Connecting with nature or self?

"आई थांब, तुझ्यासाठी काहीतरी बनवतो मी".

Mom, let me make you a cool summer drink.

After returning from school today, he chirpily offered to do something for me. These moments are rare and don't see the light of day often, so before his mood changed, I happily told him to go ahead. 

 

From mid-June on, the serious business of learning, studies, and exams is over, and now it's just some or other activities at school where kids can relax and enjoy the time waiting for summer vacations. As an Indian parent, I can never get comfortable with T's attitude towards school and learning in general, but I am also learning as a parent, and I try to accept the German school system and try to see something good in it. Side-effects of learning the Bhagwad Geeta. 

Roots

My son, aged 11 years old has spent more than half of his life in Germany, and sometimes he acts more German than Indian which becomes a little harder for me to digest and accept. I sometimes feel he is getting away from my roots, my culture, my belief system, the Indian food ecosystem, the morals and values, and in general away from everything that is Indian for me. But there are times when there are pleasant surprises and there comes a small sign from above that assures me that it's not as bad as I assume or believe it to be. 

Blog Marathon - February 2023 - Day 27 - Happiness is within

My son had a week off from school last week. Schools in Germany have holidays every six weeks on average. To keep kids and teachers stress-free and enable them to take a break every now and then, I think this has been the norm for many years. My son spent last week meeting different friends. He has a friend from his old primary school, and he loves to hang out with him on every vacation. He often goes to his house, as his friend has a big house and a separate room for himself. They laugh a lot and talk a lot, and the friends' mom and I are grateful for their friendship and make every effort to meet up on a regular basis. So my son spent a night out with that friend, and then he planned to go swimming with two other friends from the primary school who stay close by.

Puzzle solving

It will be a month soon that the schools and offices and shops are closed owing to the Corona pandemic. Everyone has the same routine of getting up, having 3 meals a day, watching TV or surfing the internet, and sleeping. A few activities like baking, writing, reading, sketching, going for a short walk in the fresh air may be the activities for the few privileged ones. Still, for an average woman, it's just cooking, cleaning, and answering many questions. The man of the house is busy working on the home office model, and his help can hardly be anticipated in this new scenario.

Blog Marathon - Post 30 - Tingly

I have always loved soft toys.

I don't really remember when I began to collect them. But the first soft toy that I remember buying was a chubby doll that I had purchased from a store in Mumbai called Akbarallys. It was a departmental store where one could get everything under one roof ranging from food items to clothes. That was a new concept in India in the early '90s, and it was the most sought after departmental store in South Mumbai.  Then I went to Germany in 2002 and bought a stork from Strassburg, France, when we students had gone there on a trip. And then the collection began to grow by leaps and bounds. I had almost every animal in my collection.

Blog Marathon - Post 29 - The winter sets in

As mentioned in the previous post, the temperatures have suddenly plummeted to one digit from Sunday, the atmosphere suddenly feels very heavy and grey. The clock changed on Sunday, where now the time difference between India and Germany is 4.5 hours. Due to the shift in time, it gets dark at around 5-5:15 pm, and suddenly the evening seems too long and dark till it's really time to sleep.

Blog Marathon - Post 28 - Kid's workshop at VHS

Saturday was a bright sunny day. The sun was shining, the skies were blue. People were out enjoying and having ice-cream. But from Sunday, the weather suddenly changed. The sun vanished from the skies, and the temperatures plummeted. We spent the Sunday at home, not realizing how cold it had gotten outside.

Blog Marathon - Post 17- It's ok to get hurt and cry sometimes, dear sonny!

There exist certain things in our society, our community, our culture, which are expected of women and men. Women are the nurturers, soft, caretakers, emotional. Men are considered to be robust, breadwinners, and practical. Girls play with dolls, and kitchen sets at home, and boys play outside with cricket balls and cycles. Girls cry easily, and it's justified when they cry as they are considered to be weak. But when boys cry, what is usually told to them? "Don't cry like a girl," "Are you a girl to cry"? "Be a man," etc. Crying is often considered a sign of weakness. But I have different views on it, and I tried to explain it to T today during one such incident.

Blog Marathon - Post 13 - A Sunday well spent

Twice a year, in almost all cities and towns in Germany, the shops are open on Sunday. Though not the whole day, they are open from 1 pm to 6 pm, and today was that time of the year. T and I decided to make good use of the free time and the lovely weather outside. To our surprise, the traveling was free. T didn't have to pay for this ticket, and he was very excited to learn about it. The bus was full of passengers with their kids, and we reached the city center in no time. I met one friend and her son there, and we started our chit-chat and going to different shops on the demand of our sons.

The helping hand

It's the holiday season here in Karlsruhe. The schools closed on 26th July and will start on 11th September. You can see people scurrying with bags and kids on all the bus and tram and train stations. The weather is also thankfully better than the last two weeks where the heatwave had gripped Europe again. With no vacations planned, T and I are in Karlsruhe listening to other people's plans of going on summer vacations in admiration and awe.

Awwa - Part 2

When we were new in Karlsruhe and it was a long holiday over the Easter in March 2018, T had sprained his neck in sleep and we had to take him to the Emergency clinic in Karlsruhe as everything else was closed during holidays. And what exactly happened and how things happened was documented by me in the post "Awwa". Cut to July 2019. Awwa - Part 2 happened when we had least expected something like this. How?

Read on

Mother's Day!

Today is the second Sunday of May, celebrated worldwide as Mother's Day! A week in advance, the shops were all cashing on this occasion and were having special discounts and offer on special products deemed to be ideal for the Mother! That would just be a token for whatever a Mother does her whole life for her offspring because repaying her is not possible, at least in this life.

Blog Marathon - Post 23 - An eye for beauty

It was just an ordinary bright sunny day today but my little boy just made it extraordinary for me. The pains I am taking on him to inculcate certain good things show up sometimes and today was such a day.

When we were in Bangalore and when he was around 4 years old, we were sitting on the common road of our apartment complex and talking among friends. Between the B2 and B3 building, there shone the beautiful sun on the way towards sunset. It was a beautiful sight and T saw it first and told me to see it and exclaimed, how beautiful!! He was just 4 then. One of my friends heard it and fell in love with T. She was happy and surprised at the same time. How can such a small boy have an eye for beauty which the adults sometimes fail to notice, she exclaimed!

Blog Marathon - Post 21 - Mathematics and life

T is currently obsessed with numbers and Maths in his school. He always asks me what is this plus this. Usually, they are more than 2 digit numbers which he can't handle right now. But he wants to be the best like his dad in Mathematics and calculations. I try to tell him whatever I can calculate without help from a calculator, but as the 0 keeps on adding, I lose track and become disillusioned. Numbers have always left me confused and speechless. I don't understand inches, cm, meters, miles. I can't imagine how small or big is 1 meter or 10 inches when it comes to specifications. Anyways, I have stopped troubling myself over it. It hasn't made much difference in my life. But seeing T's obsession with numbers, I secretly wish he should do great in calculations in his life. That will help him a lot.

Blog Marathon - Post 17 - The Cats Cafe

A left for a business trip to the USA and T and I didn't know what to do on the weekend. Lucia, my friend from Buddhist Chanting offered to spend time with us and suggested that we go out somewhere with T. There are many good museums in Karlsruhe, especially for kids. So I checked with Lucia if "Naturkunde Museum" (State museum of natural history) would be a good place to take T. Check out their website here https://www.smnk.de/en/ She said it's a good place to take kids where there were different exhibitions of animals, birds, dinosaurs, insects. They are not real, but they are a specimen and it's a huge collection which kids and adults enjoy equally! Then she told T that after a visit to the museum, we will go to a Cafe which has cats! I was surprised. A Cats Cafe?! Really?!

Blog Marathon - Post 11 - The story of the lost winter cap!

I had written in an earlier post about a birthday party which T had attended in a movie theatre with his school friend from Class 2. That day he lost his winter cap in an electronic shop when he had gone there to check out PlayStation with his dad. I had thought he lost it in the theatre. I also went and checked there immediately on that day, but hadn't found it. Then after coming home, A told me that the cap was with him and he kept it in the electronics shop. I decided to go and check on Monday. I was very confident that I would get it. I had listened to stories where people had got their mobile phones after losing them in the bus. This was just an electronic shop.

Blog Marathon - Post 9 - The birthday party

T is an extremely outgoing kid. He makes friends wherever he goes. He had a lot of friends in Bangalore in the apartment, where we stayed earlier. He had friends in school and now when we shifted to Germany, he made many friends in the Kindergarten. They were mostly boys. He hardly spoke to girls after he turned 5, so he had a gang of boys in the Kindergarten and the trend followed in the school too. 3 weeks ago, he came home and asked me if he can attend a friend's birthday party and that boy was not in his class!

Indische Nudeln!!

As you all already know by now my son, T goes to a Kindergarten nearby and has a wonderful time there with his multi-ethnic friends and he looks forward to go there every morning. He has now caught a fancy to take a small tiffin box for snacks in the Kindergarten. Usually all the meal times are taken care over there, but recently his friend Alex started getting "Milchbrot" (Milk bread) with some sausages and honey to the Kindergarten and the fever of bringing snacks spread to other household too. T and I explored at least 2-3 supermarkets to search Milchbrot and finally found a packet of 8 small breads (very unhealthy, contains Maida and complex sounding chemicals which we have no idea of what it exactly is). I bought it for him because he was so looking forward to it but I managed to convince him that it can't be consumed on a daily basis for 2-3 weeks in a row. Thankfully he understood and then began a series of food surprises in his tiffin box.

Awwa

Last week on a Wednesday morning, around 5 am, T woke up from his sleep shouting "Awwa, awwa". Awwa is a replacement for the word "aai ga" or "hey ram" when one is especially hurt or in pain. All the kids and also sometimes grown ups utter this funny word "Awwa". Yes, so at 5 am it dawned upon us that T has a bad pain in his neck and he is not able to move it to his right side.

S S School

T turned 5 this April and we had already decided to enroll him in a big school from the UKG. I was little reluctant to do so as that would mean a whole change in the entire schedule and I was not sure how he would cope up with all that. But my happy go lucky son proved me wrong, yet again and proved yet again that I am blessed to have him.