We are on the 11th day of lockdown and looking back at the last 10 days, it has been very interesting so far from a family bonding point of view. I had the opportunity to spend RICH time with kids and family.
We had stepped out last two Saturdays for grocery and when my wife prepared the list we decided to segregate it to must-haves and nice to have’s. My daughter knows by now to which category biscuits and bread belong. The first thing she would do is check out the grocery bags once we come back. Nowadays she knows that all we get is must-have things. Also, she has started trying out new things when it comes to eating as she understood that there are only limited options. I had the opportunity of sharing this with my mother and she was also very happy how her grandkids are adjusting to the new reality.
We were having our dinner and suddenly my 8-year-old daughter was talking about Albert Einstein. I was wondering how she knew about Albert Einstein. So I asked her “How do you know Albert Einstein?” She said in her typical as a matter of fact way knocking me down, “Everyone knows Albert Einstein”. I mustered my courage and said, “The other day when you were throwing away all your stuff, you threw away Albert Einstein’s toy as well. She quickly changed the topic!
It was time for her to puzzle me and she came up with her favorite riddles. The first question she had was,” Which fish can’t swim”? I didn’t know the answer and I had to give up. The answer was dead fish!
The second question was, “What word is spelled incorrectly in the dictionary”? The answer to this literally made me tear my hair. That was “Incorrectly”
My wife declared that it is going to be a house cleaning weekend. The task for all of us was to help my younger daughter decide what to keep and what to throw. We did not figure out that she could take that decision so easily! We saw that she had inadvertently decided to throw away all the stuff ( Toys of all kinds)!
Why do kids throw away their toys without emotions?
She even threw away a lot of small toys which I love very much. I had a crucial conversation with her on all the toys. The real put off was when she decided to throw one of her friend’s gift which I decided to keep. You can picture the anger on her face. Added to it I said that I will tell this to her as well. That was the tipping point for her to burst out. That was a quranTUNE for me which I had never heard before. She keeps checking with me, ” Are you the king of this house?”
My younger daughter had picked two mugs for me and wife sometime back. So it was regular that when I make coffee I would have it in Dad’s mug and my wife will have it in Mom’s mug. That day I did not notice and I was drinking in Mom’s mug to which my younger daughter inquired, ” Have you read what is written in that mug about Mom “? I must admit that up until that point I had not noticed what was written on Mum’s mug.
That was a period when I realized that we were running a fast pace life and was forgetting to look at certain things in life. I decided to make up myself with them and so decided one afternoon to invade the kitchen and show my cooking skills. My wife had been busy with other things that day and when she walked into the kitchen she was surprised to see me making chapatis and she remarked: “Oh domesticated Das!” It was after some time that my younger daughter noticed that I was in the kitchen. She asked, “Do you know how to make chappati ?” with a sense of surprise written all over her face. I rattled out those old stories. She was only interested in what I was making and how it is turning out to be. After 8 chappatis I found my rhythm and I could get the circular shape and fluffy texture. That night’s adventure of making dosa was also well done as it tuned out to be round and non-sticky.
As the wifi is kept in my room I see that all of us make sure to sit there and chat and then get hold of devices. We might be in the same room but with different devices. It then becomes a family device time. Soon the bandwidth is choked, we first jostle for bandwidth and then we turn to each other to log off from their devices. It so happened one day as I closed the door I saw my daughter literally putting herself outside the door for getting the connection.
The best time we laughed a lot as a full family was when we saw Amit Tandon’s show on Netflix and that was a QuranTUNE day for me.
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