Siriajja

Hi There,

Remember Siriajja? I had told you about him in the last post. He is amma's father. He is my best friend now. Every morning he takes me out for a quick walk and a sun bath. He keeps telling that early morning sunlight is good for my health.

Siriajja's day starts very early in the morning (last stage of my night :-)) He gets up and has his morning tea (Indian Style with lot of milk and sugar) and goes for a walk in our complex. By the time he finishes his walk and takes some rest, I am ready for him. He entertains me all morning. He helps Ammamma (ajji) when she gives me my daily bath (boo hoo... I cry a lot during the bath).

Do you want to listen to the funny part? Siriajja calls me by so many names. All I had heard was putta, pitta, anna, ranga from appa and amma. Suddenly Siriajja calls me Somesh. That is cute! I liked that name too. Then suddenly I hear him calling me "jinke mari".

Siriajja was busy practicing for a solo performance all of last week. We all went to see the performance. They called my name and dedicated the performance to me. I had to give something back in retun. I tried giving some background music to the performance. Then ammamma put the bottle in my mouth. I fell asleep slurping my food..... yawn yawn. feeling sleepy now. more later okay?

Bye now.

Legend:
Ajja - Grandfather
Ammamma or Ajji - Grandmother

My Cradle Ceremony

Hi There,

Now I have a name and I am able to write myself. I know my dad wrote the first post but I take over from now on. This is the age of connectedness and of community and I want to be part of this as quickly as I can.

On 11th day after I was born, there was this cradle ceremony where I was dressed in traditional dress. Leela Ajji did the the difficult bottom part of the dress and my mother had stitched the top even before I was born ( psst. I was trying to make it hard for her to guess my size but she beat me to it). Anyways lot of people came that evening and I enjoyed the company.

The cradle was decorated and the house was gleaming clean thanks to the effort of Ammamma and Siriajja (Ajja from Sirimane - you know who keeps telling me good stories all the time and keeps watching over me when I am asleep). I like Siriajja very much. He comes up with these names for me all the time. More on that later. Back to the cradle ceremony. House was decorated, I was decorated and mom wore a nice sari and folks gathered in the evening.

Lot of amma's friends, Leela Ajji and her children and surprisingly folks from West coast - entire family of Ram Manohar Ajja came to visit me. That was so cool...

Cradle ceremony is an introduction for me to sleep alone in my own space (Myspace ???). Gundappa went first and then it was my turn to go over and under the cradle in circles three times before I was put on the bed. All that warmth of folks waiting to lift me sizzled out as soon as I was on the bed. I tried to sleep but there was too many things not to miss. So I enjoyed everyone's company. Many people gave me gifts too. Oo La La. I am waiting for papa to open them up and assemble some of them.

Let's talk about Siriajja in next post okay?

Bye Bye
Saaranga

Legend:

Amma - mother

appa - father

Ajja - Grandfather

Ajji, Ammamma - Grandmother

Gundappa - an imaginary person supposed to take away bad omen

XXX - Week 1

Hi there,

I wanted to start posting my own blogs for quite some time now. The perfect opportunity has arrived with the addition of a new member to our family. Our wait for 9 months is finally over. Bhramari delivered a healthy baby boy on June 22nd at 2:18PM Eastern Time.

It is just amazing to see a new born in the first couple of hours. The first weighing, wash and the Mohawk hair style etc. were very good opportunities for me to experiment on my new digital SLR camera as well. I thanked the nurse profusely for the hairstyle. Our boy looked really cute in it.

You might be wondering why the XXX in the title. We did not know whether we were having a baby boy or girl but unlike most parents, we did not finalize the names. So there we were left wondering what to name our son.

Our logic was simple, name must be unique ( uh! that was simple?), must start from S and must be easy to spell and pronounce. Bhramari's father helped a lot and started to short list a series of names. We finally settled on Saaranga. Don't know whether he will like it or not. But name has all angles to it, common, cultural and philosophical meaning - Common meaning is Deer, philosophically it is Lord Krishna's Bow and we have a raaga called Saaranga in Carnatic Classical music.

He is healthy, at home now, peacefully sleeping for 18 hours, making us change his diapers multiple time and crying whenever he is hungry. We are going to put him onto his cradle on Monday 7/2. I will share more details and photos in the next version...

Ciao.