No, grazie

Mamma is cutting pizza into small pieces that will cool faster and places them on the plates in front of two little boys who are sitting at the table chewing like there's no tomorrow. Mamma keeps cutting, kids keep chewing.

BUZZZZZZZZZ! BuZZ! BUZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!

Rajiv- There'a bee in the house!!!
Mamma- No, Appu, it's just a big fly.
Rajiv- Oh. It will not sting. It will just bother us.
Mamma- That's right it won't sting us, just bother us a little.
Rajiv- Yes! It will think we are food, but we will say "no", and the fly will say "o-k"..

Mamma opens the window and pushes the fly out, just in case.

For papa'...

... who should be landing in Chennai in a few hours.
(In fact he is the one who took the photo, last week)

Bye bye Papa', see you soon...

Today papa' is going back to India and that means you can probably expect more frequent posting for some time.

The kids are at daycare today and said their goodbye to papa' when he dropped them off in the morning.

Here they can see them getting ready for school.The first step is convincing the kids to surrender the balloons left over from the birthday party.

Next is convincing Rajiv to wear his new blue shoes that fit just right instead of the green ones that are still too loose and make him fall.

Then, out of the door. But wait... too much light... "I want my sunglasses!" (Too bad, I think we left them at school last week..)

And now they are almost ready to go. Note the birthday banners still on our fence. Nothing is cleaned up right away at our house, it's a matter of principle.

"Bye!"

And just like that, he was gone...

Sorry, we are busy

I know I haven't posted in a long time, I am sorry about that, but we are really overwhelmed.
Things we are doing right now:

1. Organizing a yard sale for TOMORROW to get rid of stuff we won't take with us when we (sigh!) move
   
2. Arranging for someone to rent our house after we (sigh!!) move
   
3. Organizing (can you say 'disorganizing' in English?) Rajiv and Rohan's joint birthday party for NEXT WEEK - and our guests don't know that they will be our guests, yet
   
4. Arranging for packing and shipping of the stuff that we do want to take to India
   
5. While doing all this and deeply covered in too much stuff, still shopping for a few essential children's books that we don't own yet (ok, that's just me: dad is innocent)
   
6. Doing some of the work that we are actually paid to do?
   
7. Planning a week in Paris on our way to India at the end of August. Ehm, this doesn't sound so necessary, does it?
   

Meaningful - so to speak - posts will resume as soon as I don't need two Starbucks Double Shot Vanilla drinks a day to keep going :)

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" :)