Lila On The Slide

Who Can Touch The Tip Of The Pyramid?

Carousel du Louvre, under the upside-down glass pyramid, where tourists line up patiently to have their picture taken. But not today :)

Playing on the couch at the Musee d'Orsay

I want one of these at home..

Little Explorers at the Jardin Des Plantes

We are in Canada at the moment. I thought I would be able to post regular updates about our trip, but as you may have noticed I am a little behind schedule. While I get it together, I thought family and friends might enjoy some videos we took in the past two weeks. I will start with one from Paris, at the Jardin Des Plantes. Enjoy :)

Stomping Song

A video from September 2012. Appu sings for us a song he learned at school. I think it is in German, but nobody knows for sure.

Joy and Jubilee!

I have finally regained access to most of my photos and videos! There are things I had even forgotten about and as usual we all look much happier in the videos than we do in real life, so now I will be off to re-watch all of them to boost my spirits. I will be posting some too, soon, all depending on how the internet connection is behaving today.

An old video from Appu's babyhood

This is from when Rajiv was little, maybe about five months old. We were still staying in a flat in Waterloo - we didn't move into the house until after his first birthday.
I had not posted this video earlier because I took the first part with the camera tilted by 90 degrees ("portrait"), which is a silly thing I often do without thinking. Now that I have found that editing movies is fun, I am correcting a lot of these mistakes, so that history will not have to do without my masterpieces.

Here you go:

Lila smiles in her sleep

All babies do, I know, but how many parents have a movie to prove it? I thought so.. :)

Plot: It is bed time. Baby Lila has fallen asleep in her playmat (!!!). Mamma bothers her a little to make her smile, but she keeps sleeping. Rajiv reads Kipper's alphabet book for his brother and declines to be interviewed for this movie. Baby Lila keeps sleeping, but finally agrees to show us her famous sleeping smiles.

Sorry for the background noises.

* * *

E' ora di andare a dormire. Lila sorride nel sonno ma non vuole essere disturbata. Appu legge per Rohan e - anche lui - non vuole essere disturbato.

* * *

Sunday morning: bike and flip flops

Yesterday morning Rajiv woke up and, as we have recently agreed to do, went to the next room to wear his daytime clothes before requesting me to get out of bed. This time however, he found an unexpected treasure. Mamma had carelessly left the new flip flops - intended for a later use - buried under a bunch of other stuff, still wrapped up in the package they came in. None of this could stop Appu, of course.

So I hear: "My flip flops! They were lost! But I found them!". Indeed. I slowly get out of bed and ask Rajiv to please be quiet so that Rohan can sleep a bit more. He is usually quite good at that, but not when there are such exciting news to share.

Rohan was initially on board with trying out the new footwear, until he realized there was no way to wear them without having something between his toes. He suffered it for a while out of respect for his older brother, but it's just not for him. Anyway, before a knew it - and before I could change into my daytime clothes myself - Rajiv was out of the front door.

So here is how it happened that we were out on the street before 8 AM on a warm but overcast Sunday morning.



Not much later, we met our Chinese neighbours who recently moved in. I wish I knew how to write the name of the little boy, so I wouldn't have to call him The Chinese Neighbour. He still only knows very few words in English, but my kids don't care one bit, as long as he shares his dinosaurs with them.

It is, in fact, a horse

Tre video di "tanto tempo fa". Nel primo Rajiv va a cavallo su una borsa-cesta che era stata in teoria acquistata per contenere i libri presi in prestito dalla biblioteca per i bimbi (14-11-2010). Nel secondo Rajiv e la sua amica Kalena esprimono tutta la loro gioia dopo essersi fatti dipingere la faccia ad una fiera in occasione di Halloween (31-10-2010). Nel terzo Rajiv, piccolissimo!, gioca a nascondersi in una casetta giocattolo nel nostro primo appartamento in India (settembre 2009: Rohan era gia' nato ma aveva pochi mesi e si vede solo per un attimo sdraiato sul aterasso mentre Appu gli corre davanti). Quest'ultimo video e' uno dei preferiti di Rohan, che non si stanca mai di rivederlo.

Three old videos that I never ended up posting.

In the first, Rajiv rides his new horse (I had bought that bag/bin to finally contain the tide of the library books, but one should never underestimate the imagination of a child when he feels that the untidiness of his environment is being threatened). This was the middle of November in 2010, just about six months ago.



In the second video you can see Rajiv and his friend Kalena express all their joy after having had their face painted at a Halloween event. October 31 (obviously) 2010.



The last video is the oldest, dated September 2009 when Rohan was just a tiny baby - you only get a glimpse of him lying down on a mattress while his brother plays peek-a-boo with and practices his alien language. It's not a great video: bad lighting, bad camera, abrupt ending. It is however, one of Rohan's favorite videos and he never tires of watching "Appu in the house" :)

Hello papa'

This was last Saturday. It seems so long ago, it's easy to get used to having papa' around :)

We were waiting next to the window to see if we could spot the car. We stayed there for a while and so I decided to take a little video to kill some time. And right away papa' was here!



Cuddle cuddle..

..check mail..

..open the box..

..and crash.
So we watch a bit of a movie

and then we go outside to try the new balance bike (that just means a smaller than usual bike with no pedals and no training wheels).

It was a bit rainy, as you can see, but one week later the weather has really come around and I am off to spend a little bit of early morning (well, ok, it's 8:30, but still morning) time outside with the kids. See you soon :)

Un anno fa

Un video dell'anno scorso in India a Ooty, il giorno del terzo compleanno di Rajiv.

A video from last year, that I never ended up uploading. It was taken on the day of Rajiv's third birthday, so it seems appropriate to post it now. Rajiv and Jayadev are being cool in their new sunglasses and Rohan makes an appearance through the window.

PLOP!

Chicha's wedding

With the fact that I didn't tell you much about our trip - and just showed you our photo album instead - I almost forgot to share the little video I took at Vijay's wedding in Guruvayoor.

As you will see, I better hold on to my job, because it's unlikely I could make a career as a wedding reporter. I must say though, that I could have been placed in a more favorable spot (you know, somewhere where I could actually see the couple) had I not wasted valuable time looking everywhere for my husband to make sure that he didn't miss the ceremony.

I later discovered that he was there, just on the other side. Unfortunately, he is not in this video, but almost everyone else is. Even the - by then - married couple, in the last few seconds.

Preschool physics: experiments with magnets

Appu osserva che due calamite dello stesso polo, che quindi si respingono, si attraggono quando viene interposto tra le due del metallo - in questo caso una moneta. Naturalmente la sua descrizione del fenomeno e' in termini leggermente differenti :)

Maybe you remember that Rajiv learned how magnets can attract or repel when we gave him his first toy train, during our trip to Paris last year. Toy trains being the brilliant toys that they are, here is another important physics lesson:



Rajiv observed this himself, I just made him re-enact the whole thing for his dad's benefit and for the camera. Just so you don't think that he has a lab report due every evening :)

Before the Zambonis

Questo video si colloca subito prima dell'apertura delle uova. I miei bimbi decidono di giocare a nascondino.. :)

Sorry, earlier I got so caught up in writing about my ineptitude with the Zambonis that I forgot to show the prequel to the story. Here it is. And for the last time - this year - Happy Easter :)

The Best Laid Plans

Cliccate sotto su "Read more" per video e foto.


In Case you are wondering - and I know you probably are not, really - I am intentionally borrowing the title from a book about Canadian politics that I haven't even read yet - but it looks good ;)

I thought about what to do for Easter for a while and in the end we did absolutely nothing special, as you well know. One thing I wanted to get right, though, was the eggs. I didn't want to get really good - and really expensive - chocolate, because:

1. The kids really don't know the difference
   
2. If we want to keep collecting the Thomas Wooden Railway we have to save money somewhere -- even if just symbolically
   
3. I wouldn't know where to find really good Easter eggs here - because I'm a European snob

So the choice was restricted to whatever the Valuemart in front of my office had to offer. The boys love Kinder chocolate, but recently I have been very disappointed with the little gadgets found inside them. Not like those of my youth..  The thought of an oversized version of them popping out of the big Easter Kinder eggs left me cold.

Then I saw he official CHL eggs, which promised a pull back Zamboni inside every one of them: Perfect!

If you are not Canadian you might not know what any of this means, so let me explain.

The CHL is the Central Hockey League and ice hockey is of course the most popular sport in Canada - did you think it was curling???

A Zamboni is a large machine, looking a little like a road sweeper, that resurfaces the ice on an ice rink: meaning, it peels off the top layer of ruined ice and leaves behind nice smooth ice. All Canadian kids love Zambonis, just like kids everywhere love all sort of large and mean machines. Why this thing is called a Zamboni was a mystery for me for a while, until I googled it and found out that this machine was invented by Frank Zamboni and his company is still leader in the market. I'm afraid You have to be Italian to understand why all this sounds hilarious..

Anyway, Rajiv has recently become a Zamboni enthusiast, thanks to an episode of Caillou he watched in which Caillou gets to ride on a Zamboni after his skating class. For a few days after that, the toy bulldozer that Appu rides around the house turned into a Zamboni.

So I thought: this is great! We get to do the ritual cracking of the eggs with some cheap chocolate, and who cares about that anyway, and then inside there will be two nice small pull back vehicles that the kids can play with for the rest of the day. While I take rest.

If you have reached here without falling asleep, below the fold you will get to watch a video of the actual egg cracking. Papa' was with us on Skype, which was nice.






NOOOOOO! The Zamboni came in a zillion pieces. It was fun, because I got to see how a pull back car works - or in this case doesn't. Less fun was the fact that Rajiv and Rohan were howling behind my chair because I wouldn't let them play right a away with the toy. Rohan probably thought I was playing with it myself and was really angry.

The thing that should make the vehicle move after you pull it back is the rubber band you see below. Simple. And cool! (By the way, note how the steering wheel is already broken)

Ta - daaaaaa!

Uhm, not really, no. The pull back never worked, the band was falling off and pretty soon the wheels were falling off too. Appu agrees to show the toy for the camera, but by now the excitement is fading.

At least we got one "Toronto Maple Leaves" Zamboni, which I guess is our team. The black scary one is from the "Calgary Flames". Brrr..

So that's it. I have already disposed of the two offending objects, although some of their parts must still be hiding somewhere in the living room.

I know the whole thing doesn't sound like a big deal, but the three of us took it quite personally :)

Vigilia di Pasqua col sole

You are going to hear a lot about Easter on this blog. Not because it is my favorite holiday or anything like that, but I had four full days to spend at home with the kids and I'm going to share the joy. Only the good parts, I promise: I will spare you the synchronized wailing contests and the I-want-to-go-out-in-the-rain-without-shoes moments.

Unfortunately I don't have any photos of the egg hunt with Kalena on Good Friday - but maybe I can get the video from Anna Marie? Anyway, let me tell you about our Saturday instead, in every boring detail.

I'm not sure you can tell from the photos, but the weather was really nice, the warmest we had so far. I sort of overdressed the kids, just in case, but I wasn't wearing a sweater and I never missed it.

We played for a while on the street in front of our house - it's a dead end, so it's very quiet. Appu insisted that we put together Rohan's new tricycle, but in the end Rohan preferred to walk.

Appu had a blast on his own big trike and kept riding back and forth on the sidewalk.

I asked him to take a photo of me and Rohan and I think he did a great job!

One of the highlights of the afternoon was finding two badminton rackets abandoned on the curb in front of some students' house. They were there to be picked up with the trash, but we rescued them and there was a soft ball too! What more could you want?

We also got a chance to play a little bit with our neighbor Kyle, after a long time.

Then we took mamma's bike with the buggy attached behind for the Rohan and Rajiv to sit in and we went for a short ride. We went through the park and to the office, to pick up some stuff I had left there, and then we went to the grocery store.

My idea of happiness, looks something like this:

If only there was another big bike in this photo...

But let me conclude with a little video, taken earlier while playing on our street.

One day - soon - people will be asking for his autograph :)

Rajiv improvvisa una canzone alla chitarra.

Rajiv improvises a song on the guitar.. The best part was before I started filming it but, alas, isn't that always the case?

Papa' is The Greatest Dad

Tomorrow we are flying to India to be reunited with papa'. To celebrate, let me bring up a couple of memories.

Italy, Rajiv, three years ago:




Rohan, India, eight months ago:



Papa'- never leave home without him :)