Miracle Moments

Ask a mother of six, and she will have a unique story related to the birth of each of her child. Guaranteed. The experience of pregnancy and motherhood is so dramatic and life-changing that simple moments could remain eteched in your memory. I have this two unique tangible memories, associated with my the birth of my children, that I cherish like no other. Am making an effort here to paint them as true as possible to the sweetest memories I carry with me.

Push — One sunny afternoon, while I was close to 8 months pregnant with my first son, I was travelling by car. I remember my, otherwise overactive, baby would remain still everytime the car was in motion. Our car stopped at a traffic signal and we were waiting for the light to turn green. Suddenly I could feel two tiny feet pressed against my belly and it was pushing me very hard. It seemed as though my baby was impatiently willing the car to move forward. It was so surprising I just kept staring stupidly at my large tummy with a huge perplexed smile. Hubby, noticing me grinning ear-to-ear, asked "What is it?" With wild gesticulations I tried to explain him the feeling of having two tiny feet pushing me from inside. The car moved on and the pushing stopped. I got an inkling then of how impatient my boy is going to turn out to be. :)

Sweet silence —  It was a few minutes after the birth of my second son. My morning had been witness to a short but very painful labour. My little wonder boy had entered this world screaming, kicking, and holding on to the umblical chord. My gyn-obst laughed and called him little tarzan. While lying on the delivery bed, exhausted, and in a daze, I could hear him crying non-stop as he was being cleaned. In sometime, I saw them bring him to me, wrapped in a clean and soft blue cloth. He was crying his lungs out and I had no strength left in me to hold him. The nurse gently touched his face to my cheek and all of a sudden his howling stopped. He simply stopped crying. Silence. I did not know how to react, except to smile, in those few seconds. Soon the doctors descended to complete their work and he started to cry as they took him away to the neo-natal care center. But that one moment made me realize that he recognized me. He knew me from the different hands that handled him. It was one magical moment that I will never forget all my life.


Just re-living those memories makes me smile. What is that one moment that has moved you so much? Something that will remain etched in your memory, like carvings on a rock?

 

 

 

The Second Arrival

With the arrival of the second baby life changes beyond recognition. Here are a few home truths that comes from experience:

#1 You have already experienced pregnancy with your first born. So your growing frame is not going to make you wonder-struck again. That does not mean you would love your second child any less. And yes, every pregnancy is different.

#2. Guilt - thy other name is motherhood. You start living a life of guilt- you feel guilty of robbing your first-born of his exclusive status, you feel guilt towards your second one for not adequately loving it, you feel guilty of renegading your husband to some obscure corner in your life, your guilty of not maintaining a spick and span house..etc The list is practically endless. Having an extended family makes life a lot easier.

#3. You will forever be exhausted. Children right from inception are a drain on your energy. You will be depleted of all your patience, sleep, life source and will still have to be up on your feet. The little task masters are very demanding and what can ever stand against a tiny non-stop wailing baby?

#4. You cannot please the world. Everyone and their cousin will have suggestions of what will help you lose those pounds and what to feed your babies so they can gain more weight. Ask them to take a walk. The world as such pretends to understand or empathise with mothers only to snigger at their back. Give them the middle finger.

#5  Husbands turn into full-time fathers only after the second one arrives. Till then they oscillate between being a very bewildered new dad and a sulking you-have-no-time-for-me husband. Once the second one arrives they transform into hands-on dads. They grow more responsible and so much more endurable. Ok, lets make that adorable. :)

Top 10 Sites for the Marketing Enthusiast

Everybody worth their salt are discussing what's in and what's not. Here is my personal list of  top social websites; tools  that are a must-know, must-visit for every marketing professional. Not in any order of preference.

#1 Twitter: Much has been written and said about the power of a tweet. Everything still falls short of what it can do for a brand. Lurk around even if you don't get too many followers.

#2 Linkedin - I am not yet a part of Linkedin and I have my own personal reason for it. However, it has its share of loyalist who swear by it. See you there shortly.

#3 Pinterest - The latest toy in the market. Keeps your interest

#4 Facebook - Learn to keep your professional and personal prirorites apart and it will work for you.

#5 Plugged.in - A knowledgebase for entrepreneurs and the startup/geeky community, it says. Get to meet the likeminded.

#6 Scrible - Online annotation tool. Every helpful for those aggregating and researching online content.

#7 Storify - Let lose the journalist in you. Neat tool to collate and curate content from other social media sites and present the story in your own way. One can also explore Storyfull.

#8 Mashable; Wired - My mornings are incomplete without paying a customary visit to these sites.

#9 Wordpress; Blogspot - You can like them, write them or even ignore them but you surely cannot abondon them.

#10. Youtube - Would the internet be the same without Youtube? Possibly not.

There are a host of others Ryze, Flickr, Foursquare, Slideshare, Prezi etc. Each with its own unique business proposition and its own set of audience. Check them out and share what works for you.

Cafeteria Musings

My organization offers flexi-timings and work-from-home options. Huge benefits, if you ask me, especially for young mothers. Some days I end up eating lunch alone at the office cafeteria,  Being part of a globally dispersed team does not mean not having colleagues but there are days when none of whom you interact with are around.

Its might be unthinkable for many but I enjoy these occasional periods of solitude. It gives one the time to observe people around you, how each one differs in their dress, mannerisms, how they address one and other, the team dynamics and so on. And at times one inadvertently ends up being privy to amusing conversations, snippets of information that makes your meal-times fun.

There is this team who lunch with their manager who has quite a formidable personality. It is really amusing to see them being led to the dining table and after a quiet lunch walk away almost like school kids. There is one vibrant boisterous attention-grabbing crowd whose lunch sessions are replete with guffaws, jokes and gaiety. Its spring for them throughout the year, I suppose. The food is secondary, they walk-in and immediately own the place.

My favourite is to observe the couple doing the dating dance. One of them usually reserves a chair for the other, they partake even canteen food, generous with offhanded compliments on everything about the other (if the relationship is new) or tease incessantly which makes the other blush and yet they enjoy the attention. The ritual hardly changes even if they are among a crowd of twenty people. Oblivious to the world around them. :)

And then there are the usual girl gangs who love to bitch about everything under the sun. Conversations can start of with the railway budget, movie or UP politics and ends in some kind of rant (personal or professional). This groupie's carry elaborate lunches in multi-colored boxes, take the time to actually warm the food in microwaves and discuss the recipes of the curry. Given a chance they would love to combine the lunch and coffee-time if not for something called the work-break. :)

And lastly there are the perpetual lone wolfs. You can recognize them from a mile. Don't want to generalize but they mostly are the bespectacled-nerds who smile at their smart phones or are busy grasping their tablets mindless of what is in their plate. You can confound and intimidate them by simply asking if the seat next to them is free.

People analytics is more fun than data analytics, I say :)

Later is Now.

Children in their own inexplicable way end up teaching some of life's biggest lessons to us. The other day my son wanted me to play with him, while I was busy on my laptop. His pleas started getting persistent and I tried to shoo him away with different errands. So he got me a cup of water, arranged the cushions on the sofa and piled the day's newspaper and was back to ask me to play with him.

Again he started coaxing: "Mamma, mamma come to play na."
Me busy tapping on the keyboard: "Later, Avyukt"
Avyukt: "Mamma, come now"
Me (a little firmly): "Later. I said later right?"
Defiantly he says: "Later is now, mamma"

Those words struck a chord in me. We do postpone most of the things that we actually want to do to a later time. I will tend to my gardren - later. I will clean the cupboard - later. We'll watch a movie - later. Its never now. I guess we learn to postpone small things that bring us joy in the hope that once the bigger must-do's are done with we will find the time. But those things are never completely done and our small wishes remain just that - wishes.

I closed my laptop and without a word went to play 'train-train' with my son. We pulled the dining chairs in a row and had great fun. He was exhausted and asleep in about 30 minutes. I felt an elation seeing him asleep peacefully. All the laurels, hikes, letters of praise will not equal the simple joy of seeing a smile light up your child's face.

Our Misadventures In Parenting

That my boy has settled down at his school and well-adjusted to his routine has knocked one worry off my list. On day 1, it was alarming to see my little boy with a dangling satchel in tow, trudge almost half-a-mile from the school gate, cross the tiny little bridge in his campus and climb a flight of stairs to reach his class on his own. For a mother who has him chaperoned even at the play swing, this was akin to seeing him take-off on his first space mission. Its a different story how we actually followed him on the pretext of talking to his teacher, hovered near his class, pretended to be busy on the phone when some teacher passed by and stalked his return van journey for a week. Its with some conviction I can say that we have also managed to settle down. Today, two months down the line, its a matter of pride when Avyukt returns home with a skip in his step and a new tale to tell.

First week, he was full of stories of the 'brown boy'. "Who is this brown-boy, Avy? Is he your friend?" "No. Brown boy sits next to me."
"What's his name?" Thinks hard for some time and says exasperatedly "Brown boy, mamma." Makes a poker face and says, "He looks like this no? He only is brown-boy" I pretend I understand him.

Friday he returns to say "Mamma, I pulled the jhuttu (ponytail) of Khushita" Worried I asked, "But why??" "She follows me everywhere, mamma. And today she went ahead of me in the play slide"
Huh uh! Is this supposed to mark the birth of the proverbial male ego? I tried to explain to my best how such behaviour won't fetch him any friends. Alas! He seemed defiant when it came to Khushita going ahead of him.

The other day he proclaimed the moment he jumped off his van, "Mamma, you know Veer is a boy!" Okay. A minute later, he continues in a higher octave, (Maybe he did not get the reaction he was expecting from me) "Mamma, mammma, Veer is a BOY!" "Oh! thats wonderful sweetheart. Er, how did you know?" and braced myself for an answer. Smugly he replied "Dhruv told me."

A week back Avy comes running late in the night, "Mamma, papa is telling all bad words." Giving an accusatory glance at his dad I ask, "What did papa tell, dear?" "Papa saying, go to bed" :|

Last evening Avyukt was busy with his "dip & dab" painting session at the dining table and in the process knocked a few items to the floor. Hubby reprimanded him telling he needed to be more careful or could end up hurting himself. Seeing Avy upset he tried to lighten the situation with a mock cry and pretended to imitate him. Mishearing Avyukt muttering to himself, hubby came down harsh on him again and said - Avyukt! No using bad words. How dare you say "bloody fellow?" Blah Blah..

Avyukt looks up perplexed at his dad and meekly says, "I said baby-fellow, papa. You crying like baby" Hubby looks sheepishly at me and tries to slink away. My smile wanes, as I hear Avy retrospectively muttering - "bleedy feelowh?"
Sigh!

As I write this, I hear him trying to convince his grandmom that he is a *real* doctor and he needs to operate her eye. He is upset she keeps cowering from him and wants her to keep her eye open as he operates on her with a bottle-opener and some Johnson Baby cream!

We are only a month away from welcoming Avy's sibling to our warm fuzzy world and I am filled with excitement, wonder, and worries of the days ahead. Please wish us luck.

I am happy and I want you to believe that

If you're happy and you know it, post an update
If you're happy and you know it, upload a photo
If you're happy and you know it...

These days people actually have so little to say and so many ways (read social media) to say it. My timeline on Twitter talks of what one had for his breakfast, who bought the best brand of vinegar, or when they plan to cross the road. There are yet others who, for the want of a few 'Likes' and flowery comments, bare their entire lives on Facebook for all and sundry.

Maybe it's the inherent human need to be appreciated, but it hardly stops there. From there stems the need to be looked up to, and maybe that's why one comes across pompous status updates where they claim to eternally live in paradise or have professionally reached the pinnacle! Sure. Smirk. smirk.

In the constant need for validation and reassurances, I wonder if they are even living the moment fully. The parties that one attends, the sumptuous food one eats in fancy restaurants, the dresses one shops for are all updated for the benefit of the rest of the world. All in a bid to show a happy and successful face to the world.

I have to say it once again, though - nothing meaningful to share and yet so many means to do that. And this is one of my classic excuses for not being able to blog more regularly. 

In a cheeky mood, and hence this post. Don't mean to judge anyone or their life choices