Our street is a zoo

To continue along the line of my "Our House Is The Center Of The World" narrative - see the previous installment here - let me tell you about the few meters around our front door.

Now that is spring we spend more time outside, and so do many other fascinating life forms. There are some creepy ones too, but even leaving those alone, there is plenty to see. Like here:

Let's zoom in a little.

Aha! A large crowd of ants hanging out on the sidewalk. You'd think that's where they live, but it seems unlikely because if you come back in half an hour they will be gone. Then maybe tomorrow they will appear at the other end of the street.

Appu and I think it is a fascinating phenomenon, but Rohan at first seemed to disagree. Here you can see him trying to get us to go back inside the house.

Failing that, he joined us at the ants', taking his yellow bus with him.

A few minutes later he decided to put his hand and part of his body right on top of the ants and so our attempt to connect with nature ended with me shaking Rohan trying to get as many ants off him as possible. They were literally everywhere.

Rajiv remained outside a little longer, using tiny sticks to make a series of bridges for the ants. It was quite cute, but a little disappointing for him, because the ants just didn't want to walk on the new bridges.

I will spare you the details, but there are many other interesting things going on in front of our door. Sometimes there are ducks - or geese - and we get to say goodnight to them - many times in a row.

We see worms in the garden when we pull the weeds and I know there are often toads in there but I never came across one with the kids. The best we could do was going on a snail safari, a couple of days ago.

We read a book about snails, where we learned that they prefer to put their heads out when it's getting dark. We also learned that they are slimy, the have only one foot so they are very slow and they have a strong tongue to eat leaves. So one evening after it had rained and after we had gone for a walk with the wagon we decided to go looking for snail.

There were so many! Rajiv and Rohan remained "safely" in the wagon while we walked to the end of the street and back moving the snails to the side so people wouldn't accidentally step on them. We even saw two tiny baby snails with almost transparent shells. Any we saw many many leaves with wholes on them, a sure sign that our little friends like the local cuisine.

Piccolo Rajiv (The Book) - is here..

When the movie? :)

Anyway, maybe you recall I had decided to get a hard copy of the now abandoned "Piccolo Rajiv" blog. I received the book from Blog2Print a couple of weeks ago and I am very happy, in spite of some obvious flaws.

Here are a few snaps.

Front cover - with the trademark baby feet...

... and back cover: I thought this image from the Canadian winter would be appropriate.

A couple of random images of the inside. There are two options while making the book: you can choose to maintain the exact formatting of the pages as they appear on your blog or you can ask the software to rearrange the photos to fill the space better and reduce the number of pages. I chose the latter to save some money and I don't regret it for a second (I am no designer anyway, so it's not like the perfection of my layouts needs to be preserved at all costs) but while sometime the optimized layout is perfectly fine,

sometimes it is not.

But who cares, right? My only real complaint is that there have been a couple of instances where the text has ended up hidden by the corner of a picture. I should have spotted that in the pdf preview, so it's my fault, but to be honest I just didn't want to spend the time. After all the whole point of using Blog2Print was that it required zero work on my side, and I tried to remain true to that principle to the very end :)

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.

Our window is better than a movie theater

Depending on your preferences, of course.

If you like garbage trucks - we do, especially Rohan - then you can spend all Tuesday morning, and sometimes the afternoon too, waiting for the recycling truck to come, then the regular trash one and the one collecting the yard waste and the truck for the organic waste. In fact you might even consider inviting some friends over and have a party! (No, we haven't done that -yet)

If this had not been enough, one morning - not Tuesday! - we spotted a garbage truck parked for a full ten minutes in front of our neighbours' house. It turns out the driver needed a quiet place to stop and have breakfast. Did he suspect the eyes of all toddlers on the street where directed on him? I think he saw me pointing at him through the window, but I bet he is used to it.

Even better, one morning we woke up to the sound of various different kinds of "thump!" and "clang!" and it turned out that we had a small bulldozer and a few other marvelous machines just a few meters away from our house!

They were changing the pipes directed to the sewer. Well, this time we did have a party. Rajiv waited patiently for his brother to wake up too and found himself a cozy spot to observe the work from inside.

Meanwhile, I called our friends from down the street who might have missed it. By the time Meaghan arrived to stay with the children there were five children between one and five surrounding the hole in the ground. I went to work and left them all there to have fun. By the time I came back home, Rajiv knew all about black pipes.

Childcare update

I think I haven't mentioned this yet. We are transitioning from having a nanny to having both children in the daycare center near home that we - Rajiv especially - love so much. Rohan is still too young to go there, as they generally only take children older than two and a half, but now that he is almost two they are willing to make an exception. It will be only for a few months though, until we leave Canada. It's too bad for the boys, because they really like it.

Rohan already knew Appu's school from having dropped him there in the morning several times and picked him up some times too, so he was well prepared for it. In fact it almost seems as if he has been waiting for this opportunity all along :)

Normally the first day it's easy to leave a child at daycare, because there are children and toys to play with, but then once the child realizes that he is going to be there the whole day without his parents he becomes more tense when he enters the daycare and it takes a little while to adjust. This anyway has been our experience so far after every change of care. But so far, Rohan seems to really like his new school - although admittedly this is only the third day. We were told that he gets a bit sad about an hour before we pick him up, but that's because it's hard to go the whole day without "latte".

I was a bit worried of how Rajiv might react to having to share his special school, teachers and friends with his brother, especially given all the fuss we are making about this. But Rajiv is not the kind of boy to point out this sort of thing. If it does bother him, he will "misbehave" in some way and it's up to us to understand. So who knows what he thinks now? It did help, I hope, that yesterday Rajiv got to be the center of attention because of his birthday and he got a card from all his friends, so he knows they all still like him :)