Kavya : Can we go live in the white house ?

Last night, Kavya got a book about Presidents to read as part of her night-time routine. The book had a picture of White House on it. So, Gaurav was explaining to her that the house is called White House and it is in Washington DC which is capital of US, etc etc. Before he could tell her all the details, Kavya interrupted and asked "Can we go live in the White House ?" Gaurav and I both burst out laughing.

Gaurav responded "Sure, if you ever become President of US then you can go and live there." She probably didn't understand it much.

Innocent and funny question :)

Little Kavya is not that little any more :(

I remember little Kavya when she was 2 or 3 years old.. she was so cute and filled with innocence. Now that she will be almost 5, I can totally feel that she is growing up and becoming an individual with her own temperament, thoughts, opinions and attitude.

In whatever we do, she has lots of questions and also an opinion on how and what to do. She also wants to pick her own clothes to wear with matching pins/rubber bands and socks. Sometimes, she also wants to help me pick my clothes and ear rings :)

Lately, if I ask her to get something for me, she retorts "Who needs it ? you or me? Since you want it, you go get it!"

It is also not easy any more to just make up something and convince her. She needs more reasoning and she understands it all. She gets mad if you don't listen to her and makes faces as well. Often times, she is lost in her own thoughts or action or may be just because, and does not listen or pay attention to what you are saying. Her school teacher had also mentioned this in our last meeting.

What's funny is that now she helps me to convince / threaten Ishaan by making up stuff. If Ishaan is not eating or doing some mischief, I tell him that cops will come.. and Kavya will actually pretend that she is calling cops or will knock on the door/wall suggesting that cops are here :) While that helps, I am not sure if that is good :)

The big problem is that while she understands lot of things, she does not understand or cannot interpret everything. For example, we teach her not call other names. Then other day, I was just calling her cute names... and she immediately complained to me "Mommy, you are calling me names". I tried to explain her that these are cute names, something I am using out of love. But she failed to understand.

When kids are small, we often wonder when will they grow up.Now that I see my little girl is growing up, I miss those golden days of innocence. I want my little innocent Kavya back :)

Love Garbage truck - but not garbage uncle !!

There is something about garbage truck that fascinates kids. When Kavya was little, she was initially afraid of the big truck, but then she was fascinated by it and every time she would hear the noise of the truck, she will want to look out of the window and watch the truck collect garbage. Ishaan is the same way at this age. He just loves garbage truck. He has a dump truck that he calls as garbage truck and moves it along saying "Kachro leva" (Truck has come to collect garbage).

While both the kids loved garbage truck, they don't like the garbage uncle character. When Kavya was little, we used to tell her that garbage uncle will come if she didn't do xyz.. or listen to us.. and she would then listen to us. Its the same thing with Ishaan now. He thinks (or may be we might have told him) that garbage uncle will throw him with the trash. So, he is just as much afraid of garbage uncle as he is of the cops :)

It didn't work for too long with Kavya(may be couple of months). Lets see how long does the fear of garbage uncle works with Ishaan :)

Kavya has become very creative..

Lately, Kavya's creativity has increased a lot.

She builds different things with the small legos on her own. One day when she showed me something she had built, I asked her to go build a tree and I figured that would keep her busy for some time :-). However, just 3-4 mins later, she came back to me with a very nice tree made out of lego.. And I was just WOWed by it.

She is also doing a great job at drawing. She has a whole bunch of drawings put up on the wall - she just loves to stick everything she makes on the wall with a tape. Each of those drawing represent a particular item/action. She just draws them directly with crayons and then colors in it. After she finishes her drawing, she explains us what she drew and waits for us to say "Wow.. good job, Kavya !!" :)

One other thing that took us by surprise almost a month back was when she prepared a bunch of different activities on her own. She likes doing the different activities like connect the dots, find the differences, arrange in right order, etc in her books. So, one fine weekend morning, she decided to make up her own activity on a sheet of paper. The activities she drew were to figure out the right path to something, which two of the few items were same, jumbled up letters of simple words like CAT, AMI and then figuring out the correct way, something about a frog jumping on heart shaped and numbered lily pads to get to somewhere, etc.
When she showed and explained it to us, we were just, WOW. Gaurav and I looked at each other and felt really happy and proud of our little girl !!