A much needed checklist a few months before/ after conception

My husband and I have decided one can never really be ready to have a baby. Technically. Romance is one ballgame, marriage is another. Planning a family is one thing, and actually embarking upon the adventure of raising a child is, trust me, completely different. Considering the human aversion to changing, forget forming good habits, I think it is better to practise some routines even before baby enters the womb!

Having practically mothered my niece in her first couple of years did, I thought, prepared me with the necessary experience to be a mother. Then I made many mistakes like many new mothers, and suddenly, I wasn’t so sure anymore. Thankfully, I’m wiser for it and, phew, there was no permanent damage done (fingers crossed J).

Here’s my check list for ‘mothers-in-planning’, ahem, for want of a better word.

1)      Have you ever babysat toddlers AND babies (read children less than two years old)? Try it. Patiently, for a whole month.

2)      Find a destress routine. Practise it till the time you know for sure that it works for you – a 60-minute “me” time of just about any activity that gets you happy. It could be allotting telly time for yourself, yoga, a walk, a beach, shopping, anything. Psst, and don’t stop the sex. Don’t ask me why. For some strange reason it keeps the upset post-pregnancy hormones in check and it’s great for the skin!

3)      Rope in elders, friends, family and have their word of honour that they will help out in times of crises. Make a list. It’s only a last resort, but it’s nice to know there are people you can entrust your child to, when you have to go attend to an accident victim or rush to the emergency doctor. Keep telephone numbers handy, and hubby’s number on Speed Dial.

4)      Start a healthy diet at home, get hubby’s support – low oil, less sugar, no junk, no colas, no chips and fries. If you don’t follow a healthy diet before you conceive, you will resent having to follow it later. Once you get used to food that is good for the entire family, you will pass down the habit to your little one as well. This one really needs preparation WELL in advance. If there are elders at home, talk to them and convince them that a healthy diet IS needed and their cooperation is needed as well.

5)      Ensure your home is child friendly – no slippery floors, no peeling paint, pest control three months before delivery, no unsafe doors (fit doorstoppers), and most important, make sure your sofas will withstand frequent outbursts of your baby’s altogether too frequent needs to go J.

6)      Train husband. Talk to husband. Prepare him to participate in baby activities and to the fact that the baby is going to tire you out a lot – typically once the baby starts standing  – which means that you will be giving hubby less time. If there are elders at home, set up a routine with them so you and hubby can spend time out together while things are taken care of at home. Just like “me” time, “together” time with husband is also very important.

7)      Ask around for a good, aware, communicative paediatrician. Make sure s/he is well recommended – very important; there are only a few who make your child comfortable for a “visit to the doctor”. Also, ask for a good hospital to have the baby at. Check other mothers’ experiences (recent ones nearing your date of delivery) so you have a recent update about hospitals and post-partum care.

      Do not start too many new activities around the time of delivery. Plan ahead. New job, new house, new domestic help (maid), visitors, change of place – all a strict no-no. Cut the stress, you will anyway be handling too many changes in your life: physiological, hormonal, psychological and social. You will be cut from the couples and become part of parents’ clique J, are you ready for that? Through it all, remember, you have to be happy for the baby – it rubs off, you know.

9)      Lastly, and very importantly, don’t become yet another boring mom. Other people are not interested in your child, so please don’t flaunt his developmental milestones to every visitor or friend. Save it for hubby . He is bound to you by holy matrimony J and being a co-parent, will share your pride and not hate you for the drivel.

Hope this helps. The above are from personal experience. And yes, I am guilty of not following ALL of the above. You see, nobody sat me down and explained to me the perils of not “preparing” in the real sense of the word. As for you, you lucky woman you, you have this blog!

Happy conception!

When your child is a health foodie

I never thought fostering good eating habits in my child would spell T-R-O-U-B-L-E  for me. My child is going to be four soon. I have been struggling since his toddlerhood to have him eat chips, fries, burgers, noodles, chivda, in fact, any ready-to-eat food. And let’s not even mention restaurants. Sigh! It means this. Since A started solids, I am pretty much cooking every meal for him at home, be it a snack or a square meal. Would you please excuse me a moment while I inject another shot of energy boosters into my very, very, and if you still didn’t get it, VERY tired self?

My paediatrician loves to wag a finger at me. What a wacko mum. Your child refuses to eat junk and you WANT him to? Birthday parties, doc. I tell her. And eating out. You see my problem areas?

My child is one of the less known tribe of anti-junk crusaders who feels completely out of place at McDonald’s. Can you imagine that? I mean, what about Happy Meals?  Sigh! Oh, and did I mention? He is vegetarian by choice since birth. He can smell eggs from a mile, mutton and chicken are “yucky” and fish are for Nigel the Pelican (from Nemo).

To sum it up, sonny eats anything that looks homemade. Like dal, rice, sabzi, chappatis, rotis, parathas, well, you get the picture.

I guess there are advantages of having a vegetarian non-junkie child at home. He makes sure we only go to healthy restaurants J.

Some useful links for mothers grappling with vegetarian babies :

Infancy first-foods:

 http://www.babycenter.in/baby/startingsolids/vegetarianbaby/

For children aged 1 to 5:

http://www.vegsoc.org/info/childre1.html                                                    

Dear Mr Manmohan Singh and Mr Shivraj Patil,

We don’t want a resignation. We are not looking for a fall guy. We want an agenda. We want you to tell us how you will implement it.

Quitting doesn’t solve our problems. Make it up to us.

Don’t quit. CHANGE the security system!

Start acting tough Congress. Unfortunately we can only talk to you since you are at the helm of affairs.

If you don’t do it now, you never will.

“I do.”

With these two words, the Protestant man and wife are happily bound in holy matrimony, blessed by the church and their loved ones.

The Protestant wedding ritual is very similar to its Catholic counterpart. The Protestant sect, however, has absorbed a lot of Indian customs and traditions into its wedding ceremony. One such custom that is significantly manifest is that of the groom tying the mangalsutra, the Indian marriage ornament worn by married women, around the bride’s neck.

Although there are many sub-sects within the Protestant community, the Anglicans are believed to be the origingal breakaways from the Catholic church. Most of the rituals mentioned here are therefore those followed by the Anglicans.

Before the wedding

Protestant weddings require both the bride and groom to have been baptised and have received the Holy Communion – the two sacraments that are basic to every Protestant. The Anglican marriage itself takes place in the order of the betrothal, banns, consent and wedding.

The traditional Anglican Protestant wedding is preceded by the betrothal or engagement ceremony. This is held in the presence of a priest and relatives of the to-be-weds. The priest blesses the couple and declares the formal engagement. Engagement rings are not mandatory, though there are some motifs that are exchanged. This ceremony is subject to the native rituals of the couple’s land of origin. For example, Maharashtrian Protestants have a haldi (turmeric) ceremony with the application and exchange of the auspicious turmeric between the bride and groom. Clothes and jewellery are also exchanged between the two families. The engagement is later officially recorded in church.

The church announces the banns (wedding announcement) three Sundays prior to the wedding date. Within this period, any person known to either of the couple can voice his objection to the marriage, if any. In case such an objection is expressed, the wedding date is postponed till the time the issue is resolved amicably among the families.

The Protestant wedding ritual

The wedding itself is marked by a lot of Hindu characteristics. The bride wears a white wedding gown or a white saree with the traditional veil. The saree is typical of native traditional attire such as a kasavu for Keralite Protestants, kanjeevaram for Tamil Protestants and so on. The groom sports a suit, but may wear a dhoti if a Maharashtrian, a mundu, if a Malayali, and so on. Native ethnicity marks the rituals.

The father of the bride escorts the bride to the altar and groom. The priest performs the perfunctory Order of Service and asks for the consent of all those assembled after which he declares the couple man and wife. Wedding rings are put on, and often, the groom ties the mangalsutra around the bride’s neck. The newlyweds walk out of church together to a happy tune from the church organist, who hopefully offers a variation for every wedding!

The merriment starts only now. A grand reception usually follows the wedding and is held in the evening. Music, dance and wine are integral to the celebrations. Subject to native customs, plenty of couple games are played beginning the newlyweds’ lives on a fun note. Brief speeches and toasts are raised with anecdotes from family and friends who recount memories from the couple’s past, adding to the gaiety. All these go into making the day a delightful episode, to be treasured for life.

Protestant families incorporate traditional Hindu motifs of the coconut, turmeric, saffron rice (akshata) and native attire such as sarees and mundus or dhotis (traditional lower torso garment draped at the waist by Indian males). Vows, rituals, music, motifs and blessings – most weddings are made of these, underlying what a wedding really boils down to: tradition.

Different Protestant Norms

Protestants in India have sub-sects of Marthomites, Jacobites, Methodists, Anglicans, and so on, following slightly different sets of Biblical principles. Most variations are seen in pre-wedding customs whereas fewer variations are in the wedding ritual itself.

The Marthomite brides for example, don’t wear a veil. Instead, they cover their heads with their saree pallu or a piece of cloth. Once married, they cover their heads whenever in church. It is mandatory for them to wear a tali or mangalsutra, braided with seven threads from the saree gifted by the groom’s family during the wedding. Some sets even shower the akshata after the wedding, though this is done outside the church. The engagement ceremony isn’t recorded in Methodist churches, but is mandatorily recorded in the Anglican church.

Even though some customs differ, the basic Order of Service of Marriage remains the same for all Protestants.

Zeroing in on the right daycare/ preschool for my child turned out to be a tougher proposition than expected. There were at least five that looked as “international” as the new buzz word would allow! On closer scrutiny, the only commonality seemed to be the scent of money via the “international preschool” route.

Get past the hoardings, the hype, the badly acquired accents and the constant badgering marketers, and you find a school structure put together in no time, staff piled on without checking credentials, helpers who are barely trained and hapless children slipping into a state of psychological orphancy. Unwanted at home by working parents and treated as a tiresome package of needs at daycare, many toddlers seem to be getting alienated from the feeling of security that a “family” offers.

The reasons working parents like me turn to daycare could be many, from absence of elders at home or simply to provide a lively activity group for a toddler to spend time at.

I have personally done a sting operation at several daycare/ preschools to check how the staff handles kids. This was two years ago, so the situation may have changed.  Shemrock, Kara, Little Elly, Eurokids and India International were the closest. This is what I found at all the centres.

a)      Trained staff/ helpers/ ayahs as we call them were in short supply. As a result most daycares recruited people ill-suited to handling children appropriately. When I say appropriately, I mean with consciousness of hygiene, basic child psychology, love and the wisdom of a mother. I have witnessed helpers using unsuitable language, threatening sobbing children to “finish meals or mummy won’t come to pick you up”, even pinching some children under the table. I have also seen helpers holding children’s hands and doing activities like colouring themselves while the child is busy with other things.

b)      Spaces are too small and cramped for large numbers of children.

c)       Curriculum/ activities are either not planned in advance or not adhered to. Nobody seems accountable for this, including the teacher.

d)      Communication is weak between daycare and parents. Sadly, very often, parents are working and unable to find time to check on the progress and well-being of their children at daycare. They therefore find communication a waste of time and feel confident the child will get by somehow.

e)      The owner of the daycare is very infrequent with supervision of the centre.

This last, would really help.

My child went to Kara, purely because it was part of an international body, claimed to follow the same standards and I loved the helpers from the start. The problems seemed tiny at first, but were indicative of a pattern – a pattern of apathy for the same sensitivity to standards that Kara seemed to advertise in the first place.

The helpers, I must admit, were the best I have seen in any other daycare. My child still remembers them fondly, god bless them!

Coming back to the problems – Kara overshot the batch size and things seemed set to continue that way till a few of us got together and asked for more staff. We even asked for one teacher to be changed for her rude conduct, nasty comments to children’s innocent questions and her habit of ridiculing the shy, quiet ones.

Kara’s snack time was an unhygienic affair with children being offered scoops of the snack in the palms of their hands from one bowl. Curriculum was never handed out to the parents, and the owner – a British lady Katherine – never replied to emails, although on paper, we were always encouraged to write. Weekly activities were supposed to be put up in a timetable for all parents to see, but was NEVER done for the entire year. Helpers were doing children’s activities, which showed too, with the poor English sentences describing the work. For most part of the year, children slept on rubber mats without covers, in spite of repeated requests. Thankfully, I picked up my child before nap time. In spite of charging for evening – the normal day ends at 3.30 pm – Kara did not conduct any activities in the evening for toddlers; after the teachers left, the children were left pretty much to themselves, sitting around, waiting for parents to come pick them up. The school administrator is an angel by the name Meenuji. But there is only so much she can do, without help from the lady running the school.

I wonder sometimes if the poor standards maintained, in spite of the ‘international’ label in most daycares has something to do with the Indian psyche.

Everything in India is chalta hai. We are so bad at implementing quality standards ourselves, we don’t ask for it outside our homes either. People get away with anything – from holding huge rallies, driving recklessly, disregarding traffic rules, littering streets, charging bribes, paying bribes, to stuffing 25 children in a room fit to hold 12.

Maybe we need more Montessori schools. But then again, how many of us know that genuine Montessori accredited preschools in Bangalore are, but a few?

What are our choices? Are we guilty of promoting an acceptance of Indianised international standards only because we are “busy”, double-income, working families? Can we call ourselves a family at all?

Over time, I have learnt that the best meter to gauge a child’s comfort level at school is his eagerness to go at all. Today, my child is no longer at Kara (thank God) and looks forward to go to preschool. The simplest question to ask is, “Honey, do you want to go to school?” When your child answers, think about it.

Indian Marriages

India is a country with as many spoken dialects as there are communities, with unique rituals for every occasion. Any surprise then, that marriage is itself a unique affair across the thousands of tribes, communities and religions that make up India?

Though primarily serving as society’s seal of approval, marriage imparts a ring of finality to a couple’s decision to be companions for life. What are universal are the sanctimony, regard, celebration and happiness that go with it, and the one undeniable fact, that marriage remains one of the most momentous occasions in the life of every wedded couple today.

Here’s looking at some primary marriage rituals among the main communities of India.

The Malayalam Wedding

The Malayalam wedding, believe it or not, is only a 15-minute affair. And although the groom and bride seem very relieved at the brevity of the ritual, it is the poor pundit who really has to tire it out, keeping the agni (fire) burning {in some sects of Malayalis} all through the preceding night.

The Engagement

Like most Hindu marriages, the Malayalam wedding is preceded by the engagement or vivah nischayam ceremony. This is believed to be a half-wedding. It is also an occasion for relatives of the bride and groom to see and approve the match.

The maternal uncles of both sides conduct the ceremony, sitting on either side of an otta valukku (brass lamp). A pundit oversees the proceedings. The groom’s uncle asks the bride’s uncle to give his word of honour, committing towards giving her hand in marriage. A mock consultation follows among the girl’s relatives persuading the uncle to say yes. The bride’s uncle acknowledges, “Nyan vaak taranu (I give my word)”, thrice, thus solemnising the engagement. Congratulations, and sometimes, engagement rings are exchanged.

The date, time and venue of the marriage ceremony are fixed by the pundit in the presence of the elders. A luncheon usually follows the engagement.

The marriage

The wedding day finally dawns accompanied by anticipation and excitement. The pundit performs the Ganapati Homam (Lord Ganesha’s pooja) in front of the holy fire that he’d kept burning all night at the marriage venue. He goes ahead and completes all the wedding rituals accompanied by the relevant mantras before the muhurtham (auspicious time). Next to the agni, a nira para (ancient measuring cylinder for rice) containing a pookuta (coconut flower) and a nila valakku (lamp) is placed. These are traditional motifs signifying a brimming, plentiful life just as the nira para is brimming with flowers – the same that turn into fruit later.

Most such motifs in Hindu rituals symbolise fertility, prosperity and the expectation of future progeny that will complete the family.

The bride arrives first at the venue, since her family hosts the marriage. Her female relatives prepare to welcome the groom’s party. They give away a lemon, a perfumed cotton pod wound on a two-inch stick with zari (shiny lace), rose water and flowers, in welcome to every member of the groom’s party. The groom is personally welcomed by the bride’s eldest sister/ brother and garlanded by the bride’s uncles. Sometimes, each of the bride’s brothers presents the groom with a gold ring. Fireworks signal the beginning of the celebrations and provide, what is perhaps, the only gaiety in the proceedings.

The groom’s sister gifts the bride with the traditional kanjeevaram wedding saree to change into. In some Malayali sub-sects, the saree is given after the tali (necklace worn by married Hindu women) ritual. The groom’s female relatives then take away the bride to dress her up in finery and the gifted saree. Nowadays though, the dressing up ritual is just a namesake since the bride comes dressed in her best straight from the parlour!

The bride is then escorted back to the mandapa (marriage venue built around the holy fire, usually constructed with coconut fronds and banana stems).

The wedding ceremony starts with the unwed girls among the guests circling the mandapa once, carrying plates decorated with diyas (earthen lamps) lit in til (mustard) oil,  coconuts, turmeric sticks and flowers. The ritual marks the next in line for marriage, so that those assembled can look at prospective brides, much like the “coming out” ritual followed in Britain’s Victorian age. The ritual also symbolises the blessings of the virgin womenfolk, as theirs is the womb that will bear the Malayalis their next generation. So also symbolic are the motifs of coconut for fertility, turmeric for purity and cleansing and the diyas signaling a new life.

The bride now enters the mandapa after paying respects to the bhoomi (soil) and takes her place in front of the agni and nira para. The groom follows. The pundit announces the muhurtham for the tali mala (mangalsutra) to be tied. After being garlanded by the bride, the groom ties the tali mala around the bride’s neck. Sometimes rings are exchanged. The groom then garlands the bride.

The bride’s father steps forward to give her away. The groom leads the bride by holding her hand, to circle the agni and nira para thrice. The assembly showers akshata (saffron rice) in blessing over the wedded couple. The bride and groom are now a couple. A reception is sometimes hosted by the groom’s side the next day or so.

We can understand the smugness of the Malayali at the end of it all, happy no doubt with the sheer brevity of the ritual – possibly the shortest of all Hindu marriages!

So if you catch a Malayali recalling his treasured wedding moments, you can be sure they were exactly that – moments.

The Malayali lunch menu

Traditional Malayali marriage fare comprises many compulsory dishes, typically:

White rice, sambar, parippu-nai-papada (dal-ghee-papad), pulissari (curd- based curry), avial (vegetables with coconut base), two or three toran (dry vegetables), upperi (banana chips), sakkaravarati  (chips with jaggery), inji curry (ginger curry), lemon curry, olan (black gram curry), kalan (raw banana curry), pachadi (white pumpkin chutney in curd), khichdi curry (tomato in curd), two or three types of payasam (sweetened milk dessert) – mostly the ada pradhaman kheer (made with maida and coconut) as a must, mango pickle and mor (buttermilk) to wash it down with. Burp!

Most communities use vegetables, fruits and seasoning that is available in plenty locally to flavour wedding banquets. Coconuts and bananas are therefore integral to a Kerala meal.