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.

Matisse

It's been a while since I last wrote and I have so many things I need to post about - like Rohan's birthday, that just went by! - that I don't know where to start.To get out of this negative loop, let me break the ice by sharing a couple of random pieces of information about my boys:

• Rajiv can recognize "The Goldfish" painting if he sees it and knows it is by Matisse. He also knows it is called "The Goldfish". But he always tells me it is a picture of a hat. Can you see why?
  
• I told Rajiv that I was born in Italy and so was he, whereas Rohan was born in Canada. Since then Rohan keeps saying "me too, meee tooo! I born Italy toooooo!"
  
• We tried to grow beans in a cup. We got two cups, one for Rohan and one for Rajiv, then we filled them with soil and put some beans inside. Rajiv's beans sprouted and grew really fast, so we transplanted them into a pot outside and they are surviving so far. Rohan's beans never sprouted. For a while I gained time telling him that they were hiding, but secretely I dug them up and they look just like when they were put in there, no change at all. Sigh..
  
• It's summer. Appu likes to wear big explorer's hats. Rohan tolerates the hat - sometimes - but what he really wants is sunglasses, because the sun hurts his eyes. Appu prefers to wear long sleeve shirts, even when it is so hot that most people would rather not wear anything at all. Rohan doesn't mind wearing shirts of whatever kind (but if they have a firetruck or a frog it is obviously much better), however he really doesn't like wearing pants or underwear or anything that might cover his lower bum. Mamma thought insists on the pants - at least outside.
  

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.