My father never imposed his will on both my sister or me. We were free to choose the school we wanted to go to - Rosary School, which was 15 Kms away from where we lived as opposed to St Ursula, Nigdi, which was just four kms away. The courses we chose while in college and the people we chose to become. I am pretty damn sure he would have been happier if I had joined Telco instead of a startup and if my sister would have studied to be a engineer. I can only begin to imagine how he managed those thousands he required to let us imagine what we wanted, for the hundreds of books I bought and for the subscriptions and the flights of fancy he funded. For a man limited by his own need to be free, he seemed to have a sense of what was good and what was not.
I have tried to emulate him in the last 4 years and 8 months. My daughter is allowed to break things, tear up newspapers, paint the floor, play in the mud and act like an excited puppy. She has discovered books she likes and things she wants to do. Has begun to draw Dragons ( her favourite ) and choose the movies she wants to watch. She helps me fine tune the nursery rhyme she will recite at school - Her contribution to Grey Squirrel - a poem she chose when we browsed together for things that would be interesting for her. When we found a little poem Grey Squirrel interesting but just a bit too short, she helped in adding the lines by about how the grey squirrel runs up the trees so tall but never ever falls.
Sundays are the days when I pretend I can coax a little bit of baking out of a 5 year old convection microwave oven. Influenced by Nigella and Racheal Allen and an overdose of the TLC channel, I involve her in the baking. So far she has sat patiently and asked questions on why eggs need to be added and why milk and butter and sugar need to be beaten and has helped in sifting flour - plain old atta - with baking powder and cocoa powder and has stood around watching the final product rise slowly and brown and then pestered me for a slice even before the cake has cooled.
This sunday we got a little ambitious and allowed Tamara to bake her own cake. While I grated apples and ground cinnamon for a light apple cinnamon cake, she mixed the flour with a bit of oats and then with cocoa powder and then added butter and sugar and milk and whisked up a sticky gooey slop. She patiently mixed and mixed and mixed and finally decided that it needed an egg - I had to help get the egg out of the shell and into her pan. Thereafter she mixed it further to make a fine mess, which she called a mud pie. I had to convince her to allow me to use an handblender and sprinkle a few raisins into it just for some fun :).
We baked it in a tin she buttered and dusted - it had more flour than required but then she will learn as she goes along. And along came a cake that was nice - nice for a almost 5 year old. The forty minutes were agonized over why the cake is not jumping and if the eggs would break or if there is a possibility of an omlette instead of the cake.
After 45 minutes we had a springy moist dense cake, we decided not to wait for the cake to cool ( as usual) and sliced it and smothered it with some more chocolate 'sauce' and gobbled it up
The cinnamon cake I baked in her words was ok :(
I have tried to emulate him in the last 4 years and 8 months. My daughter is allowed to break things, tear up newspapers, paint the floor, play in the mud and act like an excited puppy. She has discovered books she likes and things she wants to do. Has begun to draw Dragons ( her favourite ) and choose the movies she wants to watch. She helps me fine tune the nursery rhyme she will recite at school - Her contribution to Grey Squirrel - a poem she chose when we browsed together for things that would be interesting for her. When we found a little poem Grey Squirrel interesting but just a bit too short, she helped in adding the lines by about how the grey squirrel runs up the trees so tall but never ever falls.
Sundays are the days when I pretend I can coax a little bit of baking out of a 5 year old convection microwave oven. Influenced by Nigella and Racheal Allen and an overdose of the TLC channel, I involve her in the baking. So far she has sat patiently and asked questions on why eggs need to be added and why milk and butter and sugar need to be beaten and has helped in sifting flour - plain old atta - with baking powder and cocoa powder and has stood around watching the final product rise slowly and brown and then pestered me for a slice even before the cake has cooled.
This sunday we got a little ambitious and allowed Tamara to bake her own cake. While I grated apples and ground cinnamon for a light apple cinnamon cake, she mixed the flour with a bit of oats and then with cocoa powder and then added butter and sugar and milk and whisked up a sticky gooey slop. She patiently mixed and mixed and mixed and finally decided that it needed an egg - I had to help get the egg out of the shell and into her pan. Thereafter she mixed it further to make a fine mess, which she called a mud pie. I had to convince her to allow me to use an handblender and sprinkle a few raisins into it just for some fun :).
We baked it in a tin she buttered and dusted - it had more flour than required but then she will learn as she goes along. And along came a cake that was nice - nice for a almost 5 year old. The forty minutes were agonized over why the cake is not jumping and if the eggs would break or if there is a possibility of an omlette instead of the cake.
After 45 minutes we had a springy moist dense cake, we decided not to wait for the cake to cool ( as usual) and sliced it and smothered it with some more chocolate 'sauce' and gobbled it up
The cinnamon cake I baked in her words was ok :(
1 comment:
Nice to read this blog... I enjoyed :)
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