Writing Alphabets & Numbers

It is interesting to understand how the school taught neha & nidhi to write numbers and alphabets. They can now write from A - R and from 1 - 10. I don't remember how I learnt to write them nor do my parents. And that is the reason for this post. I remember having sharpened (or should I say rounded :-)) my handwriting quite a bit on the good old "four line" books when I was about 10 years or so. So much so that my written text would look like an array of jilebis from far.

In the first two months at school, the kids were taught to recognise and draw basic geometric shapes like point, line (standing line, slanting line & sleeping line), circle, semi-circle, square, diamond. They were asked to trace the dotted line of pictures on their home work books.
After two months, it was assembly time:
1 = one standing line + one sleeping line
2 = one semi-circle + one sleeping line
3 = two semi-circles
4 = one standing line + one sleeping line + one slanting line
5 = sleeping line + small standing line + semi-circle
6 = semi-circle + go in
6 is interesting. So is the alphabet that resembles it - G
G = semi-circle + go in + come out

I guess they'll teach kids the upper case letters this year, lower case in LKG and cursive style in UKG.

My kids (like most other I've seen) write C inverted (like this - ) ). I tried to google out as to why kids do this but couldn't find. If somebody knows the answer, please post a reply. Here is my theory of why they do it :-)
C is one of the only two numbers or upper case letters that can be constructed using only one of the basic shapes - just a semi-circle. The other alphabet is O and you wouldn't know if your kid wrote a O or inverted O. Zero is similar to O and hence I discount it from this count. When kids have to assemble at least two shapes, they do it well; they become careless & overconfident when it is just one shape.

Taare Zameen Par

Yesterday, we went & watched Taare Zameen Par. It is not often that we watch a movie on its 3rd day. Veena visits movie theatres about 2 or 3 times a year and I fare much better at about 10 per year. (remaining 8 or 7 with my HP friends). So it was out of the ordinary that we both watched this movie this early and not just that, we took neha & nidhi along as well.

Their first movie in a theatre was "Ekalavya" at PVR. They hardly enjoyed it. They watched the big screen in awe for about 15 mins, then walked & played in the open area in front of the screen (we had deliberately taken the first row) for about 30 mins, enjoyed pop corn for 10 mins and cribbed that they are bored for the rest of the movie.

That was about 10 months back. TZP was their second movie. We thought they might enjoy TZP more cos its the story of a kid, they can recognise some settings in the movie (school, class, drawing...). They did watch it intently for most part. They got bored only when little Ishaan was not on the screen.

My opinion of the movie - very well made, its like a work/well prepared book. you can see & appreciate the work aamir khan has put on the subject & movie. It touches all the parental chords in your body (hey, i just realised paternal is an anagram of parental, hmm, interesting what does that mean, if you jumble up parental feelings you get paternal feelings? :-))

To me, aamir is the best actor in the last 20 years and stands alongside amitabh on my list of favourite actors. In many ways he is similar to kamal hassan in that he tries diffrent things. While Kamal mostly experiments with his looks/acting style, Aamir apart from those also tries different subjects, is trying direction in this movie and is surely more thorough in research & effort. The outcome is a great movie and I'd recommend it to every parent, teacher and anyone who cares for kids. If that list leaves someone, I'd recommend a silly entertainer called OSO to them. In short the story is about a dyslexic child facing the challenges of the world & getting beaten into a shell before a teacher helps him overcome his problem.

I asked neha & nidhi what they thought the story of the movie was and what they liked & disliked in the movie today morning. The story according to them is - ishank (& not ishaan) is a good boy whose parents, teachers scold him for no reason and then an uncle comes and helps him by singing to him, help him paint. Ishank & Uncle are the good boys while all others are bad boys & girls. Ishank's mom is a bad girl too.

The scenes that impacted them are

(i) when ishank is sitting with 2 stray dogs and one of them is sleeping on his lap

(ii) when he fights with his neighbourhood kid & the 2 dogs circle them

(iii) ishank is standing on the parapet wall in his school overlooking the valley - they thought he was stupid as he could fall down & die

(iv) ishank's dad scolding & slapping him - this hurt them quite a bit.

Aamir khan plays the teacher. He looks a little unconventional to be a teacher even in our eyes cos of his dressing and is so cool. Neha & Nidhi could not recognise him as a teacher at all. They could recognise every other character who plays a teacher role as that. They refer to him as ishank's uncle. I asked them why they thought he is not a teacher. They said cos he sings to the kids and sits with them on their bench and plays with them.

Hmmm that is a grave stmt and has me in a thinking loop for a while now. Why is it so hard to do those things with kids. For Teachers & Parents. TZP surely is a thought provoking movie and I'm learning. Thanks Aamir.

Fit for cows

Yesterday Neha returned from school and frowned at veena "ಏನಮ್ಮ ಮಕ್ಕಳು ಬಾಳೆ ಹಣ್ಣು ಹಾಕು ಅಂದ್ರೆ ಹಸು ಬಾಳೆ ಹಣ್ಣು ಹಾಕಿದೀಯಾ?" (amma, instead of putting banana that kids eat, you've put banana that cows eat, in the lunch bag). I know the expression that neha wears when she talks like that. I captured that expression today morning when we were waiting for the school van. It would have been something like shown in the snap.

Veena was taken aback by the comment and wondered what it meant. She had to jog her memory about an year back to understand neha's comment. When we were staying in h'nagar, there used to be stray cows on the street. They weren't stray actually, an insensitive man had a cow shed and also used to sell firewood. After extracting milk to sell, he would let the cows on the street to find some food & clear their bowels. They were a big nuisance and numerous efforts to drill civic sense into that stupid guy's head had failed. Kids love banana and we used to buy them regularly. If the bananas were not consumed in time, they would ripen to death and turn black. We used to let kids feed such bananas to these stray cows.

So it turned out that the bananas veena packed in their lunch bag yesterday were a little more ripe than usual (not black or close to black as neha exaggerated). The expression in the snap is not exactly what she wears in these situations. That is artifically created and hence little exaggerated as well. Suits her. She will probably fight with me about this snap 5 or 6 years from now. I'm ready :-)

I'm also attaching a snap of nidhi that I took today morning. She bought her elephant today to play for those 5 to 10 mins before the van arrives. When they see this blog, they search for how many photos I've put of them. This post should have just carried neha's snap but I'm putting nidhi's as well to make her feel good. I have to be conscious of their sensitiveness when I fill up the real estate on this blog.

Perspectives

This is the view of one property adjacent to our office. You can see a swelled up well (its a huge well like the ones you see in villages plus rain water collected next to it in a man made ditch; you cant make out where the ditch ends and the well begins) and open space where they have even cultivated some paddy(not shown in the pic). The surprising part is my office is not situated on the outskirts but is in the heart of bangalore - bannerghatta road. The adjacent vacant land and well belongs to Christ College who probably don't know what to do with that huge land (more than 2 acres acc to my visual estimate) that is lying idle.

The above para was a digression from this post's topic. Look at the AC fans that line up the inside of our office campus and next to the compound. The office building is 13 floors and hence they have these huge fans lined up on the periphery to cool the interiors. These fans make the parking lots noisy and hot. I hate them for that.

About a few months back, our office had a arranged a "get your kids to work" day on a friday. I could get nidhi along with me. neha was down with viral fever and hence could not make it. They had arranged some actitivies for kids that day - talent show, tattoos, caricature sketching... When Nidhi saw this line of noisy fans, she got very excited. She exclaimed "appa there is a train in your office and you never told me that" She thought people come to office in this train. Before that, I could never see them as bogies of a train. I find them cuter these days.

Neha did not let me sleep in peace till I took her to office. I got both of them to office on a weekend. They were amused by the cubicle walls all round the office and instantly figured out a game to play using them - hide & seek. Since I'm 6' 2'' and can see above cube walls of most offices this again was a surpise to me. I never thought you could play hide & seek in the aisles of an office. There are many times, you want to hide yourself from people in office. If only cube walls are over 7 feet!

Some Silly Snaps

I was browsing all the snaps I had taken on my cell phone. These snaps are the more spontaneous ones unlike the regular camera snaps where kids are dressed up and are posing. I saw some really stupid poses and silly photos. Here is the collection that neha & nidhi will be embarrassed about when they grow up :-)

# Snap 1 - Taken in home town mall last Saturday. They posed in front of a huge ad hoarding. Nidhi wanted a snap of her touching the girl in the ad.

# Snap 2 - This ain't silly but cute. They used to love the play home that they were going during their 3rd year - tender lily play home at gavipuram. They would usually get ready before time and sit on the steps in front of the house (the rented house at h'nagar where we stayed for a couple of years) waiting for veena to get ready and sharada (care taker) to come and drop them to the play home

# Snap 3 - Wearing juttus! check the art on the wall that they have created with crayons and pencil. It costed me 8k to get that rented house repainted when we left.

# Snap 4 - Nidhi sitting in a basket on the street in front of the house. I don't remember the exact reason but i know it was a mark of protest for something we didn't buy her.

# Snap 5 - kids wearing my shirts

# Snap 6 - As you could see in snap 4, the street was very close to the house (or there was minimal area in the compound). So we had got this half door done to disallow kids from rushing to the street. This half door was around 3 feet tall. Neha & Nidhi used to watch the kids playing on the street by standing near the half door. Nidhi would stand on her toes and was tall enough to see beyond the door. Neha devised a method to view the street. She would balance on the skirting and lean against the door. She used to do it pretty well. Just one day she forgot to wear her something on her bottom and I clicked :-)

# Snap 7 - A more recent snap. Nidhi applied a little more makeup.

# Snap 8 - Few months back, we went to puma store to buy veena jogging shoes. Kids hid themselves in the racks and were playing hide & seek with me while veena was picking her shoes.

Odds

There are about 7 million people in Bangalore and 2001 census said 47.5% of the population is women. Assuming the same sex ratio exists in 2007 as well, that means 3.3 million of the population is women. Now what is the portion of this size that has kids under 5?

If you divide the 3.3 mn roughly into three pieces - single, young mothers & older women, we are talking about a million young mothers (sounds huge but let us go with that assumption).

Now stats say that chances of fraternal twins is 12 out of 1000 births. Since fraternal twins are dizygotic, the kids can be of any of the three combinations with equal chance (boy-boy, boy-girl & girl-girl). Not related to this discussion but FYI - identical twins are rarer than fraternal twins - 4 out of 1000.

So the chances of two girl fraternal twins is 4 out of 1000. And Bangalore should have about 4000 female fraternal twin siblings.

Now what are the chances that two such pairs sit on adjacent tables in a SLV restaurant on a Saturday evening?

Very Low odds I suppose cos this had never happened in the last 3.5 years. Also there were about 8 other empty tables in the restaurant at that time to consider if you really want to pin those chances very low.

While enjoying rava idlis & chaat at SLV, JP Nagar (if you are a food freak like me you should visit that place :-)) We were rather refreshed to meet a family similar to ours. Husband, Wife & Twin girls. The girls are in their 4th year too and about a couple of months elder to neha & nidhi. We stared at their kids and vice versa followed by little nods with partners to confirm and then we started talking - "are they twins, how old, names, how tough is it to manage..."

That pair is named ananya & amulya and looked very similar initially. A second look and closer observation of their features indicated that they are very different in fact (as different looks wise as neha & nidhi). Even in that pair, the second one seemed more dominant physically. Amulya was donning nidhi's role in that family.

to be a good teacher, be a good student first

Life comes full circle - quote by Tracey Gold

The circle in one particular instance seemed small & hence boomeranged back on me pretty soon.

To avoid nidhi & neha from getting confused about the way people should dress, we taught them that it is bad to dress skimpily and since then we discouraged them to watch photos in the magazines where models are dressed rather inappropriately in advertisements. They seemed to have watched a few photos and deciphered that if a girl is showing her umbilicus (that means navel button :-)), then that is bad and should not be seen.

This lesson we taught them hit me back hard when one day I came back home from work and was watching TV. I was surfing around when one channel was play dhoom-2 song "crazy kiya re...". I just got my fingers off the channel button on remote and was beginning to enjoy the song when nidhi barged into the living room, saw the TV and said - "ಥೂ! change ಮಾಡಪ್ಪ ಅವಳ ಹೊಕ್ಕಳು ಕಾಣುತಾ ಇದೆ.

("thu change madappa, avala hokkalu kaantha idhe")

Cricket is the safest thing to watch on TV, for me these days. The other one is the aastha channel. Thankfully I've not grown that old in life yet to dig into that.

Another joke around death

kannada films (even telugu & tamil ones AFAIK) seem to glorify death & scenes following one. I dont know who likes to watch the gory details when there is a death in hero's family. But film makers seem to use precious reel time showing each step in detail. They show everything from covering the dead body's face with the white cloth to hero getting a mundan!

This was the root cause for another joke on death by kids the other day. They obviously have seen a few such scenes on TV & have a fair understanding on what is death.
I happened to overhear one of the conversations they had in the balcony with kriti (their friend): "why do they put cotton in dead man's nose?"
I think it was nidhi who responded to that question - "so that he does not become alive again"

Cute Pic

I clicked this snap today morning when the kids were waiting for their van.

The camera on my cell phone works well only in outdoors, so I end up clicking snaps of my kids when we are waiting for their van. The van is supposed to come to the back gate of our apartment by 9:45 am but usually comes around 10:00 am. So everyday, kids either bring along a story book or magic pot or a toy down there to read/play till the van comes. We sit on the stairs of D block of our apartment complex & wait for the red maruti van to appear.


Today it was the turn of hanuman mask to be picked up. nidhi must have watched the baby hanuman dvd about 60 times now & neha about 40+ times. we've had that dvd for about an year now. Couple of months back, they were mightily thrilled when i bought them the hanuman mask that i found at landmark in forum. There was only one left in the shop when I wanted two. There were quite a few hanuman tails left though in the shop :-) the toy company seems to have had mixed success with their ploy of selling hanuman goodies. the tail was a buckle belt to tie around the waist & a long tail with black threads at the end (to simulate hairs). Even i did not like the tail as it was pretty bulky for kids to wear & run around. The mask though is cute & at 40 rupees or so, was a pretty good deal.

Since they got only one mask, we had asked them to share it & not fight over it. Of late we are buying them only one toy (& not a pair) deliberately so that they understand the concept of sharing things.

They were time sharing the mask since they got ready for school today morning. nidhi was wearing it at home when veena was dressing her up & putting her shoes while neha got to wear it down there.


it is kind of interesting that nidhi & neha (wearing a hanuman mask) were waiting for a maruti van that is driven by jairam uncle :-)

Neha's First Art Work

this is the first art work of neha that is in some recognisable form!

she & nidhi scribble around a lot on any given blank paper these days. they have picked this fascination to draw & color things since the last 5 months. the time kind of co-incides with the time they started going to school. i don't know if there is a serious connection between the two but it is quite intriguing to watch what they write on a piece of paper these days. On a happier parenting note, since they keep themselves busy with drawing & coloring, me & veena get some time to chat or watch TV or just do our own stuff.

Phew! after 3.5 years of parenting, we get time to do things we were always doing before the kids were born :-)

Anyways, back to the drawing, I found this art work fascinating for the following aspects:

# as i said before, this is the first art work that I can recognise & enjoy. the kids make a lot of abstract art work and enjoy & derive meaning out of them. sadly i cannot connect with them many times.

kids brain are supposed to be the most complex & creative cos their brain is not ruled or maligned by the rules of this world yet. a good puzzle you can crack when you are a parent is to ask your kid what she drew & then try to decipher it yourself :-)

# she described the drawing as a "cute girl holding a balloon".

Let us dissect this sentence

"cute girl" - the girl looked more creepy to me than cute - huge eyes, nose starting from the top of her forehead, hair all round her face (like a primate). you might say I'm being cruel on this innocent art piece. my point is not to be critical. my point is neha finds a creepy looking thing cute. their definition of beauty is so unspoilt & that is what i like.

"holding a balloon" - on closer observation of the girl's hand (the hand itself is an interesting piece of work, more on that down), neha has written a balloon and then has shaded it hard & dark

# the girl's hands look more like in a posture of comfort where she is resting her head on her palms. the hands hence look like a cloth hanger round the shoulders & one of them is holding the balloon.

# observe the feet. neha has written a line & a circle. don't know how to decipher that but its very interesting.

# the biggest reason that i wanted to put this drawing on this blog is the girl's face resembles in a small manner to neha's face. I've attached neha's snap. the girl has a wide mouth so does neha. the girl has a squarish kind of face, so does neha. i find this amazing.

# FYI i sometimes call neha ಬೊಚ್ಚು ಬಾಯಿ ಸುಂದರಿ :-) *

* - bocchu baayi sundari (wide mouthed beauty)

Baby Names

We did the naming ceremony of neha & nidhi on June 7th 2004 (their 3rd month in this world)
Life was hectic as hell since they were born. a few hours of continuous sleep was a dream, kids waking up at every hour of the day & night, me balancing work & life on a tight rope, doctor visits to get the vaccine shots...
In midst of all this was arranging the logistics for the naming ceremony function & more importantly spending time to choose the names. I did spend considerable time on the web searching for names.

I've seen people people spending lot of time picking name for one kid. We had a little bigger problem than that. We had to shortlist names in pairs, & chose two names that we like, that seem linked in some manner & then decide whom to give which name :-)

Apart from web, i referred to maneka gandhi's book on Indian names (borrowed from agarwal)
We ended up with a bunch of names & name pairs that we considered for a while. Here are some of them:

aadhya, ananya
ananya, anagha
siya
shravanthi
shraddha
chaitra
siri, nidhi
neha, nidhi
snigdha
neethi, nidhi
neethi, niyathi

these are the ones that I remember now. I'll add more if they pop up in my mind later or veena remembers more names that we considered.

there were suggestions & influences from everyone in the family but I & veena were the deciding authority. it is a fun exercise to find names for kids.

aadhya, ananya was the closest competitor to the final winner - neha, nidhi
ananya was a favourite name with everyone but the name was already too common by then. We had heard of too many ananyas' by then. it fell off the list for that reason & the fact that it had 3 syllables in it. We were avoiding names with more than 2 syllables cos people invariably create a 2 syllable nick name for such a name. I liked aadhya for a while but others felt it was too new & so revolutionary.

siya was deepa's suggestion. i thought it was a cute name but veena did not like it much and also we could not find another name to go with it.

shravanti was my favourite though it was breaking the syllable rule. i found it mystic & cool. it was probably the name princesses used to have. the other reason i liked it was cos it was associated with my hunch that we'll have two girls. We got to know that we'll have twins in the second month of veena's pregnancy. I still remember the grin on veena's face coming out of the scanning room and she was fluttering her index & middle fingers to tell me from far that we'll have twins. I of course did not understand her sign till she came near me and exploded "we'll have twins". Since that day i had a hunch that it'll be two girls. the hunch was more a hope also as I could not fathom dealing with twin boys. That was based on the assumption that as kids, girls are more manageable than boys. nidhi has of course disproved that assumption convincingly now. anyway that is a different story.

So i had a strong feeling that it is two girls and hence used to talk to them & refer to them as "ananya & shravanti". i used to call nidhi as ananya & neha as shravanti. As we had rejected ananya & i did not find a nice pair for shravanti & veena did not like that name as much as I did, we dropped shravanti.

shraddha is a nice name and the biggest problem with that is it sounds very similar to a bad or depressing word in Kannada (& probably Sanskrit) "shraaddha" which means death ceremony.
I don't know why languages can be so cruel.

chaitra did not gather enough momentum & did not get a pair to be a serious contender.

siri was amma's choice. I liked it cos it obeyed the syllable rule. I did not like to pair siri & nidhi though cos both mean the same thing (treasure) & the names somehow did not sound similar or connected (apart from meaning). By this time nidhi was a clear favourite & we were looking at names to pair with nidhi.

snigdha sounded cool one day & seemed like a tongue twister from second day onwards.

neethi was the pair proposed by veena for nidhi but i did not like it much. no apparent reason but just didn't like.

niyathi was a nice name & was dropped cos neethi did not make it to the shortlist.

we finally zeroed in upon neha & nidhi. neha means love & nidhi means treasure. these two names passed all our criteria.
# they passed the syllable rule,
# they have nice meanings,
# the kids were born on a Friday & my mom wanted some linkage to Lakshmi's name - nidhi met that criteria,
# they go well together,
# neha was veena's choice & nidhi was mine so each of us were feeling good about the names

And how did we decide to give the names to the two kids - good old alphabetical rule.
first kid got neha & second one got nidhi.

Parents Wish List

Before you become a parent, you usually make up your mind thinking I'll not impose my wishes on my kid and not expect them to achieve what i didn't. Once you become a parent, you usually change that thinking and start building expectations around your kids.

I've been lucky so far cos I have not weaved any major goals for my kids. they are still 3 years old :-)

One thing i plan to teach my kids though is swimming. When i say teach, i mean through some trainer obviously and not myself. There isn't that possibility cos I've learnt very little swimming. I did not swim till i was 32 years old and then I went to learn. I can float a while & do a few strokes before i get tired or I'm conscious of moving towards deep end and stop. that's about all i do in the pool. The difference between me & a non-swimmer is that if both of us are thrown off a boat, I'll die probably 10 seconds after the non-swimmer dies.

Anyways, the bubble of my kids learning swimming almost burst the other day (in nidhi's case) when I splashed a little water on her face while giving her a bath and she screamed frantically ಅಯ್ಯೋ ಅಪ್ಪ... ನಾನು ಮುಳಗಿ ಹೋಗ್ತಾ ಇದ್ಹೀನಿ

Deepavali this year

I was pleasently surprised by the courage neha & nidhi showed this deepavali to burst crackers (with help from me or kumara or vatsa). I remember last year they were petrified by the sounds of crackers and didn't enjoy even the harmless "sussur batthis". The fact that we were living in hanumanthanagar and those narrow roads (& hence more echo) probably was a reason.

this year i bought mostly the fancy crackers & none of the noise making ones. Neha was again the more adventurous one and started bursting crackers first. nidhi was again all hyper, running as close to the cracker once and running as far away the next second. peer pressure took her over a little later as she saw shreya, saurav, megha & more importantly neha bursting crackers. she joined the gang too. only shravya was left watching from a distance. maybe only this year. she should be up there with others next year.

they were still scared of the "sussur bhatthis". the stars that emanate burn their skins :-)

Pronunciations

Some of the pronunciations the kids had as they learnt talking:

neha would use "tha" for "ka". That was the root cause of a lot of fun during her second year I would make her say karnataka, karkala, current and she would go tharnathatha, thaarthala, tharrent

hickory dickory dock, mouse ran up the clock
hithory dithory doth, mouth enath tha naath

even today, I ask nidhi to say the address of our house and she goes uttarahalli main door (instead of road)

when the kids were about two years old or so, we took them to wonder la, the water park near bidadi (its really good). It was us + seena's family + vatsa's family that went there. nidhi got scared and did not try most of the rides. she created enough tantrums to ensure that I didnt get enough rides either. neha sat next to vinitha in one of the rides that looked like a ant hill & a train going through it. She was pretty excited about that particular ride (cos she sat in that without any adult next to her & we praised her for that) and whenever somebody would ask her about wonderla, she would say "initha attha pattha thoothondu iddhe" (vinitha akka pakka koothkond iddhe)

02 April 2004 @ 8:30 or so in the evening, K R Hospital, Hanumanthanagar
Pediatrician Dr. Santosh (who later became kids' doctor) peeped out of the OT room and asked "who is srikanth?" to a crowd of about 20+ people that had assembled in the lobby. I pushed & shoved people to stand in front of him as fast as I could. He said "you're blessed with twin daughters". It was one of rare moments in life that the grin does not go away and the mind is blank. i guess emotions & plain happiness fills your brain so much that thoughts drown in them.

I asked the cliched question that husbands ask "how is my wife doing". He said she is doing great and was in fact chatting with us through most of the operation! I felt a little cheated. Cos for more than an hour, I was tense like hell, cried a couple of times, tried to calm my mother, then cried with her. Life was teaching me the exact meaning of word "helplessness" during that difficult hour. I was thinking there must be something that I can do to help veena through those moments. And she was chatting with the doctors!

I had told my mother and others that I should be the first one to hold my daughters. So nobody dared to come near the OT door where I was waiting for my daughters. The nurse handed out neha first. Tiny weeny, she looked like a small photocopy of myself. very similar lips, forehead, face structure. bundled in a shawl, she was all of 2 kgs at birth! I carried her all the way to the room at put her in the cradle or handed her over to my mother (i don't remember). And then I rushed to the OT room entrance again waiting for nidhi. Nurse let me inside the outer room of OT to have a peek. They were giving nidhi a bath and then wrapped her and gave to me. She was plumper & had huge cheeks. they were falling down to the side as she had tilted her head a little. I thought she was heavier than 2.75 kgs that she was at birth.

Neha was born at 8:23 pm while Nidhi was born at 8:24 pm. It is funny cos one of the most common questions that people have asked me is "by how many minutes is neha elder to nidhi?"
the background of their question is probably when mothers used to deliver twins through normal birth. Since it was a c-section operation, I reply back " they are separated by a minute & that is the time the doctor took to pull out the second one :-)"

I've attached the first snaps of neha & nidhi (taken on 03 April), their second day.

ಕುಕ್ಕರ್ ಥರ

this incident happened about 6 months back. veena was busy in kitchen while neha & nidhi were playing in the living room. they were creating a lot of noise and toys were thrown around. veena came to the living room, saw the mess & started shouting at them. neha watched her for a while with her usual sharp stare and cut veena's lecture by saying "ಏನಮ್ಮ, ಒಳ್ಳೆ ಕುಕ್ಕರ್ ಥರ ಕೂಗ್ತಾ ಇದ್ಧೀಯ?"*

* - yenamma olle cooker thara koogtha idheeya

ಸತ್ತು ಹೋಗ್ತ್ಹಿಯಾ?

when nidhi was around 2 years & was adding new words to her vocabulary rapidly, I realized she had heard about "sattu hogu" (die) and somehow seemed to know what that means.

One day I was back home from office early and down with my migraine headache. As always I popped in a pill, slept in the room with lights off. Nidhi came inside the room, patted on my chest & asked
"ಏನು ಆಯಿತು ಅಪ್ಪ?" *
I said "ತಲೆ ನೋವು ಚಿನ್ನಿ" *
she enquired "ಸತ್ತು ಹೋಗ್ತ್ಹಿಯಾ?"*

* - yenu aithu appa
- thale novu chinni
- sattu hogtheeyaa?

Finally!

my first blog!!
And it is not about me but a blogspot for my daughters!

I have trouble expressing myself well through speech so forget blogging. But I want to capture the great moments during their growing years.

This blog is a bank of memories for me & others who know Neha & Nidhi.

I find it exciting even now when my parents or aunt or somebody talk about the pranks i was doing when I was a kid. I remember quite a few things I've done say after my 10th year but not before that. I think it'll be fun to record such stuff for my kids. I'm sure these snippets would be worth crores as I age & my memory starts fading. I can always look back & smile at these.