Dare I Eat That!

"You are what you eat'! This adage couldn't be truer and I very recently witnessed a very compelling testimony of this. After my kids and I left to India, for about four weeks DH cut out rice, sugar and bread completely and stuck to a diet of different kids of vegetable and fruit salads most of the time. Salad dressings were used minimally and even cheese was not included. He has been eating oatmeal regularly for breakfast for the last couple of years. Barring a couple of work lunches, he followed this regimen quite strictly. He worked  most of the time and didn't exercise. At the end of the four weeks he got his blood work done and the results were stellar. His total cholesterol and all other parameters- LDL, HDL, VLDL which had been not so great in the past, were all now spectacular, I couldn't be happier. In particular triglycerides ( healthy range < 150) which had been almost 350 previously had dropped down to 105.
       The day after his blood draw, he went for a week long official trip to the east coast. During this time, most of his meals were with coworkers and he could not adhere to his diet rules of the past month. Soon after he traveled to India and ate to his heart's content for two weeks. Half the time we ate at restaurants and even home meals were mostly special occasion fare-  sweets, fried snacks and delicacies were the staple for 2 weeks. For two days we stayed at a resort where we had sumptuous buffet for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
As we were talking about how much we have been eating and what an assault we've dealt on our stomachs, DH kept exclaiming that his weight and cholesterol numbers may all have been sabotaged by this endless feasting. I replied saying , 'Why don't you just go get your blood work done again? If 4 weeks of careful eating can produce wonderful results, let's just see what 3 - 4 weeks of binge eating can bring!'. He initially dismissed it but actually went ahead. It was exactly one month since the previous time he got his tests done. As expected most numbers had moved south in varying amounts from the initial healthy figures. The triglycerides had shot up to a shocking 210 from 105. Without undermining the importance of physical activity, it was really eye popping to see the immediate effects that diet can have on one's health. That refined, processed food, sugary treats, white rice and white bread, oily salty snacks can wreak absolute havoc on one's system in such a short time, taking the triglyceride numbers up by a whooping 100 points was astounding to me. Whether good results can be gotten in as short a time as four weeks or not for most folks, worsening one's numbers is neither too hard nor does it take much time. Now I am scared as hell to go have my numbers tested!

(S)motherhood in motherland!

Long time, no blog!!!!
Phew! Just saw my previous post is dated Dec 2011.
Unlike ever before I am on an extended break in India with both kids who are enjoying their time with both sets of grandparents. With two kids it's hardly a vacation. I find myself only doing my everyday parenting duties and then some - heat rashes, some 90 odd minute lunch sessions, meltdowns and tantrums, nursing and pumping, poo-poo and pee-pee calls that come just as I finally sit down to take a bite, a clingy infant, a highly self-willed toddler - managing my kids all by myself sans my spouse is proving more difficult than I initially imagined. I have a lot of help from family members, but kids and their issues mostly get relegated to mom. A few family get-togethers and social gatherings have given me some change and the kids some fun. Managing kids at two different age levels round the clock is extremely challenging. The emphasis is on 'round the clock'.
       With great difficulty I put my little one to sleep and in less then fifteen minutes, a loud cry of  'bendekayi, urlikayi, carrot, tomato...' from an enthusiastic vegetable vendor has him sitting upright blinking. It starts with milk in the early morning and then flowers, tender coconuts, corn cobs, vegetables, fruits, greens etc go in a procession almost through mid-day. Then comes the ice cream truck ringing his bell more persistently and moving more slowly in front of houses with little kids like ours. Couriers and sales people selling everything from kashmiri carpets to household cleaning products join in. And the odd alms seeker with a ear splitting gong accompanied by a bull excites my daughter so much, she waits with a coin jumping excitedly while he's still four houses away.
These days every time we visit a relative's house, at a chosen moment DD will come and whisper with hot air into my ears ' I want to change into my paavadai and blouse, and perform a dance now. Come change me'.  This happens when she receives a gift of  pavadai or is already attired in traditional wear. And this comes when I am in the midst of a diaper change or consoling a wailing DS or some such difficult time. No amount of explaining with words and quick eye movements are of any help. Before I can sigh, she'll run into a bedroom in the host's house. I uneasily explain this sudden entertainment activity to the perplexed folks. The generous hosts are happy to play audience. DD also insists I carry out the duty of announcing aloud ' And now a dance performance by .....' .  At this, she comes sashaying out and breaks out into some funky combination of classical dance, indian film dance and some general monkeying around accompanied by gibberish that she sings herself. It's amusing and I sometimes find myself smiling even amidst my acute distress. I turn my head to see DS perched on my waist ready to put a small jasmine flower (that he has somehow plucked when pulling my hair) into his toothless mouth, I react swiftly by wresting it out of his fingers, he launches into an alaap adding music to his sister's performance!
       After all this is resolved, as I make some convo with the hostess in their kitchen or when I just emerge out of a bedroom after feeding or changing DS - I turn to see DD reaching for a delicate figurine in their living room/ carelessly handling a glass cup of juice/ reaching for a sofa cushion with fingers stained in chocolate mess!!!!!!!!!!  I am subjected to so much stress I need to get my blood pressure checked. Night sleep is punctuated by shrill nightmare cries and waking up for feeds. There's even an owl atop a high rise building close by that hoots at all odd times in the night.
    Just like how the japanese  keep a shark in their fishing tanks to keep the fish alive and fresh, these everyday challenges drive me to the brink of insanity and bring me back leaving no room for boredom to set in. Without sounding cheesy, I must say - when I see them fast asleep in disorderly positions with hardly any reasonable room for me to lie down, I do feel that time is fleeting and this phase will be over sooner than I'd like it to!  The harder I tighten the grip of my fist, the more the golden sands of time slip through the cracks!
Happy mother's day!

OMG!

Like headlines on a newspaper, the text on a snack pack caught my attention.

Trickery and deception happen everywhere, it seems! Thanks to Pistachios for reporting the story of 'Chili Con Lemon'!

DeeDee moments

On our drive to school this morning, as my daughter and I were talking, somehow the topic of 'crying wolf' came up. I found myself narrating to her the anecdote behind it - how the shepherd boy cried wolf and fooled the villagers who rushed to his rescue;  and how finally when the wolf really attacked him, no one came to help him....
Me : "So, what do you understand from this?"
DD : " That he should not have shouted 'wolf wolf' so many times, the wolf heard him and came to bite him; If he had not called out, the wolf would not have come."
I had one of those comic book moments with a crazy spiral and a bunch of yellow stars drawn over my head!

to-wel or not to .........

It's our first winter in our new home i.e. the 50 yr old house that we have newly made our home. It's brrrrrr..... cold and everything gets cold by evening- the couch, the countertops, the carpet. The tile kitchen floor has converted my mom to someone who wears indoor footwear, which she had resisted all along. Amidst all this, my dad's biggest concern is over towels. Yep! bath towels that don't feel dry and crisp but are damp and cold to the touch bother him to no end. So he's taken it upon himself to put them out to dry on the clothesline in our backyard.  As soon as my mother saw the backyard in this house, she exclaimed with relief, 'Ah, I can now hang my sarees out to dry and don't have to worry about detangling the twisted knotted heap that they become in the dryer'. So we had a clothesline tied for my mother to use. But I didn't realize it'd get used this much, that too by my dad. He's confounded over how towels that are machine washed and dried, that come out hot and fresh and then get folded and put away get cold and somewhat limp. He constantly fusses over their semi-dry state, and hangs them out to dry in nature. Every couple of hours he moves them over on the line to accommodate the shifting sunlight.  Yes this is winter in glorious California and we do get some sunny days. But the sun is just there, the wind is so chilly, there's hardly any warmth even in direct sunlight. So, after a few hours outside, the towels come back feeling pretty chilly and that irks my dad again. Between his morning and late afternoon walks, between the times he spends with some friends he's made here, going up to the community centre or saying his prayers, he can mostly be seen fussing over his towels.
   Many times when we are looking for my dad to join us for lunch,and he is not to be seen, My mother jokes' He must have gone in search of Surya Bhagavan( Sun God)' or ' I saw him last near the fence moving the towels to the far end, by now he must be in the neighbor's yard '. I laugh very hard imagining my neighbor's amazement if he ever caught my dad in his backyard or picturing my dad enthusiastically hanging clothes on a line right next to a puzzled Mr.Golden Sun - as if from a colorful page out of a children's story book.  Thank God for the earth's rotation, he gets to sleep while he loans the sun to the remaining half of the globe.  If those towels ever came to life, they'd give him a hug for all the fussing and pampering.

      In the beginning this obsession with drying towels annoyed me. Later I started finding it very funny. But in a month from now when my parents will travel back home, that empty clothesline will make me very sad, I'll miss you dad - But I'll be glad to realize you , your towels and the Sun God will all be together.

Nothing in particular-isms

Facebook's autocomplete feature on proper nouns is horrendous, especially on non-western names. I don't know whether it's the mobile app that's acting up. A relative of mine, a few years younger than I, sent me a message to get in touch. I responded to her asking her to call me by my first name rather than a respectful 'akka' ( big sister). After a couple of days when I read her reply I was kind of surprised why she still stuck to calling me akka. And then when my eyes proceeded down to my original message, I was befuddled to read ' Please, why akka, you can call me Sukarno' ! WTH! Just after I had typed the first two letters of my name, the FB angels decided to take over and do their thing! I winced in pain imagining what she might have thought of me after reading this!!!!!

This happened a few months ago. DD exclaimed enthusiastically as I took out her lunch box from her lunch bag, " Amma, I can read my name on my lunch box !" .
I went " Really ?", she responded " yeah, see- P-Y-R-E-X ". Sitting right above those letters is a label spelling out the name we so lovingly gave her!

May be I am the one who's late to this party, but did you know what a Qwerty is? I stumbled upon 'Qwerty keyboard' when I was reading the features list of a mobile phone. Qwerty is the design of a standard keyboard of a typewriter or computer as we are all used to. It comes from the first six letters from left to right on the top row : Q,W,E,R,T,Y!

The co-incidence story

*** looks long but will take a max of 5 mins to read in entirety ***

Yesterday,  as I sat down to fold 3 loads of laundry, I turned on the TV. DD, DH and parents left for a day at an amusement park and I had just put my son down for a nap. Browsing through the channels I found  the Jim Carrey starrer 'Bruce Almighty' dubbed in tamil on sun TV. I normally never watch such stuff, but yesterday I was very tickled to catch Jim Carrey shout 'Kadavule', 'Poda loose paiyya' , Jennifer aniston go ' Enna aachu ungalukku?', Morgan Freeman playing God say 'Pinne kaanaam' ( see you later in malayalam) - I figured the original version must have had him say 'Hasta la vista or Ciao'.
In this film  the character of Jim Carrey, Bruce is disgruntled, unhappy and blames God for his lacklustre career, for painstakingly having to eke his way out without immediate success and for the quick growth of his clever coworkers. Finally God decides he's had it with this man's complaints and decides to contact him through his pager. Bruce's pager beeps with the number 555 0123. What struck me was the co-incidence with something that happened many years ago - for a second I relived the same 'chill down the spine' feeling.
It was during my  II P.U. public exams;  The warning bell had just sounded at 12:15 pm  to remind us that we had only 15 minutes left of our 3 hr exam, to turn in our mathematics exam answer sheets.  I always stay writing till the very end of my every exam - I am very wordy in my answers, never had success with precis writing and I also cannot write very fast . Also my nervousness always made me check and recheck my answers and I could never walk away cool and confident, turning the answer sheet in before time. This time was no different. Just after the warning bell, as is customary, our invigilator told us to tie in all our answer sheets, check our registration numbers were entered right and be ready to hand them over. I did the needful and kept reviewing my answers as one by one most folks turned in their answer sheets and exited.  The final bell went off at 12:30 and the examiner said in a clear but strict voice - " Keep your answer sheets on your desk and leave the room" as she collated the ones on her table in the front of the room. I stood up but still kept my head buried in my answer papers. The examiner said a bit agitated to me, " Did you not hear me, your time's up, leave the room".  It struck me as a bit too rude (even though I realize now that the mistake was mine), I packed up my geometry box with my compass, protractor, scale, pens etc.,  clamped my question paper to my clip board ( which we referred to as exam pad) and walked out. At that point only my very good friend and I were present there and we started to discuss the paper animatedly right outside the open doors of the exam hall, as the examiner went from desk to desk collecting answer sheets. After about 5 minutes, the examiner turned toward us and asked me " who was sitting in front of you?", I replied " No one ma'am". She asked " Then whose number is 555 123?", I replied " Mine, ma'am" with growing anxiety in both our voices. She shot "Where is your answer sheet?". Panicked I quickly checked my exam pad- I lifted the question paper to find my entire answer sheet sitting clamped beneath it. The examiner went " How can you be so careless?" as she took the pile from me. She told me that since I was in front of her very eyes the whole time and she believed it was a dangerously foolish inadvertent mistake, she accepted my answer papers a full ten minutes after the time limit. A little hurried and a little miffed I had forgotten to leave my answer sheets on the desk before leaving.
Had I walked with it down the corridor, down those flights of stairs, down the long drive way to the bus stop discussing with my friend, there would have been no way she would have accepted my papers.  I would've made a nice newspaper column of someone who studied for an exam, solved trigonometry and calculus problems, drew geometry figures and crunched logarithmic tables for 3 hours and brought her neatly stacked answer papers home with her to a wonderful 'failed' result. I'd have lost a year, turned into a psychological wreck - God knows what! I faltered at the top of a steep cliff and managed to fall on the safer side. All three of us present there - myself, my friend and that examiner were shaken at the enormity of what might have happened. Never before had my buddy and I ever stayed back right in front of the hall talking about our paper.
Almost 20 years later, I experienced the same stoppage of breath, lump in my throat, knot in my stomach for a few seconds as I travelled with no speed limits down memory lane. After I regained my breath I couldn't help but think how diametrically opposite this was to the examination scene in the movie 3 Idiots - in which an unco-
operative examiner refuses to take the answer sheets from 3 students who request for a few minutes extra time since they started the exam late due to an emergency. The students then trick the examiner and mix up their papers with the rest of the lot on the examiner's desk and run away.
 The number 555 123 is something I can never forget. Whether the Almighty did anything for Bruce or not, he surely saved me from becoming a Bruise Alrighty! :-)