Patio Garden - Update

The plants outgrew the small pots that my parents had them and it was high time to clean the patio.My charm can only help to a limit! (for more details, read this) Leaving tulsi, mint, table rose and one of the tomato plant that was in the biggest pot all other plants were uprooted from their pots and found their way to the trash. Now the patio looks much healthier compared to last week as there were more dying, withered plants than the good ones.
When dad & aya picked up different varieties of tomato plants from the nursery 2 months ago they didn't even bother to look up at the small tag present in each pot that has details about the plant. To them all tomatoes are the usual big ones that are used in cooking (like naathu thakkali or bangalore thakkali). That is the case probably in Chennai or in Karaikudi :) Only when tomatoes started coming up, to their surprise they found out that one of the plant was salad tomatoes. And only that plant was thriving with lot of tomatoes. They got 4 zip-log bags full of salad tomatoes, roughly 4 lbs!

Mom will get angry if you ask her to have salad but dad is not like that. He eats salads now and then in Mcdonalds or in Chick-fill-a but even then salad tomatoes comes last in his choice of preferred salad items. Dad even tried making a salad with cucumbers & home grown tomatoes but he couldn't have it more than once. Aya didn't want to mash the small tomatoes and use them in cooking as she thought that will make the cute salad tomatoes look like the big naathu thakkalis. I think she wanted somebody to have them in their salads as it was intended to :)

When Jen aunt stayed in our place for a night while driving to NY, parents gave her one zip-log full of salad tomatoes to pass it to periappa. He told them that the tomatoes were tasty and he added them in many of his salads. Dad took the remaining tomatoes to his workplace and left them in the kitchen. Everything disappeared in an hour and few people even thanked him for the delicious tomatoes. I have to remind the adults next summer to buy the correct variety of tomato!!!

ing ing ing, ick ick ick

I think my parents listened to what i said about non living things, particularly my dad. Mom was complacent that i will follow the generic baby manual where by default a baby first smiles looking at their moms. So she didn't make a mental note of my previous post But dad knows that he needs to work hard and he started doing the time tested "ங் ங் ங், க் க் க் " pattern.  At first i didn't quite grab it but after some time i was able to follow the pattern, identify and recognize it. Once i did it, it was matter of seconds for me to understand that its with me that they are trying hard to communicate and they got my attention. Once they got my attention, i try to talk back but mostly it is the flashes of smiles that makes them super delighted.

My talk usually comes as coos & ooohs and the adults get very happy even with that level of communication skills!  I smiled couple of times with dad and dad alone and it put pressure on poor mommy. Once dad left to work, amma was going on with  ""ங் ங் ங், க் க் க்" whenever i was awake. After some time she found out the trick. If i am in the living room, all the non living things that are around the surrounding gets my attention in one way or another quickly and makes difficult for them to make me follow them! Next day onwards i started flashing my smiles at everyone even in the absence of the keywords! But still if you work with ங் க், you will get my attention quickly and may be rewarded with a little longer smile :)

Thank you card

This was taken on Day 2 at the hospital. Parents liked this photo so much that they ordered 25 'Thank you' cards of the same for sending it to family/friends. After few weeks dad decided to dispatch the cards and he started writing down the list of family members and their addresses. He thought 25 cards will be sufficient for their immediate family members and few of his close friends. Oh Boy, he is very poor in doing estimates! He had to order few more cards from Walmart to make sure that everybody in the family gets one. very big family you know :)

Each card had a hand written message from me. Just kidding :) He wrote as if i am writing to them. The difficult part in this episode is to find out how i need to address each and everyone in the family! for some of them, he needed to call and check with appatha!

As he got tired with all of these activities which he had earlier thought was simple & straight forward, he cut down the number of friends he wanted to mail the card. He sent the card to Guru whom he called now & then for asking help during the entire pregnancy starting from the very early days and to Meena Mani who organized the baby shower. To all others who got back to him, he sent a thank you email with a link to my pictures. That email didn't have this picture and hence this post!