all part of life

A new home record..

The kids almost always beat me at a game of Ticket to ride. It has replaced sequence as the new popular game, thanks to the MIL who introduced it to us.

Today, Daddy answered back with a new home record score of 140 points by connecting three sides of the board... Yes! I went from Los Angeles to Miami via Vancouver and Montreal..

Just on a side note, Jr. made a 130 once and the little one made 135 once and they play like pro's.

Now that Daddy is on the same footing with the girls, the games are going to be interesting!

Happy New Year 2013

Yes.. it is the New year for south Indians and we had the usual good eats and spent quality time with family. 

We want to wish everyone a wonderful Tamil New Year, Ugadi, Vishu and anything else the New Year goes by in different parts of India.

This year is named "vijaya" for Victory. Hope truth and righteousness emerge victorious this year!

Here's to 2013 from the Traveling Naryanans.

Learned earlier this year that folks in the west used to celebrate their New Year around April 1st as well a long time ago.. then they changed it to Jan 1st. In order to discredit some folks who refused to change the New Year from first week of April to January, they called April 1st "April Fools day".. don't know if this is true, but thought of sharing this interesting tid bit. 

Apparently the atheist government in Tamil Nadu tried to move the New Years day to coincide with the Harvest Festival and that is being ignored for now. We live in a funny world with all these changes, daylight savings time etc.. Don't know how things will change in another 30 years. 

Hoping it is for the better! Happy 2013!

Finally on stage

The little one, had figured out that doing any extracurricular activity like music, dance etc. is a lot of hard work and the rewards for going on stage are not proportional to the work. She could throw a tantrum for not being tall enough to get on the Harry Potter ride and get a game console. Compare that to working for a whole year and getting on some annual day program for which you get a new pencil or eraser.. it was no contest!

She pretty much said "No" without a second thought to any classes that invovled the word "practice". 

Recently though, her close friends were all roped in to do a school performance for the International festival. A fun looking Dandiya dance.. so we convinced her to go. In spite of missing many sessions with her flu, she made up for it by doing a nice job of dancing on stage. More than that, we now know the girl has moves. We did not know she could shake her hips like that or have such expressions.. 

Here is a picture taken by her teacher. We are truly blessed to live in a place where an International festival is organized where kids show culture and dancing from across the globe to their classmates. There were Kung fu demos by little kids that were simply amazing, Gangnam style dancing, Japanese dancing, Chinese dance, Persian songs, Bengali poetry.. it was refreshing to see this!

Now that she has been on stage, we told her "You are going to dance class" and before we finished the sentence the answer was "NO!".