This Weekend...

- Tara buttoned and unbuttoned my shirt perfectly, albeit a tad slowly. I had no idea she could do buttons - she duly informed me that she's done it at school. Wow.
- She learnt about where food comes from (other than from 'the market') by playing Farmville, a Facebook application/game thingy, with her dad. She decided where the cherry trees went, wanted the farmer to be a girl, and learnt that we have to wait for things to grow. 'Two hours?', she asked increduously when told that's how long it would take for the strawberries to grow. A few hours later she asked to log on so she could check if the strawberries had come. (We tried to use this opportunity to make a point and talk about how difficult it is to grow food, and therefore we shouldnt waste it, but it didnt really work as well as we had hoped.)
She sang 'The farmer plants the seed...' to complete this exercise of virtual farming, which led Papa to comment observantly that there was no situation for which she did not have a song.
While buying animals for the farm, she asked 'What do we get from a pig?'. (Her father replied, 'meat' but moved on to other issues quickly before the gory details were asked for.)Before this, when informed that 'Cows give us milk' she rolled her eyes exasperatedly and said impatiently 'I KNOW cows give milk.'
- She KNOWS a lot of things. I think its this new school she's at (it follows the Montessori system of primary education) where they play - oh, sorry, 'work' :) - with binomial cubes (!!), know what funnels are, and call a square a square, and a cube, well, a cube.
- She broke down most of the words into its phonetic components and pointed out which letter it started with as well as a host of other words which started with a similar sound. Last weekend she shocked me by reading lists of three-letter words. Really. She can read.
-All this indicates that she is seriously stepping over some invisible line, slipping out of dependency, coming into her own, you know... Growing Up.

The Three Of Us

I thought it would only be fair to the new baby - Tara's sister/brother - scheduled to arrive today with a sort-of planned C-section this evening - to put in a post on the eve of her/his arrival!

From tomorrow that organism called 'the three of us' will change in form, and I can only hope will metamorphose into something even more fun and exciting (and no doubt, exhausting) as it becomes a new creature - 'the four of us'. I have a faint recollection of when it was 'the two of us' but somehow I can't imagine it anymore, with 'the three of us' having taken over so firmly and completely! :)

Three

Clearly blogging and child rearing along with the business of life itself are difficult to simultaneously sustain! It has been six months since my last post and its being increasingly tough to maintain track of Tara's growing-up business. I suppose photos will have to suffice for now until the writing juices are stirred within me and I can get myself to blog about some of the thoughts in my head (you know, the usual parent-of-3-year-old nigglings, things like the economy of birthday parties, choosing the 'right' school, allopathic medication, waiting at pediatricians clinics, coughs that just won't go AWAY, the art/craft/disaster of 'disciplining' them, the girl/boy thing, and so on).
Till then photo-documentation will have to suffice! So here she is, waiting for her birthday party to start, in a lovely dress (thanks to Hitesh and Ruchi) and pig tails that took a lot of patience for her to sit through. She turned THREE in February, and gosh doesn't she look quite the little lady?