Thursday, October 27, 2011

A wonderful Diwali, despite the flu that went around

Most of Tuesday was spent in clearing and cleaning. Anjali earned herself a ice cream treat coupon for good behavior. The girls helped me take apart the fairy garden that was starting to look like a swamp and cleaned all the seashells with soap and water. We did reading and were just going outside to put a kolam when the first sparklers whistled.

I heard them, faint, and decided not to comment. Anjali heard them, despite the racket in the house and wanted to go downstairs to play. We drew kolams in front of the apartment and went downstairs with a packet of sparklers. There were a few other children who had brought their first sparklers for playing.

We wound up the play fairly early as I was encouraging the kids to be up early. Anjali got up at 5.30. The surprising bit was that so did Sophia, despite not sleeping till close to midnight and not letting me sleep till close to midnight by asking me wierd questions like

"Why you are sleeping and daddy is not sleeping mummy? Why mummy? tell tell tell"

We were downstairs before dawn to light sparklers - very reminiscent of India. Totally unremiscent of India though was that we were the only ones in the quiet playground. I thought it was really beautiful, just us, the quiet and the sparklers. Dawn was just breaking when we came back up for breakfast before going to the temple. That too was done early and  before most of the crowds.

We went to patti's house for breakfast/ lunch well, pretty much to spend the day. And Vishnu and Dheeraj had both come for lunch.

After lunch Anjali wanted to redeem her icecream coupon bust Sophia wanted to stay and play with Dheeraj. I told Anjali later that it was my favorite part of the day, sitting outside udders - where the icecream is actually good, as opposed to frolick where they sell something totally weird. Anjali wanted strawberry icecream, but later chose vanilla with honeycomb, since the udders strawberry icecream was sour - more points to the shop. I got coffee and we sat there, two girls people watching.

The next part of the day was getting Sophia to sleep -something that the whole house tried and miserably failed in. Anjali napped and Sophia sat/ talked / jumped to a point where even Dheeraj (who has an advanced diploma in monkey business) appealed to us to take her away so that he could nap. The girl, on the other hand, bounced, fell, jumped and when asked said

"I had a good nap mummy!"

"Which part of you had a good nap?', I asked

"My whole body", she replied

"Did you mouth nap?", I asked her, as her mouth had shown no signs of napping.

She had dinner in patti's house and crashed on her way home.

After putting Sophia in bed, and husband watching over her, Anjali (who didnt trust us much and who was waiting in the lift lobby without taking off her shoes) and I took most of the sparklers downstairs where about 50 kids were popping crackers, lighting sparklers and making a general bit of mayhem.

We stayed till around 9.30 before returning home and in the dim light before bedtime, Anjali wrote out her sounds of her own accord. And then we went to bed

And I got hit by a throat ache and running nose so bad that I couldnt believe that it existed.  Probably caught the flu from the sleepless kid.


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