Monday, November 24, 2008

Quick update!!

Aj sang january february completely on 15th nov :) and Aj can recognize 25/26 alphabets..YAY!!

Saturday, November 22, 2008

Atlanta...

Haven't been able to post regularly. It's quite hectic and i won't blame it on india trip. I haven't even started shopping yet. So, i dont know where the time is going. As the kids are growing they are getting to be more demanding.

On our wedding anniversary, I sang january february and aj completed the rest of the months. Ofcourse he could not say some of the months properly. Like for October he says something that starts with Oc. :) But, good job aj.

Now an update on our Atlanta trip. We left of friday and the drive was not all that great because it was too foggy. Kids were okay, so we were enjoying some music (ellam kids music dhaan!!) and all of a sudden Ashu started crying. We were just 5 minutes away from the hotel. Asked him why he was crying and he said 'it feels like i have been sitting in the car for 16 hours!' . I didnt know whether to laugh or cry :)

He was happy the next day though. He always has a soft corner for Atlanta. So do i. My appa used to always ask us to move to Atlanta for good coz he loved Atlanta too. We got up late as we had reached Atlanta quite late the previous night and then we decided to leave for lunch. I picked Saravana bhavan. Naaka thonga pottundu pona, everything had garlic in it..Yuck :(
Looks like the management has changed. First of all, they made us wait for 1 hour and aj adhukkula ennai kuthuyirum kolaiuyiruma aakirundhaan, atleast food-aanum yummy-a irukkumnu paatha..nondhu noodle-a poitten :( The funny part was, we had ordered idli for aj and when the idly came (finally), aj gave one look at the plate and started crying. Crying-na literally kadhari kadhari azhugai. Apram somehow we managed to feed him. Oru vazhiya velila vandhapram, B said he will take us to Macys for shopping..Appodhan konjam gift-kaana ariguriye therinjudhu ;-) But, suddenly he detoured and took me to the indian jewellery store. I was really surprised because till then he was harassing me by talking as if 10th anniversary was no big deal. So, i had no hopes for any gift :-) He got me diamond earrings and pendant set.

From there we went to the Balaji temple, the temple that appa wanted to visit, but we couldn't go there at the time. It was nice. After coming back to cookeville, someone told me that there was a Lord Shiva temple adjacent to it and we didn't know about it. Next time.

We went to Daddy's school on Sunday. Ashu loved it. He was so excited and awestruck to see how BIG the school is!! Me too. I am also glad that nobody can say that 'naan mazhaikku kooda college pakkam odhungala u.s.lanu'. I have proof, u see :) Aj had this naughty grin in his face through out our stay in the school. Donno what he was thinking :-) Dude was upto something!!
They had vending machine full of juice, cold coffee etc..Little dude style-a poi oru juice bottle eduthundudhu. The school was really awesome. Enga Sarada Vidyalaya alavukku illanaalum nanna dhaan irukku..okay okay manasatchi kuthiduthu. School was beautiful. Anga poittu vandhadhe perumaya irukku. Again playing it safe..yaarum enna anga padikka sollida koodadhu illa?

Mazhaikku odhingunadhunaalayo ennavo, i was more attracted by the break room than anything else. Break room was awesome with two BIG screen t.vs! :) Super-o super. One thing that made my jaws drop to the floor was they had a bar in the break room and all the alcoholic drinks were free too. Konjam over-a illai. But, good thing is i heard nobody takes it as they can't afford to goto sleep with back to back assignments. So, some sadistic guy must've designed this break room. Ellarayum seendi vittu paakaran :)

Oh, last but not the least, on our way back we went to a new restaurent called Madras Chettinad. Awesome food. Even Ashu said it was good, which is very rare u see. Over all, the unplanned Atlanta trip was good :-)

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Sugar Sweet Veshamam and Smarty Pants!

Last friday (7th Nov), i tried to bake cookies from the scratch. I got the recipe from Tarla dalal's book and followed it to a T. What a disaster it was!! :-O I had my doubts at the start because the cookie dough looked thin having the consistency of dosa batter.

I just thought the recipe is from the famous chef TD so it has to be right and made it. The cookies ran over and formed one big rectangle and i could not even take it out of the pan :-O Anyways, i got so frustrated and i just dumped the cookies and put the sugar and the other ingredients on the counter top and went to the living room without cleaning the mess up. Aj is very good at sensing mess even if it is not in his vicinity. He promptly went to the kitchen and dumped the whole box of sugar on the floor! :-O

I heard something and came to the kitchen and there he was playing with the sugar on the floor, drawing something on it. Before cleaning it, just for the heck of it i put some sugar in his mouth and he realized it was sweet and tried to gobble up as much as he can before i got the broom and pan. It was so funny. He was quite mad when i cleaned the whole mess and dumped it in the trash can.

Ashu got his Karate outfit last week and i still haven't taken a picture of him in it. Bad Mommy! Anyways, he is doing awesome in Karate class. He loves cub scouts also. He won a prize for answering a question in cub scouts. They asked what the state tree of Tennessee was and he was the only one who knew the answer. I think it is Tulip poplar, i need to verify with him. They gave him a book of Trees.

Now to an election joke. From the beginning, Ashu kept supporting Obama. If we ask why he would just say i dont know, but he is going to win! Josiyam paaka polaam ;-) Anyways, couple of days back when i was driving the kids back home and was waiting at lights, the car in front of us had two stickers. One said 'NObama' and the other said 'McCain Palin'. Ashu grunted unhappily looking at it and i asked him why. He said, they should remove those stickers and stick
new stickers that said 'GObama' and 'McCain Falin' as we all know Palin failed! I thought it was too funny and when i told B he could not stop laughing. Obama camp should have hired Ashu for some negative campaigning! :D

Aj now identifies few letters. When our maids came on wednesday, he went to the vaccuum cleaner that said Oreck XL21 and pointed to O and said O and then pointed to 21 and said 2, 1 :-) On Friday, Ms. Casey was wearing a pink shirt and he promptly pointed to it and said Back (black). Atleast he knows when people are wearing solids, those are colours :-) That's a good improvement!

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Short and Sweet...

Aj can sing abcs fully yay! :)

Ashu got his karate uniform. he looks very cute :)

Romba hectic-a irukku..so telegram maari oru post ;-)


Releasing soon...
aj's sugar-sweet veshamam later and Ashu's cubscout achievement too...
Also a mega serial of my sondha kadhai soga kadhai on baking.. ;-(

Monday, November 3, 2008

Diaper Genies

That's how B refers to the kids since they started doing smart things when they were/are still in diapers ;-) Btw, if you are wondering where he got that name from, it was the brand name of the diaper pail that i have :-)
On thursday, Ashu sat down with daddy and prepared his own time table. I should say he was overly optimistic. He said he can get up at 7 and still manage to do everything, have his breakfast and milk and be ready at 7.30!! He had marked 1 minute for breakfast and 30 seconds for milk...hahaha..rofl...And on friday, when he got up it was back to square one.
He was just sitting and staring at the milk from 7 to 7.15 and B said what happened to his timetable and i started laughing. He came to me after B went to the bathroom and secretly asked me to tear off his timetable!! Dude learnt his lesson in one day! :-)

On Friday, when i dropped AJ in daycare, Ms. Allison was wearing a t.shirt that said Resurfaced. He touched 's' and said 's'. We both were awestruck and we thought it was probably a fluke, but he touched e then and said 'e' and 'r' and said 'r'. He did this 3 or 4 times and then he touched the 'u' next to 's' and said 't' ;-) Atleast he knows 't' comes after 's'.
Ms. Allison said he will probably start reading before moving out of the orange room :-)
Later she said she tried showing some letters from a chart and he recognized few more. Li'l due is on a roll...

Now both A and a (Uppercase (A) for Ashu and lowercase (a) for AJ ;-)) both are fond of kalyana samayal sadham song. I just sang it one day to make AJ stop crying and he loved it. I sang 4 or 5 times after that and both can sing that song. A sings more and 'a' sings like fill in the blanks. He completes each line of the entire song!! ;-)

Saturday, November 1, 2008

Funnies

Before going to the party on sunday, i kept some of the besan burfi in the counter top for us. I had put it in a ziploc box and closed it tight. On monday, i gave some for Ashu and a small piece for Aj. I was scared to give him more because i vaguely remembered my mil telling me that kids dont digest besan well. I put the box back on the counter top and went to the living room. Aj went back to the kitchen and tried to get it. He couldn't reach and he opened the drawer that has plastic boxes, pulled one out out and climbed on it and got the box of burfis. He brought it to me and asked me to open and took a big piece! He loved it and i was so proud of my burfi.
He refused to eat dinner and that's a different story!!

Again on tuesday, he was trying to get something from the countertop and i had hidden all the stools away. He casually pulled a big plastic box and climbed on it and got what he wanted!! I got so mad at him and said 'Aj mandalaye onnu poduven' and he innocently started saying 'tuesday wednesday...etc' on hearing mandey :D We all started laughing and he looked puzzled. Ashu said, 'he seems to know too much for his age'..as if he knows everything about babies...4,5 pera kozhandhai edutha kezhavan maari oru comment. konjam too much :D

I asked Ashu what he did in LEAPS on tuesday (last week) and he said they asked them to play a game in computer lab and he didn't complete it because he didn't have time. I asked if none of them finished and he said all the others finished, but he didn't have time. I asked him if he wasted his time talking and he said yes. I told him that he shouldn't keep talking like this and he will end up with incomplete work everywhere. He casually replied, 'i know that mommy, but i dont know why i talk though!' Ha! Nice excuse, maybe i should try that too ;-) Sounds so much like Dennis the Menace...I should quit reading that!

We are getting K TV now. I noticed that on saturday and i thought it's probably a free preview for the weekend. We usually get free previews of one of the desi channels once in a while. It's 4 days and we still have it..Hmmm, i got worried and i asked B to check if aj ordered it by mistake.I dont know if B checked it or not! We have had these things happen with Ashu. Ashu had ordered Curious George, The wild, etc on Pay per view when we left him with my inlaws and went furniture shopping. They didn't know about it and he milagai arachified them :-)
We locked the 'order' button but K TV was one of the green channels that doesn't require interaction and the lock is not effective on those. Those channels can be added with just one hit!