Five!

Ashwin celebrates his 5th birthday today.

He took a box of Kitkat to distribute in class and a Thankyou card for his teacher (which said: Thank you for being what you are and what you do... May life always smile on you. One of the least mushy thankyou cards I could find in Landmark). I think it made his teacher very happy and she thanked V for it when he went to pick up Ash.

We hope to take him out for dinner or get some Chinese take-away, since he has said he'd like noodles. The cake-cutting can wait till Sunday when his paternal grandparents arrive. From a Noddy cake (which model our regular baker doesnt have), he has changed his mind to a Mickey Mouse cake (probably from watching Mickey Mouse Clubhouse in the morning during his oil massage). But we have already got him a Mickey Mouse cake on an earlier birthday, so I need to look up some other patterns that might catch his fancy - a tiger or a train are his other suggestions.

Mira says she'd like a Tintin cake - she is rather enamoured of the Boy Reporter! Maybe we have a reporter in the budding here.

Expressions

BabyCentre remembers that my baby is now 36 month old. It tells me:
Congratulations — your little one is now three! More fun is in store for you now that she's no longer a baby. She's probably already holding her own in conversations, running and jumping like an athlete and she will soon write her full name. She's developing more sophisticated social skills and knows how to take turns or join in with others. Before you know it, she'll be cracking jokes, (usually the same joke several times a day for days on end), remembering entire songs and even reading. Although she'll soon be saying goodbye to toddlerhood, rest assured that life won't be boring with her around.

And I guess that my daughter is no longer a baby and hence Iwont be receiving any more baby-related newsletters. Thank you Babycentre for being a faithful companion as my babies made the slow transition from infancy to toddlerhood and after. Thank you for enlightening me these past four years. I will surely miss you.

The gifts

Ash got a toy telephone, toy guitar (both from his granny), a push n' go jet plane (from me) and a basket ball net (from V). What I hadnt bargained for is that he'd expect the aeroplane to fly. I'm trying to convince him that it is on the runway, preparing for takeoff.

Ash turns 4

Ash cut a "car" cake (since we couldn't find an aeroplane cake) in the evening in the presence of a his grandma and a few colleagues of V. This is the first time his maternal granny, who generally comes only in times of crisis, is attending a birthday celebration of the kids.

Ash looked good in traditional attire and sandals. He is always excited about birthday cakes though he is not much of a cake eater. He is more interested in licking the cream over the cake.

p.s. There was no birthday feast since we had been generously provided with the previous day's party food by our friend - and which has lasted us a good three days!

A season of birthdays

... and parties.
On Sunday, we took part in two birthday celebrations. One of V's (11-yr-old) niece who had come down from Ooty with her parents, and secondly of a blogger friend's son. The former involved a cake-cutting at our place, and the latter a gala party on the terrace of our friend's flat.
The kids had fun at both, and were happy to have a lot of their peers around them for a change. I had fun too, especially as I got a good deal of time to chat with the kids's peadiatrician and his pathologist wife, who had made a surprise visit to the party with their teenaged son. I guess doctors too feel so lonely at the top and wouldnt mind interaction with their patients and their parents - the 10 minute allotted for each kid-patient at the hospital is not enough for such personal relationships.