Kitchen fun

Getting back in the kitchen more often these days, just on a whim!

Made some "Adai" with the little one for company. 

Adai : ~18 % protein (batter made from rice and lentils)

It is good to be back!

Daddy world

The second week of June is the most anticipated week for me. 

It involves three things..

1. Kids graduation from school.. or like we used to say when we were kids "last day of school"!

2. Father's day

3. Our wedding anniversary

We did the last day of school on Wednesday and it was special this year because Jr. finished Elementary school and moves to middle school next year.

This also marks a huge gap when the two girls will be in the same school. In the US we have 6th to 8th grade as Middle school and 9th to 12th grade as high school. In three years when the little one goes to middle school, Jr. will already be moving out of that school to high school. 

The last year of school for Jr. will be the next time they are both in same school and that is 6 years away. So we are back to two pickups, two drop offs and different school timings etc. Our hope is that Jr. becomes more responsible and starts walking or biking to middle school! 

Now.. Father's day is always nice. My kids give me the extra huggies and kissies and this year I already have my gifts. The school has a limit to creativity (and budget) for the father's day gifts. So guess what the little one gave me?

Same Frog! well, it does not seem to have any storage value given the small mouth but the little one tells me it is a paperclip holder.. Well, now my office will have two frog paperclip holders! Funny thing is I wont know who made what because they both have the same initials and they both were in Room 12 for 2nd Grade! 

(Note for posterity : one on left is Little One, right is Jr's)

They also make me nice cards which really make my day! This year they put a lot of effort into it and was really happy to read /see what they gave me..

I did not get the boat and the caption first..

till she told me that I had to flip the flags over to see which my "Jobs" were!

As you can clearly see, my jobs are all non critical functions which involve the fishes and plants. In other words, I am a "Uppukku chappani" or the twelveth man in a cricket team. Nevertheless, yours truly is happy to play any role as part of the crew! 

The letter was clear but "What in Perumal's name is a woodly?" I asked and the reply was :

Daddy, I really wanted to say "you are cuddly like my cuddle bear, but what can I do?! There is no C in AWESOME! so I changed the W to say Woodly instead of Cuddly!" .  While the concept is baffling to me, the way she said it in all seriousness with her hands waving wildly will stay in my mind forever. 

Next was Jr's turn and she gave me this nice heart and card to put in my office! 

She painstakingly created the logos for the Yoga studio, my work etc and put them there. The cartoon of me on a yoga mat with a small water bottle cracked me up! 

They have both promised to behave their best tomorrow to celebrate Father's day.. will hold them to it, given yesterday evening and most of today was a blur with yet another migraine. Feeling good now after all that sleep. Daddy day promises to be interesting!

As for the third thing that makes our week, we have our Aussie relatives visiting us and it has been a blast! So we celebrate with a larger family this year!

Here is a video of me dancing with the little one and her cousin at a local restaurant.. 

It is just great to see the kids happy! 

We have now crossed two 7 year itches and still "itching for each other".. so that must be a good thing! There are no secret presents planned for San this year.  When the whole NSA Prism scandal came out, I realized that San knows every little move I make.. she has all the passwords for the credit cards, amazon, ATT sites etc. and I have none. No wonder I can never surprise her with anything!  

Maybe I will handcraft her a card that says "You are my NSA and I still love you!"

Happy Father's day to all the dads out there!

Those few moments..

Jr. and the little one are fighting by default. We do know that when we are not looking and when left to themselves in their room, they play for hours and are all "love and caring".. it is almost as though they put on a deliberate act when we are around..

These photographs were taken when they were both playing in the local park this weekend!

Kids, gotcha! 

Now be like this more often..

Killing as perceived by kids

This writing was prompted by a video that many of my friends forwarded on facebook in the last two days, a conversation with the little one and a recent visit to great america parkway where almost half the people we saw waiting in line for one of the rides were obese. Older people, kids, different races (black, white, hispanic) all struggling to walk or try to fit in the seat on those rides! The thought that kept going through my head was "these rides are all rated based on a safety factor of ? 2x ? and most of them were built 30 years ago? this population is almost 2x heavier than the population 30 years ago. what if the whole thing collapses?

We were on a Wilderness tour bus and the little one looked up to me and said 

"Daddy, Sheep are my favorite animal when it comes to materials we use from the animal. Do you want to know why?"

It was a weird statement, so I took my eye off the camera viewfinder and said "why?"

Her response was :

"all the other animals when humans use them, they kill the animal. on a sheep you only have to give it a shave and you get the wool and the sheep grows it back! That is why I like sheep"

I was touched by that and so were San and Jr. who were listening to this. Did't have the mind to tell her that folks eat sheep as well! 

Later that night, we had a conversation on why people kill animals as food. Told them that humans evolved from apes and when humans went to places like Alaska where food was hard to find the humans had two choices in winter..

a. Eat a lot of food and hibernate in a cave for 6 months like the bears

b. Find something to eat even in the winter months were plants dont put out anything

and since humans didn't have what it took to hibernate, they chose the second option by eating meat. 

Have shown them a video in the past that shows how our teeth compare to herbivores and not carnivores and meat eating is an abberation of sorts that got a lot of focus in history. 

Given today's world, the ability of humans to transport grains, fruits, vegetables and nuts there is not a big justification to eat meat. It takes at least 10 times the energy to make a pound of meat than to eat an equivalent portion of grain and that is taking a toll on the planet as more folks in China, India and other emerging countries with big growing "middle class" populations are starting to eat meat! 

The average American consumes the equivalent of 1400 lbs of grain (if you take into account the grain it takes to make the meat) to an average Indian at 300 lbs. When you put that in water usage it gets a lot more glaring.

Eating meat is a choice and is also a way of life. If your parents raised you as vegetarian, chances are you will be comfortable with veggies. You know there is a variety of dishes and ways to cook it to know that the lack of meat is not a big deal. If you are raised in a family that eats meat and you are taught that eating your meat is very important for your health, then it is understandable that it gets passed on generation to generation.

There are three things I learned that are worth sharing

1. If you have access to veggie stuff, then you can go easy on the amount of meat and you can make a huge impact to the planet!

2. Not eating meat in almost 80% of human inhabitated land (weather, climate related) where vegetarian options co-exist will not cause a health risk. The Shaolin monks are all vegetarian! All the Spiritual gurus and great Yogis I have seen are vegetarian. So there is no physical risk or mental risk when you don't eat meat.

3. If you eat meat, you have a higher burden of not wasting meat on your plate! Eat up! Throwing meat in the trash can is worse than throwing veggies in the trash. Not that I am encouraging vegetarians to waste food.. wasting is bad (specifially writing this for someone who reads this blog!)

On a personal note, my kids know that I did try eating meat for a few years while in grad school and found out in the process that I was extremely allergic to seafood (stopped eating even Veggie food in seafood places to avoid allergy attacks), could not eat red meat without consequences on my digestive system and the only thing I could eat was chicken. Eating chicken was crossing a psychological barrier than anything else. There was no chicken after marriage and those years of eating chicken occasionally did not make me stronger or improve my appetite or provide me with any extra survival skills. In short, could have comfortably been a veggie all my life and would not have missed anything. 

The whole Yoga experience puts things in a new perspective. Doing 90 minutes of exercise that pretty much tests every part of the body and learning that the four things you need for your body and mind to work in concert are oxygen, water, movement and then food in that order, the vegetarian food has not kept me back from improving or being able to do any of these exercises.

Totally understand now how the monks are vegetarian!

There should be an App for that!

Okay, it has been a rant here that the kids are more interested in watching hours of Tamil Variety TV programs or nail polish videos on Youtube. 

Wile checking the history recently, had found that the two of them had watched more than 7 hours worth of Nail Polish videos on youtube in just one week! 

So when all other attempts to steer them to subjects like Geography and science during the hours after they just make it back from school had failed... there was only one thing left to do!

Find Geography quiz and science quiz apps on the iPad and play with them. It has been a very successful program, if one can call it that! The Geography rehabilitation program.. 

Today I watched with pride as Jr. correctly identified the Capital of Azerbaijan as Baku and the little one said Brunei's capital is Bandar Seri Begawan... Life has its little moments! They are able to identify capitals and flags reasonably well. 

Next step, they have to actually be able to point to them on the world map. That is a work in progress. 

All this app business gave me an idea, given there is no App for making them eat a quick breakfast. 

We should have an App that shows them a mish mash of nail polish videos, my little pony, good luck charlie, an occasional geo quiz question, and every 90 seconds those should be interrupted by a video of daddy saying "take another vai (mouthful)!" or "another spoon" or "chew and swallow" or "why is the throat not moving!" .. the App should let me pre record 3 or 4 such 10 second videos which the kids have to hit with a snooze type button (or we could rename it the "I ate" button. 

That app alone has the potential to improve the quality of our life 347.5%! 

Sometimes I wish my day job was to write apps.. would at least write some for my kids. Unless there are some crash courses for old engineers whose last programming exercise was with Fortran 77 or C++ in the late nineties. 

Let me know if there is a weekend course for app writing in the local area or online..