I have so much to be thankful for this season…

We celebrated Tara’s birthday at school and then at dinner with our friends and I could not help but relive all her birthdays from last five years. Her school teachers are like our extended family. This was Tara’s last birthday at Learning Links. So special. I wonder how birthday in big schools will be like. I also don’t know if I am looking forward to it.

At dinner we celebrated with a few close friends who have been with us ever since her first birthday. It was nostalgic for all of us how time just flew by.

Yesterday we went to check out schools for Tara. The big schools. Phew! Intimidating experience for me, and Tara too. The classrooms are so much bigger, and the kids also looked to be much older. Or is it just me who thinks my tiny Tara is not old enough for these classrooms. Well she still have 9 months to go before sessions start. Overall the school seemed nice. But both Agam and I were concerned about the demographics. In a class of 23, there were 15+ south Asian kids and a few Asian kids and no Caucasian kids. We love Learning Links for its diversity. I am super anal about diversity. I want Tara to have a more diverse and multi cultural experience than I did growing up. Her current friend circle is very diverse and we love celebrating different rituals and festivals together, learning a little about each other’s backgrounds. I don’t want that go away as she grows up. We know that our options are rather limited so we are going to get more rigorous about our school visits in December and make a call before we wrap up the year. Sigh! This is as confusing as it was to buy a house.

After school visit, Tara wanted to go back to her “real” school and Agam went back to work. Since I had taken the day off, I went to Coupa Cafe and worked on my project from 10:30am- 2:30pm and published my first writing experiment in the open world. Sure it is not perfect. It is full of errors in fact. But I put it out there, and now I want to do this more. I had to start, and I did. Of course the credit for this goes to my ex-manager who challenged me to get started this year. And Agam, who also published his book of Haikus earlier this year, with the same intention – let’s put it out there. I promise to not take another five years with my next experiment. In fact I already have a couple of ideas I will be working on. So let’s see where this takes us. And the best part is that it does not have to take us anywhere. These are for Tara. She will have these when we are gone.

On a lighter note, I was working half day today with Midnight Diner – Tokyo Stories, playing in the background. The title song got me hooked. I’ve listened to it all day now. This happens a lot to me. I need to hear something 500 times to get over it. This has been the way songs go since since….umm….1999. And when I love a song, I have to send it to Agam and ask him to listen to it in like umm.. umm.. 5 seconds from when I sent the link. So that happened today. I sent him a blast of text messages to drop whatever he was doing and listen to the song. He was in a meeting so my incessant texts were not helping. And when he did…. of course he loved it. And we happily added yet another Japanese composition to our favorites list. It was nice to enjoy a day where my biggest chase was finding a donwloadable version of my favorite song. See, it takes very little to make me happy and de-stress. Finding songs 🙂

And so with that starts our thanksgiving break. Except for a one night trip to SF to see the lights, enjoy the latest restaurants in town, we have zero plans! I am loving it coz it means I get to cook 😛 I don’t like turkey, but I have some fresh goat keema, and keema pav is on my mind ;D

Happy Thanksgiving! Gobble Gobble