Skip to main content

Two Questions

J's current fascination is around two questions "What is X made of ?" and "What does X come from ?" where X could be a carton of milk, a bag of candy, Mommy, her friend, a house, a tree, broccoli, her hand, the rain - it is not exactly a finite universe.

What is broccoli made of ?I haven't the least idea. It is not something I have ever thought of I guess. However, since J has and there shall be no peace in the household until I get her some semblance of an answer, I Google the question. Nothing turns up that will satisfy J. I tell her about the nutrients in broccoli and why it's good for her. She has a whole host of questions about those facts now. Again I am stumped.

J's line of questioning will change based on my response and will typically drill down to more detail. I always start off saying "Mommy does not know, but she will try to find out". I find myself reading up about things that did not interest or concern me until J made it her life's primary concern.

Recently she wanted to know about what is inside her body. This one was relatively simpler. Looking around, I found a decent site with animation and narration. J is fascinated - she can't have enough of it.

With her very basic and fundamental questions, J makes me feel like a totally incompetent idiot. I realize that I know nothing about anything under the sun - not even the basic two things - what it is constituted of and where it originates from.

Labels:

Comments

Priyamvada_K said…
Hi HC,
J is a cutie indeed. Here's one for you:

Q: What do gnats eat?
A: fungi

Recently asked by my kid at a park. I had to google for that. Thought that may be useful :)

Priya.
10:26 AM
Heartcrossings said…
Hey Priya,

Thanks for the heads-up on gnat-food. I am sure there are many challenges ahead for me. J is in the questioning mode like she's never been before :)

HC
9:16 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more