The best gift i could give them..

is themselves! What a company and what a sheer delight it is to see them play among themselves. I have often just sat there beside them, watching them play games of make believe, assuming characters and enacting their favorite stories, with a never ending chatter and watching baby's innocent face reflect the moods of her brothers and wondered at the beauty of watching her pick up roles as though she was a year older and silently join her brothers in all their games......and sent a silent prayer of thank you to whoever it is that made me blessed enough to watch the three play and felt that this is the biggest gift i could ever give them...company for life.

They have never needed any one else to play with. They make friends easily, but don't really need them as yet, they are always supporting each other the moment one of them is hurt by an outsider, they make houses and sleep inside it and name them 'kachi,kautu and baby house', they scold me when i reprimand another - baby even cries if one of her brothers are hurt, they have enough numbers to play ring -a roses on their own, they eat competing with each other and even sleep all cuddled up in their house on some days. They are now an entity and baby is no longer a baby to me. She is a part of THEM. I dread the day when the boys will go to school leaving her behind, for she's never been without them for a long period of time. Whatever the future holds, let it at least hold that these three remain together and with the rapport that makes them play for hours on end without a single call for help. This is the silent prayer that i send up everyday and the silent gift that was given to me over the last 3 years.

Amma...your food is yummy!

They say this for a few of their favorite food...Well, like almost everyother kid, they gobble up what they like and hmmm..hawww over the others! So, i try my level best to cook up something their varied taste buds will like. Its better now, since all of them kindof like similar stuff, but a year back, kachi, kautu and baby had their own tastes that were mutually exclusive!! A mothers nightmare!
Here are some stuff they love as of today

1. Pasta with white sauce (I sometimes grate carrots or potatoes, or add finely sliced tomatoes, or at times, put in a vegetable mix to make the white sauce healthier)
2. Birpulao - kachi was asking for this again yesterday! This is a mixture of biryani and pulao...ie, Biriyani without the spices and pulao with briyani base!)
3. Microwaved french fries - which are in reality just potato pieces finely cut and microwaved with butter!
4. chapathi and subzi- as long as the subzi has a tomato base and is non spicy
5. Potato bhajji - deep fried potato with besan coating. They love this, and consume almost half a bottle of tomato sauce.
6. Muesli - yeah..from when did kids start liking my non sugar fat free muesli?? Well, they seem to love it and would have it any time of the day!
7. Brown rice - finely cooked, they like eating it plain, with just ghee and salt. No side dishes allowed.

And i get a praise for any of these, even if it is the muesli that I told them the shop uncle makes! If they don't like something, its just a gentle shake of the head. So, i'll just bask in their praises till they grow up enough to tell me ...mummy, this food s**ks!!

Winds of change

have swept through my land...we had planned a relocation to UK for a while and now its all falling in place!! Karthik has already left and joined work in Cambridge and we hope to get the visa for me and the kids by december mid...Five years and growing up three kids in Bangalore later, we wound up our house and bid goodbye to friends and the city last thursday. In the two weeks after we got his visa, we visited all the favorite hangout places in Bangalore, (they turned out to be mostly hotels!!) brindavan, woodys, krishna cafe, little italy, ramanas and then chilled out in RMZ infinity where we must have spent atleast half our parent life chasing the kids around the fountain and watching them dive and jump from the small inclines, given them dripping icecreams from MacDs and delved into our subs. We hosted all our friends one saturday with almost 10 hours of rigorous Poker (Ah..I was winning till the dinner break, and wosh....lost all my money after that!). We went for dinner to a friends place almost every day and treated others on the rest. We went shopping in the morning, afternoon and night and bought a lot of stuff which made us feel like the newly weds. Wardrobes, cloths, utensils, vaccum cleaner, mixie, grinder..and so on...we are discarding most of our old stuff here and getting new ones...for a new beginning, not that we will not miss the old one, just that a change is always refreshing! Kids are missing their dad and wake up in the middle of the night crying. He came on skype yesterday and had to see Kautu weeping his heart out for him. Krithika and Kachu were fine, they chatted with their dad and kept asking him when he will be applying visa for them!! Now begins our next target, find a good house next to a good school, close to grocery and office and within our budget!! Hah..quite a lot of conditions, huh? Anyway, one thing I am sure of, the house should be isolated enough to give us and the kids the freedom to yell our hearts out!!

Now, thats the update for now, quite a big one, isn't it?