Merry Christmas and a Happy First Birthday

Merry Christmas to all of you.

My little one turned 1 this Christmas. We had a small party for close family and friends and it was nice evening with kids all below 5 running around each other while each was trying to reach out to the other breaking their own small barriers of language or moods. My little one was busy running around balloons and other kids.He was pretty cool on his own swinging and clapping to music the whole time untill he finally dozed off totally tired.

It seems like it wasn't all that long back that I was still carrying him. On 24th night after dinner and Christmas shopping when we were back home, P & the peapod slept off almost immediately and me as usual couldn't sleep so watched TV for like untill 3am when the pains kinda started. They were very mild and then again I wasn't sure if indeed these were "the pains". I timed them at almost 40 mins. As soon as the certainty dawned on me, I wanted to sleep for a while(this kind of behaviour is very typical me). Went to bed at around 4:30 and I think I did sleep for a little while in-between pains. When finally the pains started coming in at half hour intervals it was 6:30 am. I mentally listed what needed to be done. We had Christmas breakfast planned - appam and curry - I do not plan many elaborate breakfasts and when I do I will ensure no labour pains was going to stop me. Needed to pack the peapod's clothes as she was to stay at her grandparents place untill I was back and I wondered when would be a good time to inform mom & sis(s) and so on. When I was mentally done, I woke up P to tell him that I seem to be having labour pains. His first reaction was "WHAT ..are your sure? ...but today is Christmas, how can that be" and I was like "Yeah, I know". After breakfast, I kissed the peapod before she left for her grandpa's place. P, me and mom drove to the hospital by 10am. Friends and family kept calling to wish a merry Christmas only to be told I was in labour. The excitement was much. I was admitted by 10:30. In the room where I was admitted for initial examination, I had company in the next bed and the poor girl was screaming her heart out every 5 mins or so. Immediately after the first scream or second and even before the doctor could examine me I had tears running down for absolutely no reason. I wasn't scared one bit of labour pains untill then because I never entertained that one thought in as much detail. I had opted for epidural during the peapod and it was an option this time too but I wanted to try the pain way this time(Who was that who was giving gyaan about pain and gain) but who was I kidding. I wasn't made for stuff like that. I couldn't stop crying every time my neighbour screamt and in an hour after I was admitted and the pains were coming at like every 15 mins I requested for epidural. All that the hubby needed was an sms to quickly sign the form. Mom was in a difficult situation, she couldn't see me cry and nor could she stay out leaving me alone untill my Aunt(Dad's brother's wife) came in. Every time mom came in she tried hard to look all calm to me and kept telling me to recite psalms 91, I am sure she was. I was exhausted with the pain and the crying and ofcourse lack of sleep. Soon after the epidural I think I slept for like an hour. And then by around 12:30 I could feel intense contractions. Though I couldn't feel the intense pain but I could feel the contractions and some pain(I think) and the tears were back.Soon I was moved to the delivery room. After 4 pushes and amongst sweat and tears the little one was born a little after 1pm. When I first saw him, he was all bundled up and I was too tired to feel anything. I kissed him and I think I passed out. I was in there for an another hour or more and then moved to the private room. The boy was much fussed over by all and initial comparisons were drawn. I had no cuts and post-pregnancy was a lot easier than the first time. Feeding, sleeping, walking, handling the baby all was familiar territory this time. I almost enjoyed my post delivery oil massages and bath and rest. I made the most of it since I knew this would be the last time I had the luxury of a whole month of oil massages and hot herbal water bath. Most nights I would be sleeping with the peapod and mom with the little one untill I had to get up for the feed. I took rest a lot more seriously this time and did give my back good rest since unlike last time this was luxury that I had come to appreciate.




Its been a year since that day and I can not thank the good lord for 2 beautiful healthy babies that he has blessed me with. I wanted a girl the second time as well and that wish actually stemmed from the fact that I believe siblings of the same gender bond very well and stay bonded all their life. I have seen my mom and her sisters, my father and his brothers, me and my sisters, my cousin brothers. The relationship is easy, its not the customary birthday/festive call but just the every day or random nonsensical call that helps be a part of each other's life. Call or drop in because you feel like talking or meeting rather than awaiting your turn to call or drop in or feeling obliged to pay a visit. For a brother and a sister to stay bonded its easy during early years but most of them move separate ways as they grow older and once married serious efforts need to be made to stay in touch. In the past one year I am not sure how many times I have thought about this and wondered what could I do to help them build a rock solid and easy relationship. I still don't know "HOW" but I know I want them to feel comfortable enough to confide their darkest fears in each other. I want them to be there for each other such that neither ever feels lonely. I don't want them to use us as their mode of communication with each other. I want them to talk to each other because they genuinely want to hear each other, feel each other and stand by each other.

My granny(mom's mom) is very proud of the fact that her 3 daughters and their kids mingle around all too well. She would very proudly tell anyone who cares to listen that cousin B is with Aunt B and Aunt B's daughter is(was) staying with us and how I stayed with Aunt B for a while. When my mom called my aunt(her sis) in bbay to tell her I was in labour and we were going to the hospital, she immediately sensed my mom's tension and abandoned her Christmas day plans to be beside my mom. My father and his brothers had a equally strong bond. Recently I was told by my cousin's wife that she has heard more about my father than my uncle(his father) from my cousin. That is very touching and it speaks volumes of his love for dad. And to think that at a time I used to be scared he would back answer dad since dad used to be ruthless criticizing him and taking him to task. We or anybody else have no role to play in that bond. There are all kinds in a family and its never a sooraj barjatya movie with only song and dance. These bonds grew inspite of the circumstances, inspite of the various personalities around and inspite of all kinds of issues, differences one could have. A hug, a call, a word of comfort is all you need at all times in your life. Its comforting to know, there is someone who wishes the very best for you even when they are in the dumps. Everyone fights their own battles and demons but to know you have support in your family base makes you 10 times stronger. I realize, just like my granny, my mom, my dad, I too want my kids to be there for each other ALL THE TIME, ALL THROUGHOUT LIFE, COME WHAT MAY.

It will be our continuous endeavour with fervent prayers to help the kids build a relation that will last them a lifetime. If we succeed that will be our gift to both of them for many many birthdays even when we are not around.

The Dad and his girl

While I am going through the umpteem snaps I have of the 10 pots I have to put up as a garden post, the father and daughter are going bananas.

About the father, I have already told you he thinks no end of his daughter. They have a mutual admiration club. He tells her "You are a genius" and she echos it right back. I am told if I wasn't such a cynic the daughter would have done addition and multiplication right at the back of her hand. oh yes subtraction and division too. This is how they bond. While I have been asked to sit in a corner and browse through my emails, the father is going "1x1=1, 1x2=2" and the daughter continues "9x11=11, 5x12=2" ...brilliant isn't it. She is just enjoying rambling off random numbers in no particular order and he is trying to make her see the sequence. He abandons it right there and moves on to 10-20-30 and she adds 100-1000. It isn't working ...and I can't stop laughing. Btw, during similar bonding sessions she know primary colors, secondary colors and ternery colors. So maybe she will learn multiplication. What do you say?

Happy Birthday dear Mom

A rock of strength and unshakable faith are probably the 2 things that describe my mom. As a girl who was born in a small village in Kerala with values and ideas as conservative and orthodox as it can get, married a man who believed in living life king-size, it wasn't easy. She has changed to accommodate a lot of the world outside her little village. I being her eldest have been a witness to her life, their life and 2 different philosophies of life at work. My Dad's philosophy was " Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?" and my mom's is "Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise!". You see.

Mom was our rock. We could bring any kind of bad news home and let it off our chest knowing well my mom can handle it. That wasn't the case with my Dad, he was way too sentimental. When I flunked one year of my graduation, the first thing I did was get on my bicycle and speed home. Once I told them, she gave me her dose and then went on to say things like ofcourse its not the end of the road and stuff. My Dad did not say a word and had an asthama stroke that night. He was admitted to the hospital for a couple of days. He did not talk to me for almost a month. Admist all this my mom went on talking to me about what next, attending to dad, getting the 3 of us to run home-hospital with food, talking to the doctor, more to the mallu nurse, cooking and all the other 1000 things that stay-at-home mom's do. She was rock solid and unfazed. When she was worried , she would share it with us but we could see she was strong.

She is a women of faith. Her strength is in her prayers. That I also guess runs in her family. They(I mean the whole of my mom's family) pray like people who have had that realization that faith can move mountains in their personal lives. They are people who have faced show-stoppers in life, like no rains would mean no harvest, like debts running higher that one can fathom, like life altering/threatening illness, situations like dooms-day and have come out not only unscathed but better each time. They are not loud but pray silently in the confines of their homes and rooms. I have been a witness to a few of such situations & so I am a believer too. The little faith I have in the good lord comes from my mom.

Mom is full of practical advise and proverbs. We could actually have a whole argument by just exchanging proverbs for proverbs. We learnt that from dad, what do you think they were doing with such 2 extreme philosophies. She can be persistent if she chooses, like she can keep saying "oil your hair" 1643 times or untill you actually oil your hair. She has this attitude about life that, things that need to be done now , should be done now. Its of no use if you do it a day or a week or a month latter. So when my sis was home post-preg and her regime included mutton soup in the 3rd week and because no one was available around that time to get it, she went to the mutton shop, generally where ladies do not go and bought and continued my sis's post preg regime as required. That is her mantra. If she thinks her help today will make a difference to anybody she will do it, and will not harp about how she can not because of x y or z reasons. She doesn't believe in confrontation, she believes things will get sorted out with time. She believes, the less you talk, the less crap you churn out. She reads and she still has about 3 mag subscriptions to her name. She also has this very annoying habit of trying to find something positive in everything that has absolutely gone wrong or about somebody we totally abhor. It is very annoying most times but we have just learned to ignore it with time.

With her looking after the peapod, I have no worries about the peapod. Our outlook of life are the same and so that leaves me peaceful in every way.

She turned 61 on the 17th and I pray for a healthy happy life for her. She was supposed to be in Goa for her birthday but the swine flu ruined our plans. We have an another plan in place, lets see if that works. My cousin sis surprised her with a gold bangle. She was thrilled to be getting it from the youngest kid in the family.

That smile on her face, the laughter in her voice is very very reassuring.

Belated but still a Happy Father's Day

This morning I got a call from my sis at around 7:30am. The moment I saw her name flashing I knew what it was. There is only one thing of utmost importance that can not wait untill the morning madness is over for either of us to tell each other on a very ordinary day. It is about dreaming Dad. If either of us remember a dream that featured dad and specially if he said something relevant to the current happenings in the family, like kids beginning school, or about the new baby or about anything we consider special like buying a house or starting a new job it has to be conveyed immediately. We also query the dreamer about what he was wearing, where was he,your place or mine and kinds. This is a very normal conversation between us. We sometimes discuss what he said at length as if he made that comment to us in flesh and blood. Sometimes we shed a tear or two, other times we laugh at some weird stuff he is so capable of. We discuss him like he actually came visiting us and not like a fragment of our imagination. My sisters see him more often than I do and they tell me that must be because I am just so forgetful. So he actually has to go to my sisters to tell me he is happy for me. So this morning he just appeared to my sister and asked if the kids are going to school. Ofcourse kids here mean both the jellybean and peapod since they both started nursery last week. And that acknowledgement in our dreams we assume is his blessings for the kids. It is quite possible that at anything new in life we think of him and it just materializes into images in our subconscious minds. Mom even adds at times "I saw him very clearly this time".

Its been 4 years since he passed away but he is a constant presence in our lives. He lead a good life and gave us one, as long as he could. When days got tough, he toiled it out as well. He could get unreasonable at times and pretty stubborn too. He had a bad temper as well. But he was an absolutely loving man and I am damn proud to be his daughter.

I was(still am) a Daddy's girl and I can see the peapod go the same way too. Every time I and P are arguing or even discussing, I am the one who gets the flak from the peapod, sometimes even when I am at the receiving end of an argument. She starts out by telling me not to shout at Dada and then in a few mins would come by to tell me in no uncertain terms to shut up. While I am seeing red at such times, I know that is how it is going to stay so I better make my peace with it. Throughout life, every time my parents argued, 99% of the time my mom had a valid point, but we girls ultimately ended up defending Dad. And specially me of the 3 of us. I have given my mom some tough times. So its probably payback time and I better prepare myself for it.

So it is a belated Happy Father's day indeed, to mine as well as the peapod's.

A family now?

It's said, A family is where no two people eat egg the same way.

This morning I made french toast for the peapod, egg bhurji with just onions for P and bhurji with onions and tomatoes for myself. So now we complete the unwritten formalities of being a family.

With Love to that place & people we called "Veedu"

My maternal grandfather was the eldest of 3 brothers and 2 sisters. My grandfather expired when I was in the 7th standard. My grand father's youngest brother expired last weekend. He was hospitalized for a month and he finally bid adieu to this world. 2 years back around this time his wife was hospitalized and died a natural death. They both meant a lot to me and I will miss them both.

By virtue of being the youngest, he inherited my grandfather's ancestral house. My grand father and the other brother built their houses on either sides of the ancestral house. We used to call the ancestral house as "Veedu" (Home) and the other 2 houses are referred to by the directions relative to "Veedu" so that made one house the "House in the west" and the other "House in the east". And this couple were called as Veetile Appacha(Appacha from Home) and Veetile Ammachy(Ammachy from Home). My memories of this couple are made up of jovial moods, fun, stories of my mom, playing in the white sand that formed their front yard, the grandpa chair right near the door where either of them would generally be found, huge wooden furnitures, big storerooms, the paper/straw fan, huge vessels, shells, prawns, dried fish, salt rock water, pink chambakyas (does anyone know what it is called in english?), the green paddy fields, the guava tree, the cowshed, the varied sizes of straw tokris, watching them working in the paddy fields, the tapoica, the hens and chickens, running around the hen to cook it for lunch (sounds gross..sorry..we were a set of heartless :) ), the big tamarind tree near the fields where we used to sit & watch them work along with the workers, the soft mud, mushrooms and so many things. I could probably just list a million things that remind me of the warmth I felt around them.

My mom's house is in a village in Kerala called karuvatta. It is a very beautiful place with paddy fields that adjourn every land. A lot of "kacha rasta" and the people around are related to you in one way or other, the least is they know atleast 3 generations of your family. Every time we got down at the main road from a bus, we used to make a dash to "Veedu". To reach "veedu" we actually had to cross the gate of my grandfather's other brother. we would generally just try to run across the gate as fast and quietly as we could. By the time mom and dad start walking from the road to the house they will definitely meet 10 people and it would be an hour before they reach "veedu". By then we would have made ourselves comfortable at "Veedu". My grandmother would generally see us arrive at "veedu" through the kitchen window and come "Home" to get us. Every single day after we are done with our breakfast we generally just run through the narrow by-lanes created by the ponds and the fields to reach "Veedu". They had 2 daughters and a son and the youngest daughter was just 2 years elder to me. That probably was an another reason why I stuck around there. Its said that my grandfather loved her the most because she was the youngest among all the kids in the family and her father loved me the most because I was the first grandchild in the family. Complicated uh.. I know.

Appacha lived on meagre means. They did not have a lavish breakfast or lunch or dinner but all of us kids preferred eating there. We would have "Kanji", rock salt water, fish and some vegetable 'thoran' inspite of the chicken and yummy duck curries my granny made. We just loved the simple food. Inspite of the tight string budget they had, they would indulge us kids with something special every time we were there. The ancestral dinning table was a long wooden table with 6 legs. we would all crowd it enjoy our meals with stories of people we know and we don't know. Most of the times they were pulling our legs for the rotten malayalam we were speaking. I improved on my Malayalam there amidst laughters & sadness, both that made me cry. Rain, water, banana are some of the tougue twister words in malayalam and they have made so much fun of me, almost ROTFL asking an innocent 6yr old to re-iterate the same words. They were such a lovable family, nothing ever hurt.

I actually have no idea how to end this post because how much ever I talk of them its not enough. They led a very hard life towards their last years. The son, my uncle wasn't doing very well financially but he took really took good care of both of them. The last time when I met Appacha, he complained he wasn't doing very well. He hugged me and we cried. Since I was the first grand child in the family they have always made me feel very special about it every time. The ancestral property was sold off a couple of years back. So while its still right in front of my grandfather's house its still no more our "Home" and its definitely not our home without Appacha and Ammachy. I pray their souls rest in peace.