A gift from God?

 Everyone faces the January blues. The end of the relaxed Christmas days are awful. And what stretches in front is a whole new year, with all plans up in the air, holidays still nebulous and the weather still not the one to warm the hearts. Luckily this year, since 1st January was on a Saturday, we got a day's leave on the following Monday. This made the first work week back, a 4 day one! Woo hoo! A single non-working day kinda made all the difference. 

The next week, there was all kinds of jokes in my team where we all made fun of finally having a much cherished 5 day working week back. That evening when I went to pick up Chiyaa, I could see from the class window that her face looked glum. I was a bit worried that she had a fight with someone or some incident that made her upset. As soon as she was out, she complained of a headache. We were sure its nothing and back home gave her the recommended dose of paracetamol. She felt much better, but that night had a raging fever. Which called in for a PCR test for Covid the next day and a day off school. She spent the day playing with  Lego, re-reading Harry Potter and watching some television. The next day her PCR test came back positive which meant she would need to isolate for a minimum of 5 days or a maximum of 10 days. If she got a negative home test for 2 successive days within day 5 and day 10 she could go back to school. Not ideal, given the fact that she loves school, but then there was no way out. Strangely, with one kid not going to school, the workload seemed lesser. There was one less uniform to take care of, one less bag and bottle to check, one less head of messy hair to comb on time and one less kid to pick up (which surprisingly saves time!) Also since she had to isolate, I didnt feel the extra pressure of taking her on walks and keeping her active. She could literally be at home. I ensured she had a bit more fruits at home and a daily dose of vitamin C in the form on 2 mandatory oranges. Luckily Chiyaa is quite self reliant as well, and manages herself with books and toys. So that she does not become totally lackadaisical, we put some educational sites up for her. She took to them quite well and completed all the required courses. It is quite cute to have a kid at home too. She roams around from room to room and I could go for occasional cuddles to her. She would come up with sudden Harry Potter trivia and bore us to death. It was awesome to snuggle with her at night, since we kept the kids separate while sleeping. Sleeping between both of them is spine crushing, but just one is swell :) 

 We started taking daily tests, but even on day 6 and 7 we were not getting the negative results. It was a very very faint line, but not  a sure shot negative. This was bringing us close to 20th which would be her day 9. 20th is K and my anniversary and we had planned the day off. We both are into running. K much more than me now! He will be running a ton of races this year. I do not believe in driving to a place, paying money and running a race to come 1021 in it. Like a few for fun is ok, but not on a regular basis. But for the first time ever we are having a local town run, being organised by the local run club of which K is a part. Since he is running all over the world, I told I would be keen to run 10 kms in that race. But I havent run that length in the recent past. So 20th was the day decided by us to run and check how I was faring. Now 20th happened to be day 9 for Chiyaa. We needed a negative result on day 8 and day 9 to send her to school. Day 7 the line on the test was super duper faint, in fact you would blink and miss it. We were confident that we would get a negative on next day. And we did!! Phew! On 20th morning, we got her ready on time. It was quite a change after the past 10 days when she was getting up whenever she wanted and spending some time reading in bed :) But being the enthusiastic school goer, she got ready and took her test. It  was a sure shot negative!! Yay!! The girls dropped at school off went the old couple on their run ;)

The run was fabulous. It was horribly cold, but it was amazingly sunny. What else do we need? Run done, we came home to some fabulous tea and rice kheer made by my sis. After a quick shower, we popped up to a local middle eastern restaurant. The owner happens to run with K in the run club. He also happened to be lunching then. And he happened to take an item off our bill! What a sweet though inadvertent anniversary gift! Once out, we spotted a plant shop nearby and of course I had to make K spend on a couple :)  We had absolutely no engagements for the evening. Which meant K could play video games and I could play Lego with the kids! A God gifted day indeed :) 

C for??

 Cooooooovid. 

Yep. And this attitude led to biiiiiiiiiiig mess up at home yesterday. 

Chiyaa came back from school yesterday with a headache. Her face was all droopy and her teacher recommended getting her tested. The school has been sending emails that headaches, an upset tummy and puking are some of the complaints kids had before testing positive for Covid-19. Since she had a headache we got the home test kit out to test her. 

Now the test kit works like a home pregnancy test. You take a swab, mix it in a solution, put the solution in the kit and wait for the die to come to a certain point. The two points that are marked in the testing kit are a C and a T. Chiyaa asked what does C mean and the  tester in charger Mr K responded "C for Covid." "What does T mean?", asked Chiyaa. "Err I dunno, but C is what we care about" came the prompt reply from the person who doesn't believe in reading instructions. So we tested her and it went up to a C. She started crying. Children are very deeply impacted by the diagnosis because they have heard and seen all sort of glum stories about the disease. They are yet to realise that the disease is highly endemic now and also here to stay. She started crying and seeing her so did Pumpki. She was really worried for her elder sister. In all crying and sobbing it was very hard to take the test on her. Somehow we managed. We all got our "C"s. Now a 5/5 on the tests had me all perplexed. What are the odds. Then I searched the internet and found that C is for Control and T is for Test. And 2 lines in the C and T zone mean positive and C in fact means "not Covid-19". 

My God did K get a thrashing after his misreading of the results. He himself had a mighty good laugh. But my question was, all this while whenever he took the test, he had been claiming hes negative. By the way he reads the results, I am sure Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta have all had a picnic with him ;) 

PS. Since Chiyaa had a headache, we did book her in for a PCR test in the lab and unfortunately she did come back as Covid positive. Shes fine, just complains of the headache and isolating till the end of this week.

Murder of a recipe

 It was Pumpki's birthday last month. It comes bang in the middle of Christmas and New Year when everyone is too busy celebrating one or the other. This year also we were in the midst of day trips etc. For her birthday we had plans to go for a lunch to a place that served Kerala cuisine which is one of our favourites. The evening we were to check out some light installations in a park. We had a pretty packed day and had to squeeze in baking a cake in the morning.

But, the previous night my sister recommended that she would bake the cake since I was pretty tied up in giving the kids a bath etc. We had had a long day with travels to some place. She was not keen to leave the baking to the next day morning in case something went wrong. 

As usual the kids had wished for Devil's food cake by Shivesh . Now this is a luxurious 3 layered super rich but super fluffy chocolate cake with waist-increasing chocolate frosting. My sister started the process. Mid way she realised there wasn't enough flour! Thankfully we had self raising flour and she being the master baker was able to make a judicious judgement on the amount. If it was me, it would have been quits and a dash to the shops. She went on to the next super crucial ingredient for a chocolate cake. Cocoa powder. There was absolutely  none! URGH! Retreatttt! Quick change of plans! It was going to be a vanilla cake now. The cake also called for curd. We thankfully had jjjjjjust the right amount. My sis literally scrapped the bottom of the curd container :D 

Somehow we managed to procure enough materials to get 2 layers going. Now for the exterior. We did not have dark chocolate. Just white. We weren't sure the kids would be gung-ho about it. So opted to plain buttercream frosting. I was in charge of the external decorations. I made the buttercream.  As I started applying it, I realised that the cake hadn't cooled enough. This caused the buttercream to just melt down the cake instead of sticking onto it. Was everything supposed to go wrong today?! 

Again a quick change of plans. I decided to slather the cake with strawberry jam. The kids would be  fine with it. So well jam it was. By this time the cake was a decent temperature, so I put the buttercream in a piping bag to pipe some random designs out (facepalm) It was close to 2230 by then, which is laaaaaate by my old woman standards :) 

The cake didn't look great. But it was consumable. A murdered recipe can result in a zombie cake at best :|