Reminiscence – This is probably one of my most favourite words.

munnum idhu pole pudhu anubhavam
kanden ena sollum padi ninaivillai
innum edhirkaalatthilum vazhi illai maravene

Every time I sing/listen to those lovely lines from the song Rasali, I only love them even more! What beautiful words to describe those cherishable moments of life. Those reminiscence-worthy moments of life!

At this juncture, I also remember one of my favourite sayings – ‘Life is not measured by the number of breaths you take, but by the number of moments that take your breath away!’ It’s only in our hands on how we carve out every moment of our life to be.

Last week, there was this night when good, deep sleep was eluding me for quite a while. When I finally managed to doze off, the little one who was down with fever was wide awake and by the time he fell asleep again, the daughter was awake complaining of leg pain. The rest of the night had them alternately waking up and during those quiet moments of the night, I was deeply pondering about how I am loving this crazy schedule that my life is filled with.

I don’t complain about what mundane routine that I am having, since there’s nothing mundane about it except for the dishwashing chore, talking about which, as I already wrote here, with either of my kids giving me company as I wash the vessels, I am not finding that too as boring as I usually do.

Believe me when I tell you that almost every single day passes by very quickly. The mazhalai talks of the son, the conversations with my daughter, a naughty act or two, running sprees on the road (I am on a run all the time with my little one), outdoor play times, the sibling bonding and fighting spells, book reading sessions, saraLi varisai singing, unwinding with ARR’s songs on YouTube, pausing to listen to a bird’s call or talking in hushed-up voices as my children and I try to observe a bird from up-close, catching up with an episode or two of Peppa Pig with the kids (I personally like the happy family filled with loads of laughter portrayed by Peppa and her family) making dishes with loads of vegetables on a daily basis, keeping the little one busy with all his colourful mini cars and catching with the day’s news, working on my daughter’s spellings and vocabulary which I immensely enjoy doing since I have been a lover of words and spellings ever since my teens, scribbling and writing A to Z with my little one – the days are full with all the activities that happens at every home with kids.

Even what is perceived as a routine drop to and pick-up from school has nothing routine about it with my little one adding all sorts of entertainment to it by running off to the play area and sitting atop the slide refusing to budge one bit or removing his shoes, throwing it and running off in exactly the opposite direction, all the while getting my daughter and me all tensed out or all confused depending on the day’s mood.

Yes, there are days when I navigate through colourful toys of different sizes (did I tell you I have had enough of Kinder Joy toys??) scattered all over the house and the books and papers lying everywhere, muttering an irritated word or two (or quite a few too!) asking my kids to help me get things organized. But, with no lack of adventure and all sorts of fun, laughter and naughtiness, it is in the chaos that I thrive.

It has been a week since all routine got tossed down the drain with the little one being down with fever and both him and I having a very disturbed and relatively less amount of sleep. Just when I thought he has almost recovered, my daughter complained of feeling feverish today. I lectured her on and on about how she should lie down quietly and make an effort to sleep early at least today. She finally did fall asleep earlier than usual and a happy-and-relieved me got up and called my mother.

Now what do you think I heard my mother tell me?? 🙂 Just what I had told my daughter repeatedly! 🙂

This month saw me having a pretty smooth routine with the school, play and sleep schedule of my children having gotten settled into kind of a pattern.

It’s only the rushed morning routine when we leave for the school that requires a lot of change from my side.
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It’s one of those rare mornings when my little one is still asleep even though it’s already 7 am. He’s an early riser unlike me. I woke up to pacify him when he was talking something out loud from his dreams. Taking in the pitch dark surrounding, I thought it was sometime in the middle of the night. A glance at the time showed that it was 6 35 am!

Did I tell you that Singapore starts getting its first rays of light only at around 6 45? And now that the sunny, sweaty weather of Singapore is back, the evenings start bidding adieu to the sunlight only after 7?
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13:45 on a Saturday afternoon. A play area nestled among 5 HDB (Housing Development Board) apartment blocks and another 10 more blocks 2-5 minutes walk away. Each block has anywhere between 12-16 stories and each storey has more than 10 apartments. Yet you don’t find even a single child playing in the play area. Considering the number of apartments, even on other days and at other times, only a few children come out to play. Not all would have gone to full day childcare or gone out somewhere. I really wonder what is it that the kids are doing all day at home on a holiday. Anything interesting other than screen time??

I have been struggling to reduce my weight for almost three years now. Walking 10K steps a day hasn’t really helped so far. Looks like it will give proper result only if I walk those steps at a stretch, which isn’t a possibility.

Skipping chocolates, ice creams and fried/oily foods completely too didn’t help.

Going in for a low-carb diet and skipping rice completely seems to be the new mantra, but I just love my sambhar/rasam/curd rice so much to completely let go of it.

What will definitely help is a good workout on a daily basis which I am not at all doing.

I fondly remember those breaks from work when my friends and I used to go to the weighing machine in office, check our weights, grumble over it and then, later, indulge in a samosa or Lays or Cafe Coffee Day’s Devil’s Own or a Caramel-flavoured (I forgot the exact name!) ice cream from Baskin & Robins. 😉 That was a decade back! How old do I feel!

From sometime in 2007, I started going for long walks. But it wasn’t until 2009 when I joined a Yoga class that I got any real workout done. Just 6 months of going to a class regularly and later continuing to doing it on my own for the next four years, albeit only on and off, did help me till then. After that, every time I started off afresh and did it for a few days or a couple of weeks at a stretch, something or the other caused me to take a break after which I never immediately resumed when I could.

Yoga gave my body a flexibility which, thankfully, still remains. Surya Namaskaram has always been my favourite.

Yesterday evening, just when my daughter and I were talking about the exercises that I should be doing, in walked my husband who started talking about starting off with a workout plan. And, thus, I started off with my exercises yet again yesterday. I hope to keep it going for at least a few months. This time, at least, I should.

That’s what I have been telling myself for quite a while now and keep planning to write it here too. But, like the classic habit of several software folks who click on ‘Refresh’ in their desktops when their system gets hanged or when they don’t know how to proceed further in their work, all the while knowing fully well that nothing will happen because of that ‘Refresh’, my ‘Refresh’ goal too remained like that dummy ‘Refresh’.

As was evident from my meager blogging here, last month didn’t see me being fully relaxed or practising mindfulness or keeping my tiredness or irritation under control or even keeping my tongue fully in control during those stressful moments. Blame it on the weather or the cold and cough or whatever, I saw myself losing control over improving my patience level that I had been working on with full earnest for the best part of 2017. Now, with the sun back in full force, my cold and throat problems having reduced a lot and me working on improving my patience levels again – be it the patience that I show to myself or to others or to a situation, I felt that the time has come to finally hit that refresh mode.

Yes the clock says 11:49 PM and I should definitely be in deep sleep dreaming away. But don’t you know those days when you feel so tired, be it physically or mentally or emotionally, and all you want to do is to take the time out and relax? Yes, today or rather the last few days have been those kind of days.

If there was one thing that I was really happy about last year, it was the revival of this blog. This year, I haven’t been able to write anything here so far because of all that I wrote in my previous two posts. So, in a bid to relax and also to let out all those trivialities of life that one lets bother oneself, here I go conversing with you just like I would with any person close to my heart.

The house remained in a state of disarray of sorts till the last few days since my priority was to do the basic cooking and dish washing and then take rest and keep my children engaged with activities other than watching TV whenever possible.

As I visited the doctor for my face pain, the first question that the receptionist asked was if I am working. If I had answered yes, I would have been given a medical certificate advising rest. In the foul mood that this cold and pain had put me in, I wanted to ask her if there was someway housewives/homemakers/SAHMs too could get vacation when they are not well. But I didn’t.

While I have been trying my best to get the house dusted and cleaned up, I feel, yet again, that I should somehow find a way to reduce the amount of things we have. Be it toys or dress or books. The lesser the things that we have, the easier to maintain, isn’t it? But, while the realist in me knows that there is no way I can ever embrace minimalism fully, I think it’s time to at least start thinking about it every time we add one more thing to the house. It doesn’t matter even if it is only something as simple as a whole lot of plastic shopping bags.

But, coming back to the main point, I have still not been able to fully dust the windows, deep-clean and scrub the bathrooms and do a thousand other things like that and that is really getting on my nerves.

Then there’s my little one and his naughtiness. As he happily pours a litre full of milk one day, a 100 ml of orange juice the other day, half a cup of tea today and so on, I realize that I have to just wait for him to outgrow these naughty acts and no tactic or approach of mine will make him fully stop them. Did I tell you that he really enjoys doing all those mischief? But it is no fun cleaning up those messes and, everyday, at the end of the day, I feel tired of mopping a dozen times with different rag cloths and cleaning liquids.

But did I tell you the great positive thing that he has started school and is really enjoying it? He has also started talking a lot more and we do a lot of story-telling sessions and play with a select few toys together.

But the ranter in me now wants to focus not on the school but on the lack of sleep that he is facing post the start of school. The excitement is getting on to him. The boy who slept early is now sleeping at least a couple of hours late and is still waking up early. Because of this, my kitchen chores too get affected and I get to wash the final lot of vessels only when all I want to do is to make the children sleep.

The daughter is enjoying her school as always and she also now has a lot more friends to play with. I play a lot of board games with her nowadays. But, hey, this is rant time, isn’t it? So, while I dreamt of happily playing with her exclusively during those two hours the son is in school, she ended up throwing one of her tantrums and crying spells the last couple of days. Her crying spells always leave me wondering when will I ever learn how to handle a child throwing a tantrum. It leaves me more stressed out too.

I realize that it’s not just that but all the other trivialities too that get me stressed out and it affects me the most only when I am not well-rested or when I have not had a quality relaxing me-time for a while now.

And, yes, the insecure-mother in me starts thinking about how things would have turned out to be if I had remained a working mother and not a stay-at-home mother. Did I tell you that that’s another stress-inducer in itself and I might as well not write about it now?

As I found the feel of the sun-dried clothes and the warmth that emanates from them as I fold them, very comforting, I realized just how much I had missed the sun.
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