Puddi's Budday Party

Puddi had the suckiest birthday ever this year - when she grows older, she's gonna give me the evil eye for this! I had been travelling all week on work and got back Thursday evening, pooped and ankles swollen to the size of footballs from all the air travel. Friday, Puddi's birthday, I had to go in to work to check on the piles of emails and other pressing issues that had been building up for the last two weeks. A had his CEO coming in from Mumbai so he had to rush out to work at 8:30.

So after a quick bath to the two kids in the morning, A and I were out the door and gone all day. As luck would have it, my mom's knee had seized up and she was unable to walk when she woke up so dad rushed her to the doctor for a check and physiotherapy and so on, and they were gone all day. So Puddi didn't even get her usual share of cuddles and fun at their place. In the evening, A and I had to go for the ultrasound check-up which was our second Downs' screening, since we had to meet the OB-Gynthe coming saturday and would have no time during the week. So by the time we got home, Puddi was fast asleep, her birthday slipping past as if it had been just any other day, and in fact, worse than an ordinary day, with her grandparents being gone and her parents coming home late.

Last year, her birthday party was on the hottest day of the year - it was 48 degrees C! We had organised the party at a venue outside because we'd just returned from a holiday and the house was still getting put back together. And thanks to the weather, a lot of our guests who had kids of their own didn't dare venture out so the party was a bust, the only good thing being Chubbocks' delight at Mickey Mouse attending the party. Chubbocks was very into Mickey Mouse last year and kept wanting to have him over to play (!) So once A and I had to make a phone call to Chubbocks, with A speaking squeakily, to tell Chubbocks that Mickey was on his way to Disneyland, but not before Chubbocks extracted a promise that Mickey would visit on Puddi's birthday. We hired this guy from a party place whose job was to walk around in the Mickey costume, and the air or whatever his costume was inflated with kept running out so every few minutes a somewhat flatter Mickey would walk out the door and come back looking a few pounds heavier...quite ludicrous but Chubbocks was on fire from the sheer joy of it!

This year, we planned for a small party on Saturday, the day after her birthday. As we had done with Chubbocks, so with Puddi, we decided to keep it family only until she turns four and has friends of her own. So my in-laws came down from Aligarh, and A's aunt and uncle, his cousin and wife and their daughter, and my parents. And of course, our downstairs neighbour who's seen both of our kids since the day they were born and is been super-fond of them. My folks had organised a Puja at Malai Mandir so the kids were fed, bathed and packed off early in the morning, while I got busy cooking a traditional festive meal for lunch with Puddi's favourite saaru-anna and cucumber kosambri, shaavige payasa and fresh homemade ghee. After I was almost through with the cooking, I too rushed to the temple to catch part of the puja and then came home with the two kids.

A and I wanted to take Puddi with us to buy her present and went off to the neighbourhood Landmark store. I was clear I didn't want any Barbie/ Disney Princess stuff so after a lot of lookign around, we picked out a DoodlePro with colour pens which were also eraseable. I didn't think of it at the time but I should have been wary because the last time Puddi got her hands on sketch pens, she created weird indelible patterns over all the cushions and drapes in the playroom, but mommy guilt and love was not making me think clearly at the time. Back home for a quick but enjoyable meal (and how much I relished the taste of good old saaru after two weeks away from home!), and we lay down for a brief nap.

The good thing about calling family over is that one is less stressed out about organising. We had decided to keep the high tea simple, with dhoklas ordered from our favourite sweet shop, as well as small kachoris. The cake was a giraffe ( that's a whole other issue. I wanted a simple square cake with pictures of many animals on top. The cake shop said they couldn't do it so A asked for a dinosaur and finally settled on a giraffe. Then the cake shop said they could only do it for a minimum order of 2 kilos(!!!) which is overkill for 10 people. But finally we just gave up and said ok. Of course, it was disappointing when it came, because the giraffe was brown with dark brown splodges, and they had only made the giraffe's head, not the whole animal...).

Mom had made walnut-almond burfees. And I made Khara Bhaath with vegetables, hot and fresh off the stove.

Puddi has been excited about the Happy Birthday song since Chubbocks' birthday so she was thrilled when we all sang it to her. And she looked like a little princess in the Rajasthani lehnga-blouse my parents had got for her birthday.
She thoroughly enjoyed her share of cake and then fell in love with the Doodlepro and spent the rest of the evening scribbling away, with me wearing out my biceps trying to erase the colour markers ( they are not!!! easy to erase). Puddi and Chubbocks insisted on putting the Pink Panther CD on for the amusement of their cousin and the neighbour's son, and it was a real pleasure to hear the two of them giggling and laughing out loud with each antic of the panther.

Though the day of her birth turned out to be so bland, I think she had a great time the next day to make up for it, and loved all her gifts which included a wooden shape-sorter. And the best part was that the party was small enough to neither overwhelm us nor her and she got to be in the spotlight, which is the main point of a birthday party.