Iss raat ki subah nehi

*Mummy type post

Now we had the morning after. I was with my VIP all the while waiting for Daddad to come back. The day went in a flurry of activities with calls, checkups, visits from S and B who were really helpful. Finally through it all came the dreaded hour of 2130. 2200 was the deadline till which visitors were allowed in the ward. K bid me goodbye at 2200 sharp. Yes even if you have a new baby in hand and have been through a life changing episode barely 24 hours ago, you are supposed to fend for yourself through the night all alone. 

As K left I was left alone in a ward with 4 other women with their newborns. Our pains, fears, joys, anxieties were separated by curtains. So though we could not see each other we could sense what the other person was doing. There was one lady whose kid was having difficulty feeding and she was a bit perturbed and was having repeated checks done by the doctors. She was recommended to have a pediatrician visit her in the morning. There was yet another lady who was snoring through - I was a bit baffled as to how did her baby let her sleep! :) Yet another lady was wheeled in the last moment. Her spirit was simply contagious. She was chirping around. She was asking questions and responding with such enthusiasm. Really hats off to her energy and vivaciousness. 

As for me, I was with a really fussy Chiyaa. She was just not  happy in the baby basket. I was getting sleepy and exhausted. But seeing no other go, I kept her with me and tried dozing. A couple of nurses came over and helped a bit in taking her for sometime while I literally caught forty winks. The night was sooooooo dreadfully long. I kept staring at the watch. Minutes were passing slower than a snail on sleeping pills. Grrrr... I tried calling my mom and passed some time. Ashu too called and made some minutes roll by. Since it was not 'allowed' to use phones before 0600 in the ward, I was not forthcoming in going on jabbering through the night. There was the 'baby symphony' too. One baby would wail leading to the waking up of the other sleeping ones and you had a pandemonium in your hands.

To make matters worse, sometimes I felt too hot. Then some hours later I was too cold. Some times my back went numb and I adjusted the inclination of the bed. At others it just did not work and I had to re-adjust it all over again. When you are destined not to sleep, everything goes wrong. Around 4 in the morning one of the nurses predicted - dont worry it will be day soon and she will sleep, thats how babies are. I was like finalllly. I can sleeeeeeeeeep. For I have this talent of being able to sleep anywhere anytime for any duration. Around 530 finally the little birdie drifted to sleep. Believe it or not I was wide awake. I was like WHAaaaattttttttt!!!!!!! Sleep where art thou? It was just toooooo unfair. Now just like I waited on sleep I had to wait for K and me being the over smart one had asked to 'take good rest and come araam se'. How I regretted those seven words :( 

Lest he heed my words when I least wanted him to, I made a call at 0700. Gingerly I asked 'when might you be coming'. He told he had just flopped and slept and would refresh and come ASAP. Now ASAP could mean anything. As soon as what was possible? There was a possibility of just brushing and dashing. There was also a possibility of making 5 phone calls and having a good nice cuppa coffee and a shower!! Yieksssss. I did not want to think of any other possibilities. An attendant came over and asked me to get my breakfast. Well.... what was I to do with the baby? Leave it?!!?? Are you allowed to? To answer my prayers, a nurse came over, and rolled over all the curtains. Finally all the women in the ward could see each other. She announced - let there be some fresh air (a la Let there be light :D ) And she literally ordered me, I will change the nappies you go grab your food. !!! Ok. Let me risk it. I took the shortest time possible to the canteen area and grabbed my plate and came over. I was just done with my cup of tea and K came over!!!!! Hallelujaaaaaaaaah.


Finally there was sunshine!

Pat a cake pat a cake baker's man

Bake me a cake as fast as you can.

No I am not learning this rhyme for Chiyaa. This is something that just came into my mind after my very first baking experience. 

Let me start from the beginning. I have always envied people who can bake.My mom makes the most amazing cakes and cookies, but I never ever gave her much bhaw except for licking the container in which she makes the dough. I loveeeeeeeeeee that raw batter :). I always wished I could bake or rather gather the courage to bake. K's manager's wife whetted my desire for the same. Shes mastered the art of baking. She can whip a cake or a batch of cookies in a jiffy. She encouraged me by saying, the only thing is gathering the ingredients. Else baking is sooooooooo easy. Sounds so promising. Then I have posts like this (Deeps) and this (Shalom) which make the option even more alluring. 

So I always toyed with the idea of baking - like one toys with the idea of joining a gym, a yoga class, buying salad vegetables or reading an autobiography. (Yes these are all ideas I toy with :D ) Baking had the added de-merit of - yes you guessed it - eating. (Oh you could'nt guess it?) Well.. K is not a cakes person. Neither am I unless I am in the confectionery section when I am literally like a bull in a china shop (errr.... just shopping ). But like Dr. Jekyll K does turn into a cake person when he enters Nando's.  The vegetarian in him turns into a proper tangdi chicken fan too. But we should nt bother too much with that. So where was I, K and cakes. Yes - he simply loves the chocolate cheese cake there. The cake looks stunning, tastes amazing. K forgets me, the baby, the world, his hair, and most of all, his bulging beer belly when he merely thinks about it. Anyday he would elope with the cake for a better life. 

Ok now that I have posted a pic of the ahem 'other'. I thought I would sneak the way into K's heart again through a - yes - cheesecake. But cake = bake which scares the living day lights out of yours truly. So I chanced upon this "No bake chocolate cheesecake". Cake and that too no bake - woo hoo. It was like puri kayanat conspiring to get me to make a cake. Still I took close to 3 weeks to summon the actual COURAGE to get the ingredients! I think I make this much effort to venture into a room with a lizard in it. So finally last  Saturday, I took 45 minutes browsing through the various aisles in the super market to get all the stuff for the would be delicious cheese cake.

Sunday evening was the good muhurat to start on the shubh karya. I enlisted the services of K as well. Now I do not have a blender, a mixer, a baking tray - no nothing. K broke the biscuits with bare brute force. I beat the cream cheese with the manual beater all the time thinking  - toned arms toned arms. And lo and behold I was able to beat it into the 'soft peaks' state. All preps done and the cake loaded, it was time to freeze it for an hour. After an hour, the chocolate seemed soft still so I thought well, let it freeze some more. In the meanwhile I took the opportunity to tell everyone - my mom, my friend in Blore, who ever I saw online on fb - I AM  BAKING A CAKE. Some more time ended up being over night (yes I forgot to take it out) I dreamt that the whole cheese cake was frozen and I kept it for thawing and ended up having something like a cheese cake rasmalai. I woke with a fright and took the cake from the freezer and put it in the fridge (the next step). I waited as much as my impatient self could allow me before nudging the knife into the heart of the cake.

The results are presented below.

The plate has only the chocolate part. The over night freezing did unmentionable things to the base so much that it parted ways with the top. In spite of my gorilla type efforts, I could not make them come together. Its chocolate cheese cake - no one mentioned the importance of the base. :( 

After repeated and persistent hammering I was able to make some portion of the base nudge out - and this what the wreckage looks like. 

Soooooooo after thisssssssssss utter disaster I intend to make microwave cookies next. Till then any ideas to salvage the cake? Else anyone game for some digestive biscuits with cheese and dark chocolate? :( 

The Dawn

*Blabbering mom goes on with yet another baby post

I did write about the deliverance. Well as I was wheeled from the operating room into the delivery suite ( ahem suite, fancy name for the room you are brought into) I felt - blank. Yep just blank. I wish I felt tearful, relieved, joyous, exhilarated or any of the myriad emotions I expected. But nope. I felt blank. Its the sort of blank you feel after writing an exam. Yaad aaya? Yes that feeling where you pour out whatever you read into sheets of paper and come out and feel blank. You wish you feel happy about writing it well or bad about not writing it well enough or you think where you went wrong and feel good about something you wrote right. But you feel nothing of them and just feel blank. Well that is how I felt.

Once in the room, the first question I asked the midwife was if we could make calls (it was a hospital and I did not want to take chances) And the midwife said yes of course! The most beautiful thing was her eyes said YES OF COURSE. YOU JUST HAD A BABY YOU SHOULD BE MAKING CALLS NOW.On the sides, her name was Rachel and as she was filling in my forms and took my dob she said she had the same dob as me. As she said that, I told her what a coincidence, the ante-natal midwife I was seeing during pregnancy also shared the same dob. She asked me her name and I said she was Rosemary. Rachel said - Oh! I know her. We are all connected by our dobs too! Yep! Very much! And all this time I was thinking I had the special connection with Rajnikant and Yuvraj Singh only ;) ;) 

Ok enough about me and my fascination with my date of birth. K said what time would it be (in India) I said around 0630. When Rachel over-heard this she said it was 0100. We clarified we were talking about India time. She giggled and said, 'Oh thank God. I thought you were really knocked out because of the anesthesia and had forgotten to make out time as well.' K started making calls. First it was Amma who was taking a walk and she was beside herself with joy. Then K called his aunt in the US. Then a friend, then another, then another... I lost count. Atlast, I think an hour later, he finally handed me the phone. I called my mom and her tear soaked voice asked me 'Did it hurt a lot'. I must have been really high on the drugs for I said 'No Mummy it was all cool.' Then I went on to give all the details that put K to sleep. Once I was done, he said you were all bla bla bla with your mom. Non stop chatter box. Thats how shes also going to be with you when she grows up. :)

Routine checks continued and my dipping blood pressure was monitored. K stretched himself on the chair on tried to nap. I tried to sleep, but somehow sleep completely eluded me. I hoped all was well with the checks that were going on and finally at 0645 I got the clearance and was hurriedly wheeled into the post-natal ward. (There is a change of shift that happens at 0800. So 0700-0800 is the handover time when the night shift staff hands over details to the day shift ones. Hence they take in new birth cases till  0700 only. So I was literally rushed through the lifts and the massive doors et al with a baby in my arms like a trophy.) Since visitors were not allowed till 0800 K had to go back home for the one hour. But I asked him to take it slow and come after being well rested for it had been a long night for him too.

When K left the ward a nurse came and performed the routine checks of bp and temperatures. Chiyaa's was a bit on the lower side. To bring her temp up, she asked me to hold her close to me. She placed the little kitten on me and drew the curtains. The sun was slowly coming up and this was the first time I was truly alone with her. I felt truly aware of her. This little being - so beautiful, so precious and so dependent on me. I finally felt all the emotions I thought I would feel at birth. Thats when I held the little swaddled bundle and cried - tears of happiness, tears of gratitude, tears of relief and tears of profound joy. 

Laut ke budhu ghar ko aaye

Well, like most of my good intentions, this  is yet another which has to be left mid way. I intended to make another blog especially for the mommy experiences. I even made one called mummysmonologues.blogspot.com. But for some glitch about which I have no clue (yes dhikkar hai 8 saal ke IT experience pe) the blog does not come up. As in I keep getting this 

Anybody who want to solve this, may feel free. 

I had very high hopes from this other blog - I was going to write ulti personal stuff and I was going to keep it like a public secret :D and I was to gift it to my children once I deemed right. Yes yes veryyyyyyyy filmi - I know :P

But then mommy proposes google disposes. So this error being the stumbling block, I have decided to write everything here. Roomie dear ne sahi kaha tha this blog is your space and it should show your natural progression. Keep posting here. But then like all good advises I did not heed to this. K also for the first time said something apt by hinting I would never be regular on two blogs - which might have been true :D 

So my dear (few) readers - you are going to be bamboozled by more boring auntyjee posts (Its a morbid fear in me that I am becoming an aunty and I have erected a firewall of my well wishers who warn me of any aunty type harkatein) There I digress. Back to the point - now that I had created this blog I had even put up a post - which again never saw the light of the day. So there you go - my post from the 'other' blog (Is'nt there something sinister in the word other? Or its me being filmi again? ) 

"Well I have a blog already. But then for a pretty long time, I was wondering whether I should start a new blog about my musings as a mother. I was faced with the usual quandary - will I be regular on both the blogs? How will I differentiate what to post where? And as roomie dear said Cherrie's blogs are my blogs and if all the posts are there they would show a natural evolution of me, from just being just me to a mother. So it would be better staying there. But then something in me said, I should start a new blog and as they say its better to take a wrong turn rather than stand at the crossing forever. So here you go, I have another blog created. 

But then me being me, there should have been something which shoved me to creating a new blog. Well, I mean this blog for you - yes you. I want this to be some reflection of what your mother is made up of :) 

Hmm... mother such a big word eh. But honestly I do not feel like one. Like I still do not feel like a wife. I am always Amrita/ Cherrie. The same person who has some people now attached to her. And these people refer to her as their wife, daughter in law, mother and so on. There I digress! Well.. so as I was saying, I have no idea why I started Cherries blogs. Maybe, because I am better at writing than speaking and wanted to show off my skills to the world. Maybe I have a lot of thoughts rampaging my head and I needed a vent. Maybe I wanted to just have the guilty pleasure of strangers having an insight into me. Maybe I wanted to keep a memoir - a place where I can come back and relive moments past. No idea - I am still clue less. 

But this place, is just for you. These are what I have felt every moment of raising you. This is just the first post, and I have no idea how regular I am going to be. I have no idea if I can even express the myriad emotions I feel as I walk the path. I have no idea how you are going to judge me when you read this - you may hate me, you may think I am weird, you may feel I am all cuckoo or you may love me to bits. But as again - its better to take a wrong turn rather than stand at the crossing forever :) "


BEWARE - there are many more such posts coming your way

End of summer ? :(

Well...... summer has nt come yet in the Queen's land though the Queen has celebrated 60 years of her reign. But Queen ki rajgaddi pe 60 saal ki khushi main government gave an extra chuttiiiiiii. Yippppeeeeeeeeeee. And extra holiday means tour :)

This time we planned to go over to Windermere which is the biggest fresh water lake of the country. What bowled me over was the over abundance of Indians in the place and not resident Indians - tourists. It seemed like the third tourist was an Indian! There were youngsters, couples, people with mummy, daddy, granny grandpa and whole dynasty in fact! It was realllllly surprising. And some groups seemed to be attached to us by some invisible chord. We saw them in the train, at the table we had lunch, at the cruise, in the return journey. We literally knew where the other groups were each day without uttering a word :D 

The best part of the vacation was Chiyaa of course. This is the second vacation we took with her. The first was a real small 2 day trip to a nearby town. There she was as enthusiastic a traveller as us. It was so surprising to see her being all enthusiastic as soon as we put her in the pram. And once we had walked some 10 minutes she would be totally knocked out in the arms of sleep. She chose to wake up only once we were back at the residence, as if saying why have we stopped roaming. That small trip gave us the courage to plan a 3 day trip this time. This time also she was nearly the same, except for a small change that she was a bit colicky in the evening. Now for the un-initiated colic is random and persistent crying of babies mostly without reason. And the remedy is lots of cuddles and walking with them in your arms. We took turns in the evenings rocking her and soothing her. But thankfully we were a team who were totally in cahoots when it came to taking care of the little one. 

Well but then all good things come to an end. And the vacation got over. Somehow this time, I felt very sad. I felt as if the much loved summer vacations of school got over. I could never get enough of the summer vacations back in school days. I would so so look forward to the start of them. For that kick started the yearly trip to my maternal grandma's house. We would spend some really hot and humid days there, eating the wonderful food she made, sleeping on hot verandas for they might have a light wind sometimes from the nearby pond, and playing everything from hop scotch to hide and seek with cousins. After spending two weeks there, we would make the journey to our paternal grandparents place. We had a HUGE set of cousins there since I have 6 paternal uncles and an aunty! Days there would be loaded with fresh village produce, lots of milk and curd and raw mangoes. Each evening would melt away with card games which I never ever understood but surely watched. When the vacation ended I always hated going back to our town.

This time too I was filled with a sense of nostalgia and I was missing something. As I have said in an earlier post that I love 'missing'. But then I got on with the most vital anti-depressant - you got it - ginger tea. And I was ready to face one more working week. :)


PS. For Furobiker :-