All is well..

Everything is going at a snails pace... but things are alright!

The kids are growing taller.. daddy is growing balder.. all seems to be going as planned.

Sleep is daddy's new best friend!

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Weird hair day - Van de Graff generator

One highlight for adults (and kids) in the Magic House at St. Louis was this generator that makes your hair charge out..

This was so much fun!

The little one had not much hair to go for this but insisted and she was also too short to touch the generator.

Jr. who was reluctant to go (citing that her hair has many "sikku" and "sedukku" .. knots and twists) eventually agreed and charged her sister by holding her hand.

She was right..

My theory that once the hair stands out on edge the knots will go away was wrong! Her hair became even more complicated. My sister did the combing exercise for a much annoyed Jr. to calm her down.

The Magic house was just amazing. They had miniature rooms that are every kids dream. A kitchen, a library, a bank, a hospital, a mini store, a room with water, another with sand, a third one with art supplies, a tree house, a pond to catch magnetic toy fish, the list goes on and on.

I wanted to be a kid and play there!

So, I was a kid and played there..

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Toys and trinkets

We have been cleaning up the house the last two days (something that can only be done right now)

100's of pencils, erasers, torn papers, trinkets from birthday parties which no one can make sense of.. like this one which we have at least 6-8 of from "pump it up" goody bags (what is it and what does one do with it ?)

Today we plan to "boldly go where no parent has gone before", into the kids closet... a few years from now, that would be impossible. Right now, we can still do a clean up job!

Hopefully we won't find fungus covered half eaten fruits from years ago.. just saying.. because it has happened to our friends!

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Going cuckoo without the little cuckoos

There is way too much peace and quiet in the house now that the kids are in India with the grandparents.

There is an eerie silence, occasionally broken by the click clacking of one or two laptop keyboards from two ends of the living room couch.

Two adults that stare at each other, stare back at their laptops and communicate to the world using facebook because any attempts at communicating to each other would break that silence. Vijay TV's Jodi #1 plays at barely audible volume even though there is no one to wake up or object to a higher volume. Somehow there seems to be a self imposed ban on speech after the kids left. Just cannot explain it. Maybe noise is the one thing that instantly reminds us of their absence in the house?

We have tried to spend evenings outside the house. Eat outside, go watch movies at the local mall theater, visit the temple, walk around Costco aisles with high tech gadgets that we are otherwise not allowed to walk around because we are usually on a tight schedule to get in and get out, etc. etc.

Someday when Jr. and the little one leave the house either for studying, employment or when they get married and we retire, there is a good chance I will go crazy.

For now, the kids are having jet lag while the adults are having "kid lag".

Hopefully, we will set into this routine over the next few days.

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Olivia

One recent TV favorite for the whole family is Olivia, on Nick Jr.

We were watching the kid's old favorite "Max and Ruby", when one day Jr. accidentally caught this show centered around a family of talking pigs, dadddy, mommy 6 3/4 year old Olivia, her four year old "bother" brother Ian and the few month old baby William.

My initial reaction was "Why can't these serials be about a human family like Calliou?". Max and Ruby is about a Rabbit world where Rabbits do human things.

Now "Olivia" does the same thing in a pig world.

It grew on the whole family within 20 minutes because of the script, the quality of animation and the way it puts things in the perspective of an almost seven year old.

In the show we watched first, Olivia's little "bother" Ian grabs every toy that she selects. She chooses to color and he takes away all her red crayons. At that point, Olivia sees no point in coloring anymore because red is her favorite color.

Then she moves on to do a puzzle and Ian grabs that too.. same thing happens when she tries to read a book! Any refusal by Olivia and Ian screams "Mom, she is not sharing!" and mom promptly reprimands Olivia, gives her a timeout for not sharing.

We were rolling on the floor laughing because this was a normal occurrence in our household, but were totally unprepared for what came next.

You see, Olivia has these little dream sequences (usually 2 per episode) where she goes into a trance and lets her imagination run wild. When her mom gave her a timeout, she thinks about how adults would react if they had to share everything.

In the dream her mom is about to get into her car, when out of the blue comes Mrs. Hogginmuller, Olivia's teacher and grabs the key and goes "I will have to take this car. will return it later"

Her mom is all zapped and goes "but.. bbbb but, that is MY car!" and Olivia comes behind her and says "Mom, you are not sharing! Maybe you should go to your room and think it over"

Now, that is something. The kids were looking at us like "now, there is a serial that reflected what goes on in my head all the time". We were still laughing, but there was a lesson for the parents.

Every episode is a treat to watch. There is a "Rule of life" in every episode that really cracks you up and like the initial caption reads, this serial does indeed teach kids the importance of inter personal relationships.

Truly amazing. If you have kids in the 3-9 age group, they will really enjoy this show and so will you.

Now I watch Olivia while eating dinner after the kids have gone to bed.

ps. found out that the episodes are available on itunes.

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