Circle Time - 3 Cs

Weekend is a time to relax and catch up with family who you seem to just pass by on your way out! Bye Honey, getting late again, see you later! Almost every preschool has a segment called "Circle Time" where every child gets an opportunity to share anything he feels like. I think we should start something like that at home to catch up!!
Whenever my preschooler feels she has done something fun, important or when she has earned lots of praises from us, she says she is gonna share it with Ms.E at circle time. She looks forward to it and almost everyday has something to blab about. The days when she is home with me, we don't do circle time for obvious reason of lack of enough people to make a circle!! But we do time bound activities and these days we are using crayons a lot. After being able to write the letters on the driveway she got really interested in finding more about them. And the girl just went on and on an on.

Circle it, color it...Letter A


Circle it, color it...Letter B



Circle it, color it...Letter C



Circle it, color it...Letter D



Circle it, color it...Letter E



Circle it!!



Color it!!



COMPLETED!!

Blink !

The book by Malcolm Gladwell that is, not your eyes honey!
Dear Husband is reading a book, yes he is becoming a reader it seems, thanks to Kindle and one of the features we really like is before buying a book, you can get a free sample of pages from the book and then decide if you want to purchase it or ignore it! Yesterday, we got a sample of Blink , the power of thinking without thinking. the author talks about the decisions we make in a snap with the current state of mind we are, which could be either Positive sentiment override or negative sentiment override. When in former, we tend to be more accommodating while being in the latter we attack, grrrr! So we were discussing the sample that hubby dear read who usually is in positive sentiment and it turned out that the discussion became a debate and both the parties involved couldn't override anything. After exhausting each other's sentiments, we called it a Sunday and went for shopping. And I think the author should have included this in the book that shopping is always a PSO, that is , Positive Sentiment Override!! Works for me, Perfect Shopping, override or not.

Whats your PSO?

The Launch Pad

Last week weather Gods were just being overly nice to us. It just doesn't happen to people living in this part of the country. We get showered with non stop rain, we get buried in snow, we are slathered with humidity but a perfect summer day is hard to come by. We got a few last week and that makes me think if we have already exhausted the yearly quota. So we took full advantage and tried to do everything outside, besides the things people don't want to see us doing outside.
A chalk comes handy to spend time outside with a preschooler and the driveway was the launching pad of my scholar. Human mind is so amazing, my part to get her started was to give the chalk box! She started by randomly drawing on the driveway


When I asked what are you making, she said I don't know mamma, lets see what it comes out to be!! Talk about an open mind, there is no dearth here! And then she asked me if I can help her make letters and we decided to give it a try on our launch pad.

Trying to write letter E


And here's the masterpiece!


Hey Mamma, what a big easle we have now I love it,:-). I love it too honey!

Unaccustomed?

I am not the kind of person who likes to stare at a screen and still get the reading pleasure. I don't count the things I read online as reading, I call it web surfing coz that's the only kind of surfing I can do in this lifetime. Reading an e-book, I am not gonna do that. I am never going to get that pleasure out of this Kindle thing , the pleasure that my books give. I need paper and not another screen. But here I am on my second day on Kindle and I am already a convert. I was in the camp of people who thought its over hyped and I am not one of its customers. But having a techie husband makes you try things that you otherwise wouldn't ever and many a times he has to accept "what was he thinking" but this was not those times. Technology got me once again!
Oh by the way, to start reading my first book, The Space Between US on it, I finished Unaccustomed Earth in one night flat. And who was that attending my reading's funeral ??

What are you bragging about today?

Kindle your passion

So people who know me know my love for reading and my husband knows it way too well. He used to gift me books of 400 pages or so and would write inside "Hoping to keep you entertained for a while" but then at the end of three or so days I would say I have nothing to read :-). All done with that one? yes, all done with that one.Thats our usual conversation around my reading habit. But lately, I am getting too engrossed in "Being a mom" role and all I am doing is planning activities for our preschooler or doing those activities with her. So Husband dear asked me few nights back how come he doesn't see me reading much these days.You used o read so much , you love books so much, I love it that you read but now it ain't happening much. I read! Like what? Parenting magazine and ummmm I have a book half way through, Unaccustomed Earth and yes it is a great book but I am not getting around it.
So anyways darling, my birthday is coming up and I was thinking , and I am thinking ok by bringing up my love of books he was trying to make a case for something that he wants me to gift him on his birthday. Ok mister, I got ya. Spill it. What is it that you want, I would have given it even if you didn't embarrass me by telling that my reading id dying!!Hunh, so much for love these days!

Kindle, I want Kindle on my birthday. Its a cool new electronic reading device by Amazon. Now I understand that every guy out there loves electronics the way girls love handbags. They want the best and the latest. But I am preplexed here becuase he doesn't even read paper so why is this on his wishlist? Hey, you don't read, incase you missed that part! I am not gifting you a $400 electronic thingy just to brag about! Now see there comes the love that I could not see. No, I want it for you to have it on my birthday!!!! It would give me so much pleasure that my wifey is using the latest technology all the while "kindling" her passion of reading. Its techinically for me coz I want latest tech in my house but you will use it coz you are a reader. Serves both of us.

I should have said no coz its his birthday and he should gt a present but I should give my husband what he asks for atleast on his birthday, call it greed justfied and we ordered it and its arriving today. Oh by the way, his birthday is still two months away!!

I love to be loved so much!!

Any of you out there is a Kindle User?

I am bloated today

Oh yes, bloated as in like a big fat balloon but I am not looking for a remedy. Bloating makes me happy, very happy coz I am bloated with pride. Past saturday, I was in the New England Aquarium with Saumya. We cruised our way through the sharks, sea urchins, blue frogs, electric eels. By the way, this aquarium happens to house the biggest turtles I have ever seen, they are called Sea Turtles. Like a good , ifnormation sharing guide, I was telling my 3 and a half year old daughter that they are called "Sea Turtles", now keeping in mind her age and the "why" phase she is going through, I was expecting the questions she came up. "why are they "See Turtles"?" Ahem.....but before I say because they live in the sea , she said oh because we can SEE them!! Well after spending 2 hours walking through the dark giant rooms I was not in the mood to explain a difference of SEA and SEE right then. So like a polite audiance I soaked in the joke and laughed and laughed my way out the aquarium :-)
Now we were in the store trying to find something nice. We picked up a puzzle with a minimum age of 5 coz I didn't find anything else which was meaningful to spend $15 on.
Saumya was very excited about the puzzle and wanted to do it the moment we reached back home. We were all so exhausted and were trying to look for excuses but hey a moment later I heard her "Mamma I got it, I am already doing it" !!!!! Hello its a puzzle for a kid who is more then 5 years old and you are 3 and a half. I went to watch her and then I just kept on watching the progress.
Its a mosaic puzzle with very tiny faom squares cut in the squares. They need to be pasted on a picture which has squares on it and the faom colors are number coded. Squares with number one will have red pieces, number 2 orange, 3 yellow, 4 blue, 5 green, 6 purple and 7 black. No one explained her all this. She opened the box, figured all the pieces and turned the box a few time which had the color chart and got going!





The workstation.




Very Busy




Fish, one part done. She spent one whole Sunday doing this. Love the dedication. It still needed the water part around the fish but it was time for bed.



Monday morning, first thing after the bath. The fish needs water or it will die :-)

Proud Girl!!

Oh My, Its a Duck!!

This post is coming after a long break! We were in our homeland for a month and had the best time with family. Saumya grew up a lot there. Of course she is growing up anywhere she is but being surrounded by extended family for days at length made her feel important all the while going through a learning roller coaster.

These days she is showing interest in drawing. with no plan on what to make, she picks up a crayon and goes on making and commenting on the go "Hunh, oh it needs eyes, oh my how will it walk without legs let me give you legs, they will be orange, nice and bright, hey I made a duck"!!!!

We are lovers!

Its not a pretty sight when a 3 year old is coping with an earache and her body is blazing hot at 102.6 . It calls for a day off from preschool and certainly day off from work! Last afternoon I was helping my daughter go through the rough phase of terrible ear infection along with other parts of the package deal a.k.a runny nose, high fever and watery eyes. And all this turns an otherwise loveable adorable darling child into the most grumpy one. Well, since she was unable to sleep, I was lying with her in my bed and was kind of trying to distract her from the illness. I kept on talking about her bad she must be feeling, how yucky is nose right now, how angry she must be getting when her ear hurts, I just went on and on and on. And my daughter just grabbed my cheek with both her blazing hot feverish hands and gave me the best kiss ever and said, " Mamma, don't worry, I am so much better now".

All her mamma did was acknowledge what she was going through, gave words to her pain and it became the best medicine. Well I smiled back and gave her a kiss and then she went on to give me tight hug and said, "Mamma we are lovers"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I was amazed at the choice of words and asked her to elaborate. I mean I said, " Really you feel like that?" and she said , "yeah, you love me so much that it makes me feel better all the time and I love you a lot too(with a stress of "oooo":-)), so we are lovers you see". I said you bet we are lovers!