Gong Xi Fa Cai !!!

We've been seeing red, the past few weeks ! ! Everywhere you go, there are beautiful red lanterns dancing in the wind and red banners put up. It's the Chinese New Year and our apartment complex and most of Singapore, has been bathed in red, the lucky color for the chinese.

symbolic firecrackers hung outside our apartment lobby....to scare away Nian, a beast who comes out of hiding, once every year on Chinese new year to attack people, especially children. The Nian is sensitive to loud noises and afraid of the color red. I could send my children to every house for the decibel factor but then the locals already have the LION dance. Two people dressed as the lion perform the dance in each house, ushering in prosperity for that year and scaring away the evil. The dance is a treat to watch for the energy the dancers display. People hang a fruit with a red envelope containing money, and the lion is supposed to display its acrobatic skill in reaching the money and spitting out the fruit/lettuce.

These mandarin oranges, a symbol of prosperity, have been placed outside each apartment block lobby.

So as they say here, wishing you guys, Gong Xi Fa Cai, or Happy New Year and as its literal translation says, "wish you enlarge your wealth" !

people waiting in China town to usher in their new year...and its the year of the ox, this time.

And just so that you don't miss out, i give you a red back ground and pictures....how nice can i be, right?

republic day!

We are supposedly celebrating democratic India! may we realise the meaning in its true sense.

Look what we found here...

For those who don't take care of your butts, read on



Found by one delighted 11 yrold on a bus stop in Sydney

Wassup, mate!

I'm speechless! I have to be because them vocal cords have finally rebelled and decided to enlighten me as to the weird sounds i am capable of making. I can now do hoarse, guttural, squawk and possibly a mean rani mukherjee voice. Elder son never had it so good, considering its exam time. Of course i can do THE glare but the person has to be seeing you to get scorched by it....

sigh....

and my family will never win at dumb charades!

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So we welcomed the new year at the Sydney harbor bridge watching the fireworks, never mind being squished by a hundred, no make that million, other like-minded people. That reminded me why we rarely get out of our cozy home on new year's eve. But the euphoria of screaming out happy new year and the firework display was worth being squished for!!

It was a holiday well spent at Melbourne and Sydney,where each one got to do his thing. We did a LOT of walking, petting (the animals), jaw dropping (at the beautiful scenery and clear waters) and kicked balls (er..lets make that football) on the soft sand. We even visited the MCG...

At a petting zoo in Melbourne, where we fed and touched koalas, turtles, emus, wallabies.

An emu says "hi, wanna get spooked?"

One excited male, doing what he does best, preening for the ladies


Father and son completed an exhilarating climb upto the top of the Sydney harbor bridge ...f you look closely, the spots in blue on the arch near the flag are the climbers....

while mother and son (the bridge climb was for 10yrs and above - I qualified but the 6 yrold didn't ) walked across the bridge, looking down into the waters below, taking in the views from the lookout tower and going camera crazy.


Having got back home after 12 days, it seems like its been a long time and everyone's all geared up to get back to the comforting chaos of our daily life.

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Since being speechless is the mood of the moment, this seems like a right time to react to this....WIAN from Random thoughts and Preethi from Incessant musings believe i am friendship-material...all i can say is that they are intelligent women with good taste...:).

And here's a virtual hug to you both....for the award...and the sentiments attached to it.

[This award is given to a blog that invests and believes in PROXIMITY - nearness in space, time and relationships! These blogs are exceedingly charming. These kind bloggers aim to find and be friends. They are not interested in prizes or self-aggrandizement. Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers! Deliver this award to eight bloggers who must choose eight more and include this cleverly-written text into the body of their award.]

Thanks to them, i now know a new word - self-aggrandizement.

And i pass it on to all those kind people who read here regularly...I meant the award, not the word...

lazy days ahead!

One fine day, a preteen declared "Laziness is AWEsome, amma!!!"

L'il bro shakes his head and mutters "Phew! it is so difficult to handle Amma" and adds a "chill down, amma" for good measure!

?!!!!!!!

See why i send them to school?

Since we aim to please, the next ten days will see us putting the pre-teen's theory into practice. We will let our hair down, (rayshma, behave!) will say yes to french fries and no to lettuce, and will coax our feet to walk a little more.

We will 'chill down?' in the Australian sun together and see what the fuss about the Sydney fireworks are all about!

So here's wishing everyone who visits my space a bright and pleasant year ahead!

Now back to the packing!!!!

What's on my fridge?

"What's on your fridge?" asked Preeti, who is just a mother of two. :)


'A few somethings", i wish i could have answered, few being the keyword here, but ...take a peek

My fridge surface continually changes. In Delhi it looked a whole different than it does now. Besides, the arrangement keeps varying. My boys keep moving it all over the fridge surface.

There are 15 magnets, out of which a few are of places we have visited together, the rest are put there by G. So much for this place being just my very own.



Most of them have a tale to tell. Some have been with us for ages. The Singapore one was picked up by my eldest boy on our first visit here...it brings back lovely memories of our first trip abroad with the children.





That's the family at the beach and the other was taken with two orangutans in Pattaya. I was quite happy with my resident monkeys and really didn't want these two lesser additions but of course who listens to moms any more?



The picture of the baby is a favorite one...It is of Swaraj when he was @ 4mths. I just LOVE that pic...







There are two tiny Garfield ones (in pink and blue) added here courtesy my boys. i also see a Spider man one very ingeniously taped onto a magnet making its way here. And of course two animal magnets courtesy the zoological park here.



The black magnet with a pouch, has something very important - the white paper consists of lunch and dinner menus for the whole week that G managed the boys when I was in Bangalore - It was mainly followed to the T, even to the no of cookies put in the snack box, barring a call I got from the boys on a paratha dinner day, begging for Maggi noodles. :)


The resident environmentalist (my elder boy) has added his two magnets (the ones in white at the bottom)from the NEA (national environmental agency) . One of them bears the words "Turn me on, FAN my ego' ! (i'm glad that it has a pic of the fan, otherwise we would be giving people ideas, wouldn't we...*wink)


The Santa Claus has been clipped on by my lil one...


And yes, the blue/white background is an old project chart done by Swaraj...Most apartments in Singapore come furnished with basic electrical appliances and amenities (the air con, the washing machine etc). Since the fridge is not my own, that paper is supposed to prevent the magnets from scratching the fridge surface. (That's why it ends up looking neater too)

So what's on my fridge? Mostly fun memories, the current and the old, jostling for space there!

And what story does your fridge tell?

Abha, pink dogwood, ugich, Joy, preethi, rayshma, actually everyone who wants to...its showtime :)

sweet somethings to spicy nothings

There are times i wish i could directly translate my thoughts into my laptop. There are these tidbits running in my mind, untethererd and by the time i finish my work and get to the blog, whoosh...it's no longer there, buried as it must be under the ratio and proportion sums and the spellings and a myriad other things which define my day.

Then there are times i wish i had continued with my anonymous self while blogging. I could then get away with a truly outrageous statement like '..............',

"........................"

Don't go away, i'm thinking, i'm thinking!!!

Now i know why authors wrote under pseudonyms. It allows them freedom to write what they think. That's the only reason i can't come up with something atrocious. I'm not anonymous...

I've always been fascinated by certain words in English novels. You know those paragraphs where honey, sugar, cutie pie, sweet heart are used as terms of endearment by couples. I used to wonder how would someone like being addressed thus? Sugarplum? lambikins? Ofcourse the then unimaginative mind (then = younger) would come up with situations where the guy would say "honey?" and the gal may actually pass him some honey!...

I think it makes them hungry!!! (*wink)

aha! lightbulb moment!

The thing is i find them a tad too sweet and too docile...How come noone spiced them up?

Now that i'm *ahem* grown up, just wondering :

• Maybe the future novels will have a husband saying " Pepper?!!!" or the lady may purr "You are my Godiva?!!' (that's the best i could do considering the current ratio problems floating in my mind)
• I wonder what a calorie conscious couple would use as their fat free terms of endearment.

Forgive me my nonsensical wanderings but there's only so much one can do after seeing a 11-yr-old search for the tallest and shortest arsenal player on the web, and then me drawing a huge christmas tree for the 6 yrold to color and being ditched by the hubby this weekend.

Now to get back to those study books WITH the kiddos this time....

Aside 1...Guess, this falls under "One of those times, i wish i was anonymous" list.

Aside 2: You think you can do better than that? Fine!!!!
Come on now, let's see that imagination at work....

Aside 3: Just in case you needed more words...of the sweet kind to say to someone (*wink )