abu & rabad

Now Abu and Rabad are both aware of this blog, and every once in a while, they want to see the site. Abu can actually read the posts with help from us on the more difficult words.

So now, apparently, they want more creative control. If you remember, the title of the last post was dictated by Abu. Now this whole post has gone up on the insistence of Abu.

“Pappa, this story is too funny. You have to put it up in Abu-Rabad site,” he told me a few days back. Partially because I was busy, and partially because I did not really think the story did belong on the site, I did nothing. So today, he asked me again, “Did you put up the story I told you on the Abu-Rabad site?”.

So, here is the story.

We had all gone to a hill station for a vacation with extended family. Abu and Rabad had gone with their cousins for a walk among the hills. n didi is one of the cousins. When they came back, Abu told me,

“Pappa, a funny thing happened. n didi went into the hills and found some shiny stones. After that, she saw a white thing. She thought that thing is a bag. When she picked it up, it was a diaper! Ha ha.” He is giggling even now as he repeats the story to me.

When Rabad found out about this, she insisted that she wanted to see the “white thing”. No amount of persuasion would dissuade her. She rested only after she had made her cousin go back into the hill, and find the diaper, and had said “Eeww.”

Now Abu wants me to print this so he can send it to his friend TQ. “Because he’ll laugh also.”

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“What shall I do now, Pappa?” asked Abu.

In our house, this is usually code for, “Can I watch TV, Pappa.” Of course, he knows that watching too much TV is frowned upon, so he will not directly ask the question. Rather, he asks “What shall I do now.” And if I suggest any thing other than TV, he will say, “No, I don’t want to do that.”

In turn, we keep suggesting more and more non-TV / non-computer things for him to do, in the hope that he will will say “Yes” to one of them.

Anyway, today we started this ritual again:

“What shall I do now, Pappa?” asked Abu.

I definitely did not want to allow him to watch TV, so I asked,

“Do you want to play Monopoly?”

Even he must have gotten bored of saying “No” over and over again, so he got creative this time.

“Pappa,” he said, “in my mind, there is a game, with a circle around it, and a slanting line.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, so I asked him to explain. So, he said,

“Pappa, see. In my mind, there is the game Monopoly” - at this point he gestured in the air with his hands, drawing a square, and continued, “and around that game, there is a circle.” And he drew a big circle around the imaginary Monopoly he had just drawn. “And then there is a slash,” and he slashed the air, pretty much smashing the imaginary monopoly.

I believe, what he had in his mind, was this:

“That means, no Monopoly,” he explained.

So instead of playing Monopoly, or watching TV, we sat together, photoshopped the above image, and composed this blog post. Problem solved!

(By the way, the title of this post has been suggested by Abu. Also, he corrected some of the dialogue, “That’s not what I said, Pappa. I said … etc.“)

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Abu is a big fan of stories and story books. Harry Potter (he knows the names of all 7 books), Dinosaurs (he can recognize more dinosaurs from their photos than I can), Indian Mythology (Ram, Sita, Krishna, and now the dash-avatar). In fact, as part of bedtime reading over the last year or so, meetu and I have read the entire “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” (without skipping anything) to him, and now we are no Chapter 5 of “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets”.

Recently he has gotten interested in writing his stories. He has a little four-line notebook in which he writes stories, one page at a time. The first story, is called “Hanuman’s story”, and spans seven pages. He has just finished his second story, “Sita’s story”, which I haven’t read yet. 

He sits by himself and writes the story. Whenever he gets stuck on the spelling of some word, he asks meetu or me, and we help out. But sometimes he thinks he knows the spelling and goes ahead without asking us. Those are left as they are in the text below, as an exercise for the motivated reader to figure out what Abu was trying to say.

Other than help with spellings, everything else is by Abu. All the sentence constructions and punctuation are his. He understands a little about periods (”full stop”) at the end of a sentence, but not entirely as you can see below. As you will see, he hasn’t yet heard of the comma.

Anyway, on to the story:

Ram and Sita both were married to each other. Then Ravan kidnapped Sita. Then Ram got his little brother Laxman to help him to find

Sita. They went looking for Sugreev to help find Sita. Instead they found Hanuman, he took Ram and Laxman on his shoulders and he took them to Sugreev.

Sugreev said will you help me kill Bali. Ram said I will if you help me find Sita yes I will help you find Sita so Ram killed Bali and they went to find

Sita. They went and went and they made a brij and they went across it they went and they killed Ravan and they came home. Then Ram too Saita home.

Then Sita gave Hanuman a pearl necklace to sea thank you. He broke the pearls. Sita asked why are you breaking the pearls because I have to see Ram and Sita’s photo in all the

gift I get. Sita said if there is no photo of Ram & Sita in your chest will you break your chest so he opened his chest and there was Ram & Sita’s photo in it so he laft his hand and. Holes

had vanished and every body was happy.

the end

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Rabad loves drawing and coloring. She goes to a drawing class three times a week, where they teach her how to copy drawings made by her teacher and then color them with crayons. Even otherwise, she spends a lot of time drawing or coloring - with crayons, sketch pens, or water colors. She can literally spend hours doing this. 

Disney's Mermaid - Crayons on wipe-off white sheet

Sometimes she just colors inside an existing picture, like this one of Disney’s little mermaid. This was impressive because the picture is actually huge - maybe 3-1/2 feet by 2-1/2 feet. And she wasn’t satisfied until she had finished coloring the whole thing.

Then there’s this example of a picture that she drew herself and then colored.

House, Temple and Hills - Sketch pens on paper

But more often these days, she skips the drawing part and simply starts coloring - like the next two pictures.

Abstract Painting - Orange and Blue - sketch pens

and

Abstract Painting - Blue and Green - Water colors

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