arathi's space

Adi had an educational trip to ParleG factory. The same morning we received news that his great grand mom expired and we had to go visit. He did not take the news well. He did not like the fact that he would be missing out on his school trip. Unable to handle his crying we called his grand dad and asked him to talk to Adi.

Surprisingly they wound up with a few sentences...

Grand Dad: Adi , My Aunt expired.
Adi : Is it? When? How? What happened?
Grand Dad: ........ Can you come.
Adi: Ok.

This was the end of it. He never brought up the topic again. One thing he made clear though was that he wanted to be back for Christmas party the next day. Today morning my maid reminded him about his missed excursion. All he had to say was "Please do not talk about it".

Adi wanted to go for a movie. Since there was no specific movies for children running, i asked him if he wanted to watch Paa. Quickly ran him through the story and he sounded pretty interested. So we went to Paa yesterday. Though Adi already knew that the kid had a disease that made him age faster, it was very hard to take for him. Initially there were lots of questions about what Progenia is and how a kid gets it.When I described Genes and DNA. His question was "Do I have DNA? If so, will I get it?". Convincing him that he will not get progenia went on for a while.

He was pretty loud. For one of his questions, someone 4 rows away gave an answer :-)

Then he transitioned to complaining that he does not follow the dialogues as he does not know hindi. Then it was time for the interval and we had popcorn. He was very possessive about the pop corn and was giving me continuous instructions that i should not finish it.

Towards the end of the movie - the auro was dying and this had a huge impact on Adi. He started saying that he was feeling weird and this was not at all a good movie.

Adi is participating in some dance program for his annual day. I make him practice at home and it is pretty funny :-)

Adi has been extremely sweet/adorable/well behaved. For the last month and half it has been very consistent. I strongly think this is because we are also very conscious of how he wants us to treat him and try to stick to it.

That reminds me of the day when we were shell shocked to see him misbehave. I hope I will never forget that day and use that as a reminder to myself about how he expects us to behave with him.

We were on a vacation with my sisters family. My sister has two girls who were completing their home work. Since Adi had nothing else to do, i gave him a piece of paper and asked him to write something. He was in no mood to do it. So he was giving me lots of excuses. He pushed me to a point where i got really irritated and i physically lifted him, put him on a chair and asked him to write. He was taken aback. He was ill treated in front of others. He walked out of the room Yelling "I don't want you. I am going .... YOU STUPID" . When we followed him to the door, he was standing there literally shivering with anger. Senthil lost it at this point and this turned out to be a pretty nasty experience for all of us.

But this reiterated the point that we have to respect our kids like we respect any other adult in the world. They may be little and helpless but they have an adult's mind and they expect to be treated well.

We have not repeated this since then and I hope we will never repeat it.