Haiku?

I am alone at my desk.

No children in sight.

Too much freedom: Now what?

What is this?

Lego Olympics

This is totally off topic, but if you are a Lego fan then you should check out the videos in the Guardian's brick-by-brick series.

The gymnastics one is really neat -





- and I love how they did the water in the pool here (the snack is also brilliant):

"Yay, I'm a dad! For the third time!!"

Laptop is back

And to celebrate, I immediately uploaded this week's photos, ready to be blogged. It is a somewhat random collection, but here it goes.

Appu wearing his new purple shorts (from a Benetton store in Calicut, quite ironically) - a favorite color these days. I am so glad little Rajiv is still gender-blind and does not know that purple (not to mention his pink Dora underwear!) "is for girls".



Mamma and Rohan ready for a shopping outing. Our balcony, self-portraits.



Failed attempt to take a close-up of Kunju's face. What you see is instead his finger, let's not worry about which one.


Appu wears a mundu (sort of) and is miserable for about twenty minutes until he gets to trade it for a diaper and bright red shorts.




So you don't believe Rohan can stand on his cute little feet? HA!

Dad, Kipper and some more stuff

First of all, Happy New Year!

I haven't written for a while and as you might expect there is a lot of backlog, but I will try and catch up by unloading on you massive amounts of videos and photos with minimal captioning - not a bad thing at all, probably.

The reason for the long silence is in part that I have been vary busy trying to attend some lectures and thinking about my plans for the future. However, as most of you surely already know, the main reason why I haven't made an effort to write is that my father died in the middle of December and, while it was impossible for me to write about it for several unpleasant reasons, it also didn't seem to make much sense to just keep going as if nothing had happened.

There are things I would have probably written here that now don't seem appropriate anymore. I will think about it and maybe I will come back to this topic later on, or I might not. I wanted to at least post a picture, but unfortunately the most recent I have is from a year and a half ago. Here it is, at the Torino airport.


My favorite picture of my father is another one, from my childhood, but I can't show it to you now. I took it when I was about seven years old I think, with my first camera - Fisher-Price childproof camera, one of the best gifts ever. It was Easter and we were having a family gathering. My dad posed for a photo in the act of lowering an asparagus into his mouth and although I say so myself, it is really a great picture. The only print I have is in a photo album in Torino, so I won't be able to post it until (if) I succeed in making a decent digital copy of it.

Anyway, let us move on to the promised goodies. For this first post I want to show you three videos. The first two were filmed in Calicut during the Christmas holidays. Those were early crawling days for Rohan, he is faster and less prone to accidents now. In case you are wondering, there is really no point to either of the videos, it is just an attempt to capture a little bit of comforting chaos.






The last video is not a home movie, but I thought I would share with you one of Appu's favorite episodes of Kipper The Dog. We love Kipper around here and I think nonna Laura will be especially pleased by this particular choice. I recommend you all watch it, Kipper is good for you.

My new favorite song