The waiting period

Aches and pains apart, this year seems to be treating us with enough luck that we can ask for. Just when it looked like there was no way out of our present predicament, our old partime maid readily agreed to babysit the kids on Monday and Tuesday since neither of us could afford to take any more leave after the recent vacation. A new maid arrives from Kerala tomorrow and I hope she lasts :)
I am just dying to hand over kitchen duties, which in this past one week has given me sore feet and a doubly aching back - just not used to standing long hours cooking or better to say, that my cooking takes longish hours since I am out of practice. It makes me realise what a boring life it is for women to be cooking one meal after the other - breakfast, lunch, tea-time snacks and dinner. Not the 2-minute noodles or cornflakes kind, but traditional Indian meals.
The kids, finicky about food, are learning better - that they have to eat whatever their mom churns out or recycles from the refridgerator.

A week in Kerala, especially at my mil's, was an absolute gastronomic delight. Christmas was spent at my place, in the company of my brother and family. The kids had fun bursting crackers, playing with cousin Tarana and visiting the Anakoodu (elephant hospital) at Konni. V spent Christmas day visiting relatives in and around Cochin with his parents.
Part of the holidaying mood was spoilt by the anxiety to find a new maid. An agency search yielded only a candidate with a liver disease (probably another rehabilitated alcoholic like our last maid L) who professed an inability to look after small children. Agencies are the last resort for desperate working parents like us, but the results they throw up are most often unsavoury. The loser is the hirer who ends up paying the agency hefty sum as fee and then putting up with sidey characters who masquerade as maids; either the maid leaves in a matter of months of her own volition or you ask for a replacement. Whatever the case, the agency puts you on a waiting list and you wait unsuccessfully most times for a replacement.
Sometimes, you end up lucky - like my aunt who had found a good person to take care of her invalid mil. But reportedly the substitute she got when her maid took a one-month leave was dreadful.
We also got to meet cousins Renjith and Reeba, and baby Jai who was being baptised the day we left for Madras.