"Aw right! None taken!"

The most frequently used phrases in the Das household this Feb are:

Big girl Raya: “No offense”

Little man Rayan: “Aw right”

The wide variety of notoriously hilarious contexts , these are used in, make the household reverberate with laughter.

Mr. Rayan who used to be a fantastic “sleep through the night baby” since he was almost 3 months old, has suddenly become a night owl, now that he is officially in his twos. He still goes to bed promptly at 8:00 PM , but more than twice a week, he wakes up at the ungodly hour of 2:00 AM, wanting to come to our bed and chit chat or restlessly toss/kick around. And let me tell you, his teenie weenie kicks are brutal. Oh well!!:)

While I love it when he puts his cheek on mine and his arms around my neck in an attempt to put himself back to sleep….there are often times when the restless tossing and kicking around forces me to be a bit terse with him, in the hopes of  getting a reasonable amount of sleep to have a productive working day, when we see the light of dawn !

So I have tried a couple of things in this context. I softly try to coerce him to go back to sleep with, “Rayan, will you please go back to sleep now. We have to wake up early tomorrow”….To that, pat comes his reply, “Aw right, mama”…followed by a few seconds of deceptive quiet and forced closing of eyelids, in an attempt to put himself back to sleep…but sure enough, within a few seconds he is back to the restless tossing and kicking….and then when I try a terse ,”Rayan, go back to sleep right now!” tone…pat comes the reply….”Mama, don’t talk to me like that!!”…..without any attempt at all to go back to sleep…LOL…Oh well… such is motherhood!

Then yesterday, I told Raya, ”Raya…please remind me to do yoga every day. I need to lose weight. I have become a bit fat, right?!”. Pat comes Ms. Raya’s reply, “No offense mama, but yes you have”….Well I just stared at her for a moment…here I was a parent, completely aware of how I should not introduce my kids to issues about body image, and paradoxically expecting some kind of validation from my 6 six year old about my own…well bad parenting, you would say….I realize it and hopefully this will not happen again, but that aside, I realized Raya was waiting for a response to her “No offense…” comment. She waited for a few seconds and then said, “Mama if you did not feel bad about what I just said, you are supposed to reply ‘None taken’….”

I was stunned, burst out into laughter and all I could blurt out was , “Aw right! None taken!”

Then of course, yesterday at the dinner table, Rayan was pointing to some Brussel sprouts, making a face and saying, "I don't like this, mama"...soon enough I saw Raya making the following the hand signal and looking at Rayan:

When I asked her, what that signal meant, she said it means "Me too"!! So essentially I found out I have two kids here who absolutely dislike brussel sprouts and now I know the hand signal to acknowledge and indicate "Me too"! Oh well...

Kids and the lessons they teach us!!