Author: Tulika

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Enchanted!

If you have a child between the ages of 5 and 12 years you’re going to love this. I don’t do product reviews too often, this time, however, I am making an exception because I stumbled upon this absolutely fabulous subscription box for readers – Enchantico.

Have you heard of it?

I’m really really excited and I’ve been longing to share it here. I’ve often rued the fact that H and N are rather selective, reluctant readers. And yet I’ve refused to give up on them. Ever so slowly I see H getting hooked and N coming around too. They’ve stuck with Captain Underpants, Wimpy Kid and Dork Diaries but I’m not complaining — beggars-choosers and all of that.

Anyway so I picked up Enchantico because of the way it matched books and activities. It sounded just the perfect thing to entice them to widen their reading. Of course I wanted to blog about it the moment I saw it but I held on and went in for a three-month subscription before I spoke about it. Now at the end of three months I can recommend it with complete conviction.

A typical box contains:

– At least two books (sometimes three).
– An activity kit related to one of the books or to an upcoming festival.
– and the coolest collectibles.

My major reservation was:

‘What if we already have the book?’ To answer that – the books are picked from Indian as well as International publishers and are all new releases . And I can vouch for them – they are fantastic reads. I’ve been having immense fun reading them, even more than the kids, perhaps. I’ll be reviewing them here shortly.

Some specifics:
The boxes come in four age groups so that the activities and the books are age appropriate 5-6, 7-8, 9-10 and 11-12. I got my three month subscription at Rs 2999/-. There are other options for longer subscriptions too.

Here’s a peek into our latest box:

There are three books along with author cards. Oh I didn’t tell you about the author cards. Each book comes with a small card with bits of trivia – some serious some just fun – about the author.

The activity this week was making a Goody Box. So we got to put together a box as also paints, sponges and decorating material.

There was also this huge stocking with the suggestion that the children fill it up with goodies and gift it to someone.

And lastly there was a Santa pencil stand and a ‘Booked for Life’ badge.

What I love most…

… are the small touches like this card which we’ve put up on our soft board. Then there are the author cards as well as those badges.

 

The box seems to be put together by people who truly love books and reading. I am sold on it. The kids find enough reading material to last them through the month and I find my Book Club meetings becoming more colourful. Do hop across to enchantico.in and take a look.

Picture Credit: PIXABAY

Disclaimer: I’ve in no way been compensated for this review.

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Birthdays gifts and badly kept secrets

With Christmas around the corner I was going through my wish list checking to see what gifts I’d saved away, and I came upon this – a bunch of wallets, flashy ones – one with a peacock feather motif, another one all gold and shimmery and a third bright pink one. 

I stared at them. And I wondered. Not for the life of me could I fathom in what fit of bling I had ‘wish-listed’ these. My memory is not quite what it used to be, but I was certain I wouldn’t do this. It just wasn’t me. 

Before I go on, you need to know that my birthday is round the corner. And nobody  is ever as excited about it as H and N — not my friends, not my parents, definitely not the Husband (who once made the cardinal error of forgetting it, and is not likely to forget it in a hurry ever again) and most definitely not I. I mean of course I like it when someone remembers it but that’s where it should end. The hoo-haa is kind of embarrassing but then when have the kids ever worried about what embarrasses me? They start planning months in advance and they make up for everyone else … they create enough of a hoo-haa to satisfy the most hoo-haa craving person.
Every year they scrimp and scrounge to get me a small gift. This year they decided to enlist the help of Mr Moneybags – the Husband. I’ve overheard secret phone calls which they think I have no clue about and eavesdropped on whispered arguments which they think I cannot hear. 
They first convinced him to order a book from Amazon. The rather proactive Husband, did so right away and I received my birthday gift in November – more than a month in advance. 
I was suitably surprised at how apt their choice was and very thrilled too … but the children decided it came too early and so didn’t really qualify as a birthday gift. Now, they have taken things in their own more capable hands, or so they think, and they’ve been furiously surfing Amazon. Only – they have no clue that the things they ‘secretly’ save in a wishlist is my wishlist. That’s how those clutches/wallets came from – all N’s choice!

Since I made the discovery I’ve been logging in everyday to see a new set of gifts. They seem to change their mind everyday. The latest is this – a personalised ‘I love you mama’ cushion and a World’s Best Mom trophy.

I’m waiting with baited breath to see which one makes it to the final day.

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Friend, buddies and influences

Much as I tried H and N were never the perfectly behaved children I would have liked them to be. They had their good moments and their bad. They could embarrass me thoroughly in public making me question my upbringing and then do something so sweet, so thoughtful, so completely unselfish that my heart would fill with love and pride. Their being Geminis might have something to do with it!
However hard these ups and downs might have been, they taught me one thing – that there were no really ‘bad’ kids. Having seen so many shades of my own I believed firmly that all kids had bits of good and bad in them.
And so when they were younger I encouraged them to include all other kids around them when they played. The quiet ones, the shy ones, the naughty and boisterous, the spoilt and the generous ones – all of them. Despite their quirks and shortcomings they all stuck together. Also, once I got to know them I learnt to like them all.
It helped that we were a bunch of like-minded mothers who looked out for all the kids and reprimanded them too, as they would their own.
However, I find things changing as the kids grow. They are no longer small children nor are their friends. All of them have suddenly developed personalities of their own, rather strong ones, at that! They have fixed ideas of what is cool and what is not, what is good what is bad, right and wrong and that, sometimes, doesn’t coincide with what I think is right or age-appropriate.
I hear some of the older girls giggling over ‘crushes’ and  when N tells me about them, all I can think is “She’s just ten!” — too early to be listening in on stories of crushes. I hear words like ‘loser’ (how I detest it!), ‘jerk’ and much worse. One day N asked me what a b*****d was. Then we had this very lengthy discussion on why I must object each time they says sh**. ‘Everyone says it’, H argued, ‘even adults say it.’ He’s right of course and yet I’d much rather not have that language at home.
With peer-pressure peaking, I have to confess I have begun to think about how other kids influence H and N, specially the older ‘cooler’ lot, who the twins idolise. I find, now, that there are children whom I wish H and N just wouldn’t hang out with. Yet it doesn’t feel quite right to brand a particular child ‘bad company’, to ask the children to stay away from him or her.
What makes it more complicated is that I do see the good in them too – some are extremely well-read and well-informed, one of them is a crazy Harry Potter fan (a definite plus for me), one is a computer whizz, another one is passionate about animals and has loads of interesting nuggets of information. I like them for all those things but I feel they’re not quite right for H and N.
So what do I do?
I understand that there will be good and bad influences around them all the time. I cannot control them. I know that. So can I continue to stick with my idea of ‘people aren’t bad, habits are’? That’s what I told them when they were younger. Or am I being too idealistic?
Should I accept that along with the good comes bad and let them be, even while I continue to remind them of the rights and wrongs and hope to God they are listening? Will that help at all? Are they capable of seeing the good from the bad rather than idolising people as a whole? Or are they just too young to evaluate people objectively?
I could engage them elsewhere and minimise interaction. But that needs just so much energy and mind space. Sigh!

Apologies for off loading my worries here but I’m a bit lost. Am I over-thinking this whole thing?
Picture credit: PIXABAY
Linking up with Nabanita’s #MommyTalks.

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Holding on – just a little longer

This weekend was cleaning up time – one of those days when the twins get down to the big task. H and N recently got new beds and have been on a bit of an overdrive to keep their room neat. Boy am I grateful! As I glanced at the sack of toys and clothes they’d set aside I found myself picking out and saving up things, quite like they pick out and save thing when I am doing the cleaning! Some weird role-reversal, this!

Have you ever found that you are more attached to some of your children’s toys than they are? I discovered today that I was!
First, there is the blue-haired doll a dear friend of mine got for her when N turned two. She is dressed up all in turquoise (not pink!) to match her hair. N named her Shanti (because at that point they were watching Jungle Book every single day) carried her everywhere, ate with her, slept with her and celebrated her birthday. Shanti helped keep the Barbies at bay. N never did develop a passion for them. 

And there was the green-haired one called Pony whose leg kept coming off and I had to keep stitching it back on.

Then there was H’s gada – his all powerful mace. It was his absolute super power. He watched television with it on his lap. He carried it everywhere, even when we went visiting or when he was invited to a party. 

There was the boy-doll my sister got him because he wanted a doll ‘just like N’ but not a ‘girl-doll’. And so after much research a ‘boy-doll’ was found; actually it was a girl doll with short hair but H never knew the difference.
There was H’s kitchen set that he spent hours cooking at, his dinosaur army (apparently all of them fought each other to extinction), N’s tiny dressing table at which she’d sit like lady ‘drying’ her hair till she could fit on the stool no more and many many more. I let some of them go rather reluctantly even while I cling to others even now, as I wonder at how fickle kids can be.
But then probably the toys don’t hold the same meaning for them as they do for me. For them, beloved as they might be, they are just toys, which they will outgrow at some point.. and thank goodness for that.
To me, however, they are not just toys. They are bits of people I love and who love the children in turn. They are signs of affection and caring. 
They are a reminder of how innocent the kids were before the outside world and peer pressure changed them and fitted them into stupid stereotypes. Yeah, unfortunately that’s happening already.

Most of all I hold on to them because they are a bit of the kids’ childhood, a bit, I perhaps, never really want to let go.

Picture Credit: PIXABAY


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You love her more than me

You love her more than me. You always take her side!”

I watched frustrated, hurt and a little annoyed too as H hurled that allegation at me and walked out of the room. I was just back from their PTM last week and had found them in the middle of a huge row. Of late I am trying to keep out of their fights, but I had to step in here. I was still preoccupied with the discussion at school and was hardly prepared to handle all of this. I simply wanted to restore peace.
And then H made that one allegation that unsettles me most.
This isn’t the fist time this has happened
Yet it remains something of a raw nerve. Being fair is almost an obsession for me. When the kids were babies there were always people who preferred one over the other – visitors, friends, grandparents. Someone would like one of the twins because he or she was more talkative, more active, more chubby or simply because one of them resembled someone in the family. I was constantly losing my cool despite telling myself over and over again that it would happen and that it didn’t really matter as long as the Husband and I didn’t have favourites. Yet it drove me to distraction.
Now, when I have the same allegation tossed at me I don’t know how to react. I read somewhere that most parents have favourites (normally the first born) and so I spent hours in honest self-examination on whether I do love one child over the other and I can say so with all my heart that I do not. (I don’t even have a first/second born to begin with!)
Each time I try to explain this to the twins it comes out sounding like I am listing things I do for each one of them and that is so very far from my intention. That day I ended up sad, worried and exhausted with a throbbing headache.
Sigh!
That was one of the days when I truly envied people with single kids. I wondered at my naiveté that had me jumping for joy when I discovered I was having twins!!
As always when I’m lost in this parenting maze I turn to other parents – real and virtual – and here’s what I pieced together.
Some children are more insecure than others
and will always feel they are being treated unfairly. Nothing you say or do will convince them otherwise. The tweens (and then the teens) are perhaps the worst times when real and imagined angst is at its peak. You can only hope that they change their mind as they grow older. Sometimes the wait may last till they have kids of their own.
Sometimes they’re saying it only to needle you
When they are upset, tweens say things they don’t mean. In fact if they know something hurts you, they are more likely to say it to you to get their way. Oh yes, kids have crafty little brains. However, they do know in their hearts that it isn’t true. I need to remember that.
So what should I do?
Well, I realised that spending energy on convincing them is pointless, specially when they are angry. I will have to leave them alone and let my actions speak for me.
A sane, reassuring talk after the storm will help.
When one child demands/needs more attention than the other in pampering his/her need, in appeasing him/her I might end up being unfair to the other less-demanding child. So that’s an area I need to tread with caution.
As a parent I need to differentiate between treating them fairly versus treating them equally. That’s an area I’m not really good at. For instance if one of the twins needs something (and the other does not) when I get something for one of them I end up getting something for the other too only to avoid a showdown. Bad idea! The focus should be on the need not the thing.
More individual time with each of them, focussing on individual needs, is even more important as they are growing up.Those are the things I’ll be working on.

As a parent have you ever faced this allegation from your children? Growing up did you ever feel your parent favoured a sibling?

Linking up with dear friend Nabanita’s #MommyTalks. Do drop by her post where she talks about kids and the evil eye. Do you believe in it?

 

 

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