The sneak who crept in

This weekend we had a visitor. An unwelcome one too.

Hiding behind the drapes, the creepy sneak or should i say the sneaky creep?

What do I do?

(I'm well known for not moving a muscle when it comes to those tiny things but with the power to freeze me on the spot. Lizards, flying cockroaches, mice... I'm petrified of them. I'm known to have screeched in terror mistakenly thinking that the hair which fell on my neck suddenly, was a mouse's tail.

I've spent 3 hours staring at the progress of a lizard on the ceiling and afraid to close my eyes because I was afraid that it may decide to fall into my gaping mouth..Ewwww...When the visions started getting more hideous, I had to get up and finally wake up my father (i was on a holiday in Bangalore) who chased it away.

Sigh! Fathers are the BEST! )

So this time, I had to call the only knight available, who used a broom as his sword. G is great at driving away pests. Most of them. I'm not going anywhere though.

So after much drama in the room with two kids being told to look at the lizard and not me, they managed to chase the creepy visitor out.

Me? i was as far away from the scene as possible.

Yesterday, when i entered the kitchen, what do i see? Another lizard right in the middle. Blinking at me. Perhaps wondering where its cousin had gone to?

What did i do? G wouldn't get up, so much for the knight halo. So I bravely tried to chase it away with much tapping and dancing, and it, perhaps bored with all the early morning drama, went straight into the laundry room.

We now look forward to a week of unwashed clothes, because no way am i entering that room now. Come to think of it, perhaps the smell of unwashed socks will make the thing slither out...*brightens

And then the six yr-old consoled me saying that when he gets a bat as a pet, he'll make sure that the bat keeps the lizards away!

bats? pet? WhatWhenEeksdeepbreathNOway!!!!!

Now I'm sure something scares you. Make me feel better, and tell me?

Puzzling effects...

What's this?

It is a picture of two adorable kittens with a yarn of wool. It is also a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle being puzzled over by a six yr-old and his mother...

Yes! We are very smart, thank you very much! Much to the amazement of the resident snorter who thought we couldn't do it...(*i think he was just jealous)

Little S has always been fascinated by puzzles since he was almost 2 years old. He's spent many a rainy day with Kaleidoscope, the puzzle made up of colored little squares, which i love too. But jigsaws are his favorite. It's addictive and a great stress buster. Solving it teaches one about perspectives, about tenacity and is good exercise for the mind. This was the first time, though, that he tried his hand at a 1000 piece puzzle.

It is a fascinating thing to sit down with these odd shaped pieces and coax them into forming the complete picture. At first they are just meaningless shapes, and it's difficult to make sense of the mayhem. But we figured it out, me and my little helper. We started with the border, because the border pieces have one flat edge, thereby making it easier for us to start. It was not very easy because the fur looked almost the same. Sometimes, I would hold the piece the wrong way, and then lil S would slap his forehead and put it…right there where it belonged.

Every time S returned from school, he would wash up and bounce into the room, first to check how much i got done without him and then to try and beat me at it...

Sometimes it just wouldn't move forward. And then miraculously, when we tackled it after some time or the next day, we seemed to instantly find that missing piece. And everything would fall into place for a while. So much like life, isn't it?

Little by little, piece by piece, we finished it. And the look of satisfaction on his face when he fitted in that last piece was worth recording. He didn't know I had completed it hours before but had messed it up a bit, just so that he could have the satisfaction of finishing his very own "big people' puzzle.

And as usual because i just can't help it, i think of associations.

Of Scrabble boards. Of incredibly lazy evenings, of worry free minds and easy laughter, of a family bonding over a scrabble game, which my sister would invariably win.

I hope that my kids too would weave happy associations around certain things. I'm sure they could never look at a football without thinking of G, of all those evenings spent kicking the dratted ball or watching the games together. Maybe the 11 yrold would look at books and remember the books devoured together by him and me?

And perhaps, jigsaw puzzles would do the same for my 6 yrold. Sometimes, i look beyond and see a young man buying a puzzle for his child, and telling him "See this? i used to do that with my mom". sigh!

*a happy Sigh!

There you go again, my wistful heart...why peer into a whimsical future when you have such a beautiful present....?

So tell me, since i'm a curious cat sometimes....are there certain things which bring back an instant happy recollection for you?

A sigh of the times

Sigh....A weird state of mind to be in.

I had so many things to be written and the next morning, my mind couldn't trace it. I would like to call it 'blogger's amnesia' - sounds more mature than plain growing old...

To add to the vanishing act, my yahoo inbox myteriously emptied itself .

So then i do the next best thing...

I heave a deep sigh...

I look at food blogs and sigh at the great photography....

I look at my Google reader and wonder why noone is posting faster than i can read!

Then i look at my blog and sigh " -------" very deeply...

never mind me, folks, i'm just smsing...sorry pmsing...

sigh....can't even get my words right... must still be the shock of turning 37...

I also believe that my sister's 4 yrold twins are practising for my 40th b'day video! Cute as they are, I wish someone would tell them that 3 years is a long time, right? Right!