The long awaited Goa holiday!

 After trying to book our resort of choice at Goa in the last couple of years, we finally made it happen this year, thanks to making our bookings 6 months in advance :O !! And well, it was quite a lovely holiday, so all that planning effort was quite worth it.

In our hotel room

First decision, we wanted to drive down, which means hubby had to be geared up to a LOT of driving, as I don't drive much on the highway. As we were not sure of how long the kids could take in the car, we decided to take a break at Hubli along the way. It was my first try booking a hotel completely based on online feedback, and it was a pleasant surprize. Ananth Residency at Hubli was a lovely hotel, with nice rooms and very decent food. We pretty much lazed around for the rest of the day, after reaching there in time for a late lunch.

What an awesome location for a house!

We left from Hubli at a leisurely pace as we had a check-in time of 2 pm at our resort in Goa. Though we underestimated the ghat roads a bit, and reached closer to 3 pm.











We were received by a gentleman with a guitar strumming and playing our songs of choice, which the kids were greatly impressed by of course. We slowly started getting an idea of the distances involved in going anywhere in Goa, and decided to spend the first evening at the resort beach and not try too much adventurous stuff.

Starfish on the beach

The kids had a blast on the beach, as it is not an ordinary experience for them in landlocked Bangalore. It is so wonderful to see such enthusiasm from children, as otherwise it feels like we have become quite jaded with "just going to a beach" type of fun!

Back to our suite for some cleaning up and horsing around :).














Catch of the day at the Dune Shack which was our resort's beachside restaurant. You had to buy one whole fish, which they would then prepare in whichever style you wanted it to be. We chose a Kingfish and had it partly fried, and partly in a coconut based gravy.












What a bad foodie I am.. found the pattern of the lamps more interesting to click ;). Though the food was really good too - easily our best meal in Goa. Breaking the suspense already!






And of course with my enthusiasm for photos, this one is getting too long ;). Parts 2, 3 and how many ever more needed to follow soon!

The best thing in life is.....

Just as I was about to sign off for the day and go to sleep (preparing for an early start tomorrow - the starting day of school), I happened to see the FB update from Blogadda reminding about their WOW - Write over the Weekend initiative, and well, the subject was too close to my heart to ignore :).


This post is a part of Write Over the Weekend, an initiative for Indian Bloggers by BlogAdda.

The best thing in life is... the freedom to live it the way you want! And I am definitely having the best of it right now :). Like many SAHMs, I gave up a lucrative job when I gave birth to my daughter, and elected to look after her instead. Though I try my hand at "working from home" stints, it's more out of an interest to know what's out there than to really make a big earning out of it. Again the primary reason being that "Flexible" is the keyword for me where any type of work is concerned. And the amazing thing is I have complete independence to do / not do whatever I want, weirdly enough I have not even had to justify my choices much to friends and family who all seem to understand too :).

 This means I get to explore so many other aspects that I would never have if I was in a full-time job (again speaking from a completely personal point of view, I know amazing ladies who can work as well as do everything else!). Anyone who's read this blog knows of my forays into baking, gardening(no longer a foray, as it's taken over my life ;)). These are all the things that I WANT to do, and I have the freedom to do them - I think it's quite amazing!!

So here's to my darling hubby (who doesn't get mentioned here much, but I know you're going to reading this!) who empowers me and supports me all the way, and to my lovely kids who were the beginning of this new and amazing chapter in my life. Can I also say they are also the best things in my life :)?

This post is a part of Write Over the Weekend, an initiative for Indian Bloggers by BlogAdda

One more saved up memory :)

Another one from the last couple of blogless months:

S wants me to lift him up to see something on the kitchen “medai” (slab), and I say to him “My back is gone sweetheart, I can’t lift you today”.

His reply:

“If your back is gone, it will be invisible no? You should say my back is paining!”

Hmm... from the mouth of babes, teaching me English already :O !!

D keeps telling me stuff like “Amma, your hair has grown so looong!”, “Don’t ever cut it ok!” -> Finally managed to convince her to chop off her own which was the only way she would let me trim mine :).

Here are the kids all dressed up for Navaratri and exhibiting sibling love (for the camera ;)).

It's been raining tomatoes!

After the long break I was tempted to post 10 updates in a row but I managed to control myself ;). So here's a bit of a gardening update.

The plant that's growing in biggest numbers in my garden is the tomato - the seedlings just pop out of my homemade compost, and I literally threw away many as I didn't have enough space for them. Here are a few of these beauties:

Cutting off dead leaves and branches is a good way to nurture these plants. I find that even in plants that look completely worn out with a lot of dried leaves, pruning brings them back to life by generating lots of new foliage. Of course I do not manage to do it regularly so don't have the best results, but I'm slowly learning and trying to be more diligent about it. In any case, these are short lived plants with a life span of about 3-4 months, after which you will see the size of the tomatoes getting smaller and not many flowers coming up.

How to persevere and get back to your blog ;)

And I'm back !!! Still keeping my fingers crossed so let me take it one post at a time ;)


Here's one I've been saving up for a while now - I was having such withdrawal symptoms at not being able to access this blog that I saved a couple of posts in a word doc (!) and started a gardening blog on Wordpress. But my bonds to this one have grown so much, that I was just not able to abandon it and move to the other one! For the record, I'm now using Opera with Turbo turned on which seems to be my best bet.

S has developed an avid interest in reading as of about a couple of months back (yes have been trying to update my blog since then, but some tussle between blogger and my ISP/Browser/Mac can’t even decide which one!). He is now stringing together letters (sounds!) and trying to pronounce anything he sees, and it’s funny to hear the result of phonetics sometimes. I try to teach him my “extra” rules to cover what phonetics misses out (in my eyes J).

He also comes up with the most amazing “thathuvams” (logic) like this one:

After just finishing a bath and wiping himself (or trying to), he says – “Soap cleans humans (!), water cleans soap, towel cleans the water!” – I’ve never contemplated things like this even in adulthood so I was just stumped with this.

D on the other hand, continues to be brilliant with getting ready in the morning, or rather getting up in the morning, which is still not my strong point at all. She is very independent with her schoolwork, and really takes a lot of worries off my head. This morning, I was a little under the weather, and she was actually giving me ideas as to what I could give her for lunch, and offering to have breakfast at the tuck shop. I was of course immeasurably touched!

The other big development with her is that she was diagnosed with myopia and has started wearing glasses as of last week. I was cringing at all the adjustment that was going to be needed with this, but once again she has made the job much easier than expected, and took to it very easily, with hardly a fuss.

Here's a recent pic: