he zooms towards me waiting with the brush and paste!

After a few minutes of trying to get him to take bath, I tell him..

No more Johnson baby, for kids! Let us use Liril, it is green and smells so good!

And that DOES seem to do the trick as he zooms forward to the bathroom.

What I cannot get him to agree is to switch off the train videos. I have let him have his way a bit on this. But after an hour of this, I tell him, Two more and you close the laptop..

And he starts counting with his fingers. .Three more…No..No.. Four more..

Finally we agree on Five more.. and close the laptop on Ten.

And after that I let him mess around with the paint for a while, so he is distracted enough to not go back to the laptop again!

But I realize he is growing up, so having conversations with him saying not to do something works, if not immediately, at some point eventually.. Even if he continues to do the same, he does it and then calls out loud what I will react, and smiles! So, atleast the concept is explained in theory and gives me some hope to clutch on…!

Now, Sid, I cannot just wait for you to grow up and take over the cooking..

Policeman...or...err.. postman?

Sid is quite scared of policemen… and we use it as an equivalent of poochandi  at home. Initially I used that as a weapon when I needed him to listen to something. Now, I am genuinely concerned that he may start hating policemen.. so in an attempt to repudiate that, I dressed him as a policeman on the last day of his summer club for a fancy dress party…He had a gun accessory which does not show up in this picture.. but trust me when I say, he had a lot of FUN sporting this dress and the gun!

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.

I find the regular parks too crowded where children are queued up for a slide. There are lot of older kids who are in a hurry and sliding at a speed where they seem to be vanishing and its a lot of onus on me to get Sid moving fast. I’m always worried he’ll get hurt becase there are no soft landing spots.

For me, the main attraction in Monkey Maze is the safety aspect and the proximity from home… also it is indoor, and in Bangalore where many days are chilly that you cannot take the child outdoors, it is an advantage to have a facility like this. There are helpers for the smaller kids. There are also books and puzzles.. but we have not got around to using them yet..This has become a place where we frequent most weekends.

Having said that, I wish the place was a little more fancy and better maintained. The maze is quite basic and some of the rock climbing steps are broken. The helpers are quite friendly but I find the admin staff always grim and irritated. They have a display of books for sale and once Sid picked one of these books and one of the girls almost snatched it from him.

So far, they are under my tolerance threshold and I’m willing to overlook this since Sid seems to enjoy the tunnels and slides…

Check it out if you are in Bangalore.. and please share if there are similar ones.

Sample a weekend setting at home..

On a Saturday, after finishing morning chores like taking bath, giving Sid a bath, cooking, eating and feeding Sid, I feel as though I have achieved a lot and am lazing around on the couch.

Sid’s appa walks into the room with an orange tshirt on him, and I tell Sid..

“inga paaru Sidhu, appavum neeyum orange color shirt.. ” (indicating they are both wearing the same color)

And there was my folly! Sid hears the word orange.. and starts pestering me to give him orange juice!!

I tell him that there are no oranges at home, but after a few minutes, Appa gets ONE orange from in-laws’ place.

And Sid is all excited and I am left with no choice but to make orange juice..

And so the weekend moves on with a lot of meaningful things accomplished ..!

It started when FIL took Sid on a couple of metro rides and Sid was haunted with the metro train since then. Adding to that, we have been travelling frequently on trains to Coimbatore. Sid spends most of his free time watching various sort of trains on Youtube these days. While it was amusing and interesting initially, it has become frustrating for the dad and mom these days. The dad, wearing spectacles, is paranoid about the possibility of Sid having to wear one early on, and is preaching a lot these days about how Sid should abstain from laptop or TV. And the mom is tearing her hair trying to implement this rule.

And when you do not want Sid to do something, you can be assured he would absolutely end up doing that. So, for hours, he just stares at the laptop watching the videos.. I tried hiding the laptop but he explores through every inch of every room looking for the laptop and urging me to search as well. And when he does not find it, he gives the LOUD SCREAM treatment that completely unnerves me and I end up screaming at him or giving up my resolve! And since my screaming results in more LOUD SCREAMs from him, I finally give up and just play the videos so he leaves me in peace.

Once, when the search proved futile, he brought the ipod to me and asked me to play on it! And when I said there is no charge, he brought the charger and asked me to charge the ipod! So yes, there is no escape.

After two hours of this struggle, when I finally give up, is when dad walks in, and lectures the poor mom on why this is bad for the kid’s eyes! Phew! Sid, meanwhile, is very busy and not sensing the tension between mom and dad, is excitedly looking at the rajdhanis and shatabdis and the express and metro trains!

Have missed the blog and the reader friends and writing about Sid.

Sid is done with his play school in EuroKids. The thought of him loitering around at home, for the entire day, tormenting the grandparents gave a shudder to all of us. So, he has been promptly enrolled into the summer club for about 3 hours a day till end of April. The grandparents can heave a sigh of relief for another month. Good thing is, he likes school and looks forward to go there. The summer classes happen in the same play school he was going to, so not a big change for him. But he has a different teacher now, and given that he would wait to see his favorite teacher to come out of the class to pick him up in the morning, I was worried he may react to a new teacher, but luckily, no complaints so far.

Come June, Sid will start a new school (nursery) and as usual I’ll be in jitters until he adjusts. Couple of weeks back, we got a letter that was addressed to “Master Siddharth Prathap”. Ha ha! The new school had sent a circular for us to buy uniforms. I was planning to delegate the task to FIL, but suddenly my maternal instinct worked extra time and made me pick up the task. Sid and I had a mini evening outing as I took him along to the assigned clothes store to buy the uniforms. We reserved the trial room exclusively for 1/2 hour trying out shirts and pants of various sizes until I was convinced that they were a good fit, but not too perfect to not allow Sid a wee bit of growth room. Sid was extremely cooperative and after returning home insisted on wearing the uniform until I successfully managed to divert his attention on to something else.

I loved Sid’s play school, the teachers were truly wonderful! On the last day when I went to collect the report card and other materials, I felt sad for him to leave this school. He does not realize it thankfully.. The teachers told me that they are going to miss Sid They had a hawaiian style farewell.. hmpf! This for play school, when all we did when we moved away from higher secondary school was to hold candles dressed in a uniform and sway to ‘Mustafa mustafa’ (yeah, really long long time ago!)

 I searched in about five shops for the hawaiian style costume and was about to give up when finally a dear colleague of mine pointed to a rental shop… where I managed to get the floral style shirt and the hat….the garland is just from a local store. I still cannot believe I went 10 kms to find that rental shop, and hubby insisted on travelling 25 kms to return the stuff! Some thrills that these small things bring in life..

It all started when I left him in Coimbatore with my parents and left to London for a couple of weeks. He spotted a cow then and used to spend time just watching it.. and ever since the obsession has grown deeper. At the end of our street, there is a vacant land with some huts where we usually find a few cows tied. Sometime back, he used to insist that we take him there so he can just stand and watch the cows. It took us ages to get him off the habit. However, even now, when we drive around in the car, his eyes are constantly searching for them.. and he keeps screaming.. “amma..anga paaru..black and white cow!” whenever he spots one.

So, it is not surprising that his latest pastime involves this divine animal. He is usually found in one of the house corners these days tying the string of a pull-along cart to a small cow toy. The cart was originally intended to carry an apple and be dragged along everywhere but Sid thought of putting it to better use. He calls it his bullock cart and drags it everywhere. On one occasion he was sitting on the cow and riding along! Yesterday, I found him feeding an orange to the cow. Poor hungry cow, he might have thought!

The epic love story between Sid and the cow continues..