The Someone in question who till now had bestowed on me the benefit of a warm smile that pregnant women are at the receiving end of…her smile faltered a little. In an attempt to repair what I said, I carried on recklessly.

“I mean babies are so cute and all. I just love them until they start crying..Aaaarrghhh…Just drives you nuts then.”

Long story cut short, THAT Someone will not be having any motherly chats with me anymore.

This little exchange between the Judgemental Someone and the Expressive Me has gotten me thinking.

Are we supposed to be happy every single minute of parenthood?

And the answer is….

HELL, NO!

So all you young parents out there, hear me out. It’s okay to be frustrated when you have just changed the sheets and the baby spits up milk. It’s okay to admit your hands are aching from carrying a sick toddler. And pssst…it’s even okay to want to whoop your six-year old as he throws up a tantrum mid-aisle at Toys ‘R’ Us.

Mouth aches from all the smiling

Because at the end of the day, any day, good, bad or very bad – when your child sleeps, you WILL fall in love with them all over again. You will enter a state of such mental bliss that no kick ass yoga pose on earth can help you achieve. And then charged with this divine energy, you will fall asleep so quick with your mouth open and your hair still unwashed.

Because divine energy or not, children can be very energy-consuming little human beings. Yawn.

It’s a tough decision to make, and I know I’ll have to live with the  decision for the rest of my life.

If it was left entirely up to “A“, he would make an Excel spreadsheet now – Pros and Cons neatly arranged in two columns, additional flowcharts and formulas, algorithms and macros to evaluate  the better, more effective way to go about this.

But me, I am not so sophisticated. Never have been. So I stick to fool-proof old ways to sort out life’s questions. The thoughtfully chewed-over scab on my thumb stands witness to my hours of pondering.

The Baby is due in a month and a Name hasn’t been chosen yet. Many more hours of scab chewing ahead.

 – Wannabauthor on the Weekend Vigil

“Drop in a few name ideas, will ya?”

The Monday Before

It’s funny how routine compartmentalises your life into little airtight time slots. Five minutes for brushing and shaving, two minutes for matching socks hunt, ten minutes for oatmeal and boiled eggs and so on.

So how much ever I tell myself, I will savour today and the rest of week and try to do all these daily tasks slowly, I fail. I am still ready on time. My body it seems isn’t ready to accept what eighteen years of fine-tuning and conditioning has done. But then again, neither is my heart.

At office, there are still some loose ends to tie before Friday. Small blessings in the form of unanswered queries and some files to update. Something. Anything. To stop time. The replacement employee is not in yet and I dread meeting him.

The Tuesday Before

The new guy came in today. Someone half my age with more social networking site memberships than I even know of.

He has an apologetic tone in his voice as we shake hands. Retirement is a strange word. It signifies old age and worse, unproductiveness. Every day we crib about our jobs. But the day you have to leave those desks creaking under the weight of imminent deadlines, that day watch how your finger nails grow pale from holding on tight to your desk.

Retiring from a job. Not resigning, not moving onto something better.  A fancier title, a fatter pay check, gold enamelled name plate on a door. No just plain old retirement. At most, a drooping bouquet on your desk, some hearty wishes by colleagues and a crummy cake in the pantry.

As my colleagues talk to me, I see in their eyes something I am not ready to look at yet. The days stretching ahead endlessly, the hobbies I might want to take up? Stamp collection, reading, gardening, maybe a tour to somewhere exotic?

No thanks. I’d like one more year on the job instead. Is that too much to ask?

The Wednesday before

Most of the transfer of duties is completed. And a strange sense of detachment begins. I sit in my seat all day, feeling like an intruder. This seat doesn’t feel like mine. This keyboard where I have clattered on for years and left coffee stains on the mouse pad, they don’t belong to me either. Not anymore.

I sit down all day, pretending to have something to do. Drafting and re-drafting a Thank you email to this company where I had joined when my moustache was still black, when my children were still babies and when “Tomorrow” held great promises.

The Thursday before

My highlight of the day: Answering questions for the new kid about the job.

Low light of the day: Over lunch, someone suggested about going to the new pasta place across the street. Next week sometime? Right. Next week would be perfect.

The Friday before

The alarm as usual, rings at 6 a.m. I am wide awake before that, watching the inky blue night-sky pale slowly and the rich red of dawn bleed onto the golden morning canvas.

I hear the newspaper land with a soft thud on the doorstep and I hear the church bell ring twice.

On the third ring of the bell, my alarm rings too. Shrill and loud. I press the button on top and stare it at it. Like seeing it for the first time properly after eighteen years.

It sits there, as it always has, nestled between a lopsided pencil stand that our eldest had gifted for a Mother’s Day years ago and a jar of Tiger Balm. It is the old-fashioned, sturdy type. Not sleek or digital. Belonging to a different era. Like me.

It has a yellow casing with a brown border, big bold numbering, black and green needles that have worked endlessly for years now, rousing me for office, for early morning church masses and for late-night flights.

I hold it in my hand, and feel the gentle ticking. Steady, consistent and assuring.

I take my time that morning selecting a tie, picking out socks, a freshly ironed shirt.

At office, my carefully drafted Farewell email is sent out to all promising to keep in touch (personal email id included). The final email as an employee.

Saturday, Sunday (do weekends matter anymore?)

Time. Too much of it. A feeling of emptiness on Sunday evening where Monday blues should have been raging. The alarm clock looks at me reproachfully.  Out of habit, I set it for 6:00 a.m.

The Monday After

The Monday after

Something is not right about today. Well, obviously there is no office to go to. But it isn’t that. Something else.

I wake up in the morning but don’t get out of bed. I just lie there, trying to come to terms with the day – the sunlit bedroom, the neat folded blanket on my wife’s side of the bed and the distant sounds from the kitchen as she prepares breakfast.

A sigh escapes me. Something is definitely amiss. Anyway I have the whole day for figuring it out, don’t I?

I pause to glance at the alarm as I get out of bed. What time is it, anyway? The alarm reads 6 o’clock. And I realise I didn’t hear it ring today. I peer at it closer and notice how still the needles are. Frozen in time.  I try winding it but nothing moves. Gentle knocking, some enthusiastic shaking. No nothing. Still 6 o’clock.

I sit on the edge of the bed, the clock nestled in my palms. My eyes began to water as I stare at its face, willing those needles to move. Move, dammit move! But they stay still. Very still.

The hour needle points to the 6 and the minute needle settles on the 12. Two halves and a perfect line dividing Before and After.

Author’s Note: A few months ago, I mentioned to my Dad that I needed a story idea for a short story competition I was planning to participate in. He said he did have a story and he’d like it if I wrote it. So I did.

So, this is the story of my Dad who worked over 25 years in the same company and retired from there in 1999. His voice faltered a bit as he told me about the alarm clock which woke him up each day and inexplicably stopped working 2 weeks after his retirement.

I never realised why the alarm clock (same as described in the story) still sat and gathered dust in a cupboard at home. But now I do.

FYI, the story never won anything for the competition, but I’m glad I wrote it all the same.

When your world comes crashing down, you automatically assume that the same applies to life around you. Sadly it doesn’t. I go back to work on Monday after my tear-filled sabbatical and realise that the emails in my Inbox were still piling up,  the printer was still low on ink, and that I couldn’t hide behind my misery for the rest of my life.

Colleagues approach me with guarded hello-es and how-you-holding-ups. I was ‘holding up’ well enough in front of them until about 2 pm when I feel a familiar lump in my throat swell up.

The one place that would be empty at the time would be the pantry. So off I go, with a heroic mission to sip and cry into a cup of coffee. But as luck would have it, there is somebody else there already – a guy who has joined the company a few months ago. I have passed him in the hallways and our interaction has never gone beyond nodding in the lift, or queuing up behind each other at the office cafeteria. He starts a bit as he sees me, then recovers and smiles.

I busy myself measuring coffee powder and sugar slowly, hoping he leaves soon. But he intends otherwise.

“Hey I heard. Sorry about what happened.” he says.

“That’s ok; I guess it was not meant to be. So ummm…tell me how’s things at your end? How are you finding the office?” A question with a counter-question. Best form of distraction.

“Good…good”, he says. He places his coffee mug on the table beside me and stretches his legs as he sits down. Oh boy! He didn’t plan to leave soon, did he? “I’m still getting to know people here. The city is new to me also. So I guess it’s kinda lonely.”

“Oh, then you’re not married?” I blurt out and regret it immediately. Why on earth did I have to bring up the institution of marriage in a perfectly straightforward colleague conversation? The one thing that I have just failed massively at?

“No”, he said. “Not yet. But I think I have met someone special.”

NO, I think. Please spare me the details of your rosy love life, while mine crumbles into nothingness. Can this get any worse?

“Really? So, is this someone in the office then? Haha…” I can’t help keep the sarcasm from my voice. I offer up some half-hearted laughter to lessen the blow of my question.

“Actually, yes.” and he smiles.

Oh!

Now these kind of conversations can prove to be very tricky. They can go either way. The better way is he pours out his heart to me while I tear a napkin to shreds and bitterly think about why everyone except me can find a man.

The worse way would be I ask who, and he says he’s not ready to divulge that information…blah, blah. Followed by awkward silence, scraping back of chairs and end of cosy coffee scene.

So instead I don’t say anything and wait. I peer into my coffee. I can feel him looking at me. Probably waiting for me to ask who? So in the end, I do.

“So you mind if I ask who she is.”

“I don’t. But I’m not sure if she would mind. Not yet anyway”. He’s still looking at me.

Ah, I see where this is going. He needs a bit of coaxing to get this out and to be honest, I am curious now. Mentally lining up all the single, eligible girls in the office. So I go ahead and ask.

“So she doesn’t know about your feelings yet?”

He rubs his jaw and grins.

“No, I believe she has no idea whatsoever”.

At this stage, I don’t know how to respond without being intrusive. So I go back to peering into the murky depths of my coffee cup.

A strand of my hair falls onto my eyes.

He suddenly leans forward and in one smooth motion tucks it behind my ear.

THE END

But as I read it again, I ended up thinking that it deserved a better fate than the Recycle Bin. So it ended up on the blog.

No wait…that DOES NOT mean that anything which is not trashed ends up on this blog. No sirrreee, this blog only posts the Best of the Best (and then some other posts too…once in a while…)

Cheesy Story Time!!!

When you have known someone for a long time, you can make out in painful detail when they are trying too hard, when they are falling in love, and most importantly when they are falling out of love. With you.

I knew there was someone even before he said it. I didn’t go through his email even though he left his phone and laptop carelessly about. I didn’t check for bills or tickets in the trash bin like the wives in the movies did. We went on as normal for a while. We ate out on Fridays and slept in on Saturdays. We complained about Mondays.

They came home (together) on a Wednesday. Thank God for small graces. I washed my hair on Wednesdays. He had the decency to call up an hour earlier and let me know that we had to talk and he would be bringing someone.

I had a packet of Betty Crockers muffin mix lurking in a top cupboard of the kitchen. The batter was hurriedly prepared and popped into the oven. While the muffins baked, I hunted around for the hair-dryer which was rarely used and gave my hair a courtesy blow.

God knows why I bothered; she would be prettier than me for sure. With hair that shampoo companies advertised.

He rang the doorbell like some stranger salesman. In the 7 years we had lived here, he had never rung the damned doorbell even once. Every day he opened the door with his own set of keys. Until today. A stranger in his own home.

The conversation was one-sided. He explained. I listened. She nodded. Why did he sit so upright? Why did he seem so familiar, but act so very different? We exchanged looks as I offered her the muffins on a platter. I knew that he knew. That they were the Betty Crocker ones.

Everyone took a muffin each and ate. Silence. Only the sound of munching. I sneaked a glance at them and heard another sound now. The Sound of a Gap widening.

I excused myself to the kitchen and stood there trying to analyse what I felt. There were no tears. Not yet. That would come later. For now, I felt a deep sorrow inside my chest.

For now you be strong, I told myself. Even though he knows all your weaknesses.

For now you go back in there and act every bit the gracious hostess. Even though he knows the muffins aren’t yours and they might laugh about it later.

For now you don’t show him any emotion. Even though you shared every thought and feeling with him for seven long years.

I walked back into the living room and realised I shouldn’t have. They were having a private moment, and I felt like a spinster aunt spying in on them. He was asking her something and she looked down shaking her head sadly and a strand of her hair fell forward. His hand gently tucked the wayward strand behind her ear. For a moment everything stood still.

It was a simple gesture. But it signalled the end of my marriage. I couldn’t remember the last time he did that for me.

The next few weeks I spent in a flurry of apologetic phone calls from friends and relatives. I cried until I got headaches, and then cried because I had a headache.

And I found myself twirling my hair, fingering it and wondering if I had ever known the man who had been my husband…..

This gripping story is to be continued, as soon as Microsoft Word does a thorough spell-check on Part II.

Update: So that’s part I. Now everyone go get yourselves a coffee. Stretch those overworked/underworked muscles. Come back, sit down and read Part II here.

New Years has passed and we’re all back to our yawn-worthy lives. Been a fortnight since I have updated anything on the blog. Auspicious beginning to the year.

And if you think I was lounging about doing nothing over the long weekend and deliberately avoiding the blog, then YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT.

The below short travelogue (first of its kind in the blog) is long over-due. Dedicated specially to darling ‘A’ who was as the Brits would say “a dear ol thing” throughout our stay at Bali.

Grimness

“Thank you for flying with Air Asia from Bali to Singapore. We hope to see you again“, the stewardess announced in that very mechanical non-sincere voice they learn to master at stewardess school.

‘A’ and I exchanged glances as we removed our seat belts and tried to stand up.

“I think I have a new piece to write about”, I told him.

“I think you do“, he answered grimly.

We must have made an interesting trio as we entered Changi Airport, back from our ‘getaway’ at Bali. I had that sticky look that people get when sweat droplets cool mid-trickle on your neck as you enter the pleasantly icy interior of Changi terminal.

‘A’ looked haggard and steadily let out a stream of cuss words that matched his mood. I anxiously glanced at the offspring hoping he didn’t pick up on this colourful vocabulary. But Ryan just looked around nonchalantly, being at his clingy best – refusing to walk, refusing to wear shoes, and refusing to sit in his stroller.

Image via Wikipedia

                Packed Bags and Soaring Hopes

Bali was our baby-moon destination before offspring no.2 arrived soon and before airlines around the world stopped permitting me to board flights and take a chance at spoiling their laundered seat covers.

So a month ago, we packed our bags to this sunny heaven where beaches, shopping and great food awaited us. But we forgot a few things. And how I wish I could tell you it was just the IPhone charger and my iron supplements.

1.)  Bali is great for those melanin-deprived masses who are looking for a tan. And we Indians usually run for the shades in such cases.

We are talking about full blast of hot, scorching- UV rays combined with humidity which makes you reach for a sip of water every one minute.

Add to this, a toddler with overactive sweat glands and a personality to match. He got cranky, fussy, and ummm…let me search the thesaurus for more words to describe the ‘Terrible Twos’.

2.) I being heavily pregnant could help very little with any significant child-rearing skills. I was confined to

washing up of milk bottles and unproductive actions that one usually terms as ‘wringing of hands’ and “I WISH I could help more” remarks. And Ryan decided this is as a good time as any to be clingy and impossible. Leaving his father in a charming situation of almost-single parenthood.

3.) Bali roads are super-duper, stroller-friendly, sheer wonders of modern construction. And YES, that sentence is oozing in sarcasm, my dear reader. In fact, they were a chessboard of potholes, broken footpaths and other such pedestrian delights. My only consolation is that I hope ‘A’ has developed greater upper body strength from all the heaving and carrying of the ‘stroller + child’ duo across potholes. Again, note the sarcasm.

But all said and done, Bali is truly a lovely getaway destination for people unlike us. I guess we were at the right place at the wrong time.

                Before You….

Now before you start to mentally check off Bali from any your Oriental tourist spots for 2012, lemme stop you right there.

You’ll find a lot of good things there that is hard to find anywhere else.

For example, good service in any and every restaurant/shop/street side hovel you enter. And the locals seem to genuinely love kids. Read the genuinely twice. That’s a hard word to come by these days.

I am talking about waitresses who genuinely wanted to carry Ryan, so ‘A’ and I could eat our meals in peace. I know it was genuine, because they kept insisting and kept cooing at his antics. Seriously, who does that? Well apparently everyone in Bali does. Bonus points for that.

The food is yummy and dirt-cheap. I could tell you menu items and bill totals that would send pleasant shivers all down your calculative, foodie spines.

Shopping is amazing and bargaining is the religion. Shoes, bags, clothes, and the likes. Souvenirs and lampshades that you think are adorable and that your partner will think is a big waste of time? Yeah, it’s all there in Bali and more.

Note to self: Must visit Bali again alone once I have regained some semblance of a waistline.

The Icing on the Cake

We sadly staggered and stumbled through 4 days there, packed our bags with a sigh of relief on the last day and made for the airport.

But Ryan decided to drop one more surprise for us before we boarded the flight. Something that would elevate this trip into the “Annals of Horrific Holidays” that the writer has endured.

He decided to do an untimely poop in his diaper. The sort that stinks and makes people sitting near you look up in alarm. We had about an hour before boarding and ‘A’ had to clean him up at the airport gent’s toilet. That ordeal is best left unmentioned in detail. I’ll just drop in a few words here, so you can make out the situation for yourselves.

Low supply of toilet paper – flush not working – dirty toilet – Ryan’s curious hands and feet – Forgotten baby wipes.

Home, at Last!

I never thought I’d miss Singapore but I sure did. I welcomed the country with open arms  - the balmy air, the comical toy city look, the whole package. Call me a sophisticated b****, call me a stuck-up NRI, a snob if you must… but hell yeah I missed good ol’ civilisation.

So the New Year resolution for 2012 is simple. Do not venture out for a holiday till the kids are a little older (and more toilet-trained).

Barely a week had passed before we were able to discuss Ryan’s poop story with some humour. A month has passed, and I am beginning to doubt whether it was really just a figment of my nightmares.

I have resigned myself to the knowledge that I’ll never be uploading pics on Facebook titled “South Africa – 2012″ and “South of France – 2013″. ‘A’ and I have decided to opt for quiet saunters in the nearby park pushing strollers and generally being the ‘Smug Marrieds’ that Bridget Jones hates

But then again, I suspect that a few months down the line, we might flick through some random TV channel and be swayed by the ‘whiteness’ that is Greece, or the ‘slickness’ that is Vegas. And then ‘A’ might gaze wistfully at the telly, then at our little brood…and then say a holiday might be good for the children.

“For the children“, I’ll echo. And then we’ll be off. And I’ll never forget the baby wipes this time round.

‘Tis the time of the year that we’re supposed to sit down and do a bit of introspection on the past year doings. The more adventurous among us might make some elaborate New Year Resolutions. I dropped making any firm resolutions about the same time I weaned away from the Nancy Drew series.

This year, however, I decided to do things a tad differently. I decided to send an email to the future using this really cute website :

http://www.futureme.org/

I have written an email to my (hopefully wiser) self which will be popping up in my inbox on June 14th 2012, 6 months from now. Being the romantic that I am, it reminded me of those letters which wash up in cork-screwed bottles on some foreign beach dated 20 years ago. This is just a more net-savvy version of the ‘letter-in-a-bottle’.

What did I write in my email to the future? Oh, you nosy readers! Shame!

I’ll give you some bits and pieces though. I included some fine description of today, about how I am feeling and what the weekend plans will be. I also made a little prediction list for 2012.

“Will the blog hit 10,000 readers worldwide?” and other such ‘realistic’ predictions

The entire email will make any spell-checker software gag and splutter and choke over its own errors. But what the hell? It’s an email to me. Not to Santa.

Let me know how many of you do use this website. You can send any combinations of emails:

- Emails to self

- Emails to self, dated any day, even next week. So if you’re having a bad week, write to the future saying how bad it’s been and knowing you’ll pull through this one just fine.

- Emails to anyone else in the future. So if you want to tell someone what a mighty pain they have been, but you decide Christmas is not a good time to spill the beans. Then wait till New Year’s after they’ve taken down the Christmas tree and then spill the beans…haha!

- Go online and read some very interesting public emails here which people have put up. Recommended for those who have too much time to kill.

Author’s Note: Darling readers (you are absolute darlings really), my Facebook Fan page is tottering on a tempting count of 98 fans. And it would mean so much to me if I could clink glasses of non-alcoholic beverages on New Year’s knowing I have crossed the 100 fans benchmark. So you know what to do, like the page, urge others to like it and generally help out!

“Almost 12 years too late for that now, isn’t it Maria?” my Physics teacher would have asked. But hey, I got there.

Quoting Albert Einstein, scientist extraordinaire – “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT’S relativity.”

That indeed is relativity. Ask me about how fast Ryan has grown up in these past 2 years, and I’ll tell you it seemed like it happened in a micro-second. Ask me how long it took me to get Google to up my PageRank for this blog and I’ll say an eternity. Relativity. There ya go.

Image via Wikipedia

Dearest Birthday Boy,

Today, you turn two – standing on that tricky threshold between baby-hood and brat-hood.

Brat-hood seems to be the flavour of these days. There are “I-want-random-thing-that-I-must-not-have” tantrums mid-play, there are “Spitting-food-if-I-don’t-like-it” scenes mid-meal and “I-want-attention-and-I-will-not-wait-for-your-5-minutes” mid-anything else.

But since I belong to that strange, exclusive and mildly irritating species of Doting Mothers, I only see the baby-hood in you most of the time. Like when your tiny fingers curl slightly as you sleep, or how I can sing the same song over and over again and you never tire of it, and in rare moments (which I place in my secret stash of good memories), you stop exploring the big world around you and prefer to just place your head in my lap and look up at me.

These moments… they grow less frequent each day. And rightly so.

You have learnt the art of persuasion. You have learnt the art of mood deciphering. But your most precious skill this year has to be your gift of speech. I waited all of last year and you didn’t utter a single word. But this year, this power of speech, it hits you like a revelation.

A few manoeuvres of the lips and tongue and voila a legible word! An emotion expressed. A conversation begun. A mother is made proud.

I watch with joy and pride as you rattle off the numbers:

- One

- Thoo

- Thee

- Foor!

- Five

- Cheex

- Cheven

- Eight and Nine, not quite your favourites are they?

- Ten

- Wa-Wa (eleven)

I have to admit I love Wa-Wa the best because in broken syllables and mispronounced gooey words, your babyhood resurfaces again. If only for a minute.

I think I’ll stop rambling now. And leave you with a few words from another blog I came across:

“Your child will change your life. The unconditional acceptance he/she will offer will shock your system and move things inside you that you didn’t know existed. Love and despair, exhilaration and exhaustion will hold your hands as if they are twins, demanding equal attention. You will know trust; you will stare at the serenity of your baby’s sleep and absorb it.”

Ryan, each day, my child, you do just that. You shake my belief in things I swore by before, and you make me believe in things I was too scared to face earlier. I used to think that I was placed on earth to be your caretaker and protector, but on the frustrating and dark days, you turn around and show me that I AM THE ONE WHO NEEDS YOU MORE.

Happy birthday!

Love,

Loyal member from that awful club of Doting Mothers

Note: For those of you who have gotten to the end of this post, and still feel inclined to read some more of this genre, go ahead and read the dedication I had wriiten for Ryan on his first birthday.

I thought being One was a major milestone! Now I realise Two is even bigger. And next year it will be Three, and Four, and Five…sighhhh

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Today, I found an email from the Editor of ‘Chicken Soup for the Soul‘ series, informing me that an article of mine has been selected for their new book “Chicken Soup for the Soul: On Brothers and Sisters“.

Here’s the blog link to the soon-to-be-published piece. Almost written a year ago on the blog.

And while I am boasting, I might as well add this. Here’s a sneak preview of my first published story on “Chicken Soup for the Soul: On Friendship“.

Word has reached me that my 2 free copies and cheque of 1000 ruppees (small but significant) has finally (oh finally) reached home in Kerala. Yeah, they had issues sending the book to an international address so I haven’t exactly seen it yet. But a co-author was kind enough to click a picture of my story and email me.

And do buy copies for yourself. It’s out in the bookstores (I think) and here on Flipkart. Buy a few and gift it to friends on Christmas or let them collect dust on your bookshelves…whatever but do buy!

Image via Wikipedia

I think ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ was the first rhyme I taught you.

I started off with a basic gesture, a twinkling action with my fingers. These hands, these fingers which only knew how to type and to turn the pages of novels and to fix my hair, they have learnt to show you stars and butterflies and all other wondrous things to open up your imagination.

You must have been a year old then. And you were crying. Fat tears caused by something I no longer remember or want to. But all that mattered was I had to stop them. So I sang you this song. Words repeated from half-forgotten childhood memories. They came tumbling out then. The crying slowed down to sniffling. Then a cautious half-smile. I did the twinkling action. A wide smile from you. I sang some more. My heart sang too. For every smile from you is a reason for celebration, is it not?

I added more actions the next time, Googled for them in fact. You watched with awe as my hands went up like tall branches against a night sky. “UP above the world so highhhhhh“.

Now you are older and you enact it yourself. Mummy only has to sing softly.

“Star“, you say sometimes.

“Star“, I repeat, marvelling at every word from your lips. Surely the word “star” hasn’t sounded sweeter before? You could say “pffffttt” and I would find it nothing short of a miracle. Like you.

Your actions have me in splits – tiny hands shooting up, a crude diamond shape formed with your small fingers… “Like a diamond in the sky!”

This is our song, I think fiercely. Daddy doesn’t sing it like I can. The maid doesn’t either.

This is Mummy’s song.

For her shining star. Twinkle away, my baby. Each day brighter and brighter.

NOTE: This is Ryan’s current favourite ‘Twinkle Twinkle’ version on the web. But I like to believe my version is his all-time favourite