Nostalgia...!!!

Its Diwali today. While almost everyone out here is busy celebrating this festival of lights, half of my family is asleep and I am writing this post at 22:45 PM in the night wondering about how somber has Diwali been to us this year. Yes, we are not into celebrations today as we faced an unfortunate death of one of our uncles five days back. He was 72 years old with poor health conditions, however his sudden passing away has created a wave of grief among everyone of us. May his soul rest in peace; that is all what I can think of right now. Nevertheless, life moves on and we do have too whether we want or not.

Its quite gloomy here inside and my thoughts are constantly drifting in the past. Exactly one year back, on the day of Diwali, I was in Pune, with my dear Yog. I very well remember the sequence of events that occurred that day.  I was around 9-10 weeks pregnant, hence we did not go to our hometown as travelling was not advisable.  We woke up at sharp 5:00 AM in the morning, not for Diwali preparations, but to watch first day-first show of RA-ONE. Yog is extremely crazy about SRK and leaving the movie that too while in Pune was not at all affordable to him at any cost. Hence, I had no other choice than to accompany him. I wont say that I did not enjoy the movie at all. I actually felt quite good after watching it back then and a lot better today as it has become one of my most memorable moments and occupied a space in my blog. A ton of thanks to Yog for this. We also had one of our friends Mayuri with us that day, so it was whole lot of fun and happiness together.

After coming back from the movie, we busied ourselves with the preparations. Its unbelievable, but true - I had spent more than 3 hours just to prepare a single rangoli leaving the cooking task for my super cook husband. Did I mention anywhere in my blog that Yog is an expert cook? If not, let me mention that you will be completely spellbound once you taste his food. So, while I finished the Rangoli, our lunch was ready after which we headed off to a market nearby to buy diwali lamps and few other pooja related stuff. Rest of the day went quite fast while we did preparations followed by Laxmi pooja. All three of us were so tired by end of the day that after having dinner, no one had the energy to play firecrackers and hence, we opted to stay inside the house and watch Television. It was a perfect evening till the time one of our relatives called us and said to clean the used utensils which is not considered a good sign otherwise. The next moment all three of us were in the kitchen - washing the utensils which were unfortunately in huge quantity that day :)

Watching RA-ONE..

Busy with Rangoli...

Diwali Pooja...

Distasteful...!!!

Aarav has turned 6 months and now its time for me to introduce semi-solids to him. For the past 6 months, I was impatiently waiting for this day when I would be giving lots of varieties of food to him. However, I did not imagine that it would be a pretty tough task, not because he is not accepting the semi-solids, but because I am confused about what different varieties of food should I prepare for him. Initially I gave him clear fluids and was surprised to find that Aarav enjoyed it a lot. But now its time for semi-solids and I find myself thinking about the menu everyday. Though I know that a 6-months baby would have no more than 5-6 spoons, but still preparing even that much keeps your mind busy all the time, especially when you have to think about new varieties in order to develop your little one's interest in foods. So today I thought to give some change to Aarav, afterall he must be bored of Cerelac and Apple puree for the past few days. Today, I had enthusiastically prepared mashed potatoes with fresh coriander, believing that he will surely love it. But all my excitement ended when I saw him making as worst face as possible at the very first morsel. I could not find the reason why he did not like it as I tasted the same first and found it not quite bad. The only other reason could be there was no salt or any other tastemaker in the potato puree which sounds a bit distasteful I agree, but salt/sugar is unadvisable for infants till they turn 1 year. Seems, Aarav is going to be quite specific about his food choices once he grows up. However, my sweetheart did not let my efforts go to waste completely. He had atleast 6-7 tiny morsels of the puree (though with a bad expression on the face each time) and this gave me a chance to know how his body adapts to potatoes and coriander. After all, he is in his testing phase. This is how he looked when he was having his food today :-