Vs visit the Motherland - a tale of survival against all odds!

Not so long ago, each time I had the misfortune (yep my choice of words tells it all!) of being seated next to someone with a kid, I would with great deliberation, roll my eyes heavenward and curse my luck, loud enough to leave no room for any confusion on my displeasure! I even remember once telling a woman who stepped on my toes & then told me I should be sympathetic as she had a kid along, that it was not my problem she chose to produce one! So when we decided to take the Vs along to India for their baptism, I was sure, all the bad karma would come back to haunt me, what with me travelling with not one but 2 infants in tow! 

So to prevent my bad karma from catching up with me, SOS mails were sent to friends with experience in travelling with kids; in return received long emails full of tips and advices. Then the month long planning started, complete with weeks of hectic list making, shopping for climate appropriate clothes, packing everything from medicines to wipes, diapers and formula. Multiple calls were made to the family giving them lists of equipments/ foods/ cleaning I wanted done - on the lines of the President's personal staff dictating to some hapless hotel staff what the Obamas would need on their trip; an act,which I am quite convinced, made me highly unpopular with the family and the subject of many a bitching sessions!! 

D-day arrived and with it began our tale of exhaustion, of near brushes with insanity, of high speed chases and high decibel screams, of meeting new faces each day and new cities every week......and finally the dawning of empathy, sympathy and loads of respect for every parent I encountered in the past & wasn't too kind to!!

On the day of our first flight, as advised, made the Vs run around the entire day like 2 Energiser bunnies so that they would be dead tired by the time we reached the airport. But as luck would have it, I ignored the one teeny tiny little mantra of "I propose, then the Vs dispose"! So lulled into a sense of well being when the Vs fell asleep right after takeoff, I put my feet up, asked for a glass of the amazing Reisling that Singapore airlines serves & a headset to spend some quality time with the inflight entertainment. 2 happy sips later I find the Vs were up, pulling at my wine, checking out the light switch on our seats, taking bites out of the inflight magazine & pulling the headset off the guy across the aisle. About 5hrs of gritting my teeth, leaving Vj to handle the boys and pretending not to know all 3 of them, we finally reached the motherland. 

This was a forewarning of how all my carefully made plans were going to come crashing down! Then came the chronic sickness. We kicked off with a cough that turned into a throat infection and high fever. Vj and I had our first serious parenting fight over taking Vs to a paediatrician in India. So after threatening him with visitation rights over Christmas, I prevailed. We went to a dr who proved Vj as usual, is always right by giving the Vs such strong meds that they developed severe diarrhoea & fungal infections! Net result: after planning to meet one friend per day, all I ended up doing was being indoors, changing diapers and consoling the Vs for most part of my trip. Didn't go out to meet a single friend, didn't shop to my heart's content and worst of all, didn't even manage that affordable pedicure and facial I had been looking forward to for months!!!

Then there was the travel - from never having flown in their lives to 6 flights & 4 cities in 18 days - which meant making the Vs deal with a new place, new water, new weather and new faces every week, not to mention the colossally painful task of packing and unpacking each 4-6days! 

And when we talk travel, how can we ignore the contribution of the airlines into making this a trip that still sends shivers down my spine? As an appetiser, we had the incessant delays and a taste of the "I/Me/Myself" mentality we Indians are so famous for; with not a single passenger, save one in Bangalore, having the decency of offering a seat on the bus/lounge to a woman/man carrying an infant! For heaven's sake! Is good manners dead in the motherland? Even on my worst days, I don't recall hesitating for even an instant in offering my seat to someone old, or pregnant or carrying a child with them!! 

For our main course, we had the drama of the cancelled flight and the trauma of being stranded in an airport with 2babies with diarrhoea and without a diaper changing facility! Lost my temper & threatened the airlines staff with the prospect of babysitting the Vs, leading to us being swamped with juice and colas courtesy the terrified ground personnel who were convinced I would act on my threats! They were also sweet/scared enough to provide me with the email id of the King of Good times, leading me to dash off an angry email to him daring him to travel with 2 babies in tow instead of travelling on his own private jet in the company of nubile nymphets! (I am yet to receive a reply from the King of Good times on that!)

But the jewel in the crown was discovering that we couldn't sit near each other on any domestic flight due to limitations on the no. of O2 masks. While most airlines were helpful and circumvented this by letting us sit on the same row but on different sides of the aisle, the award for the most anal, unhelpful, and annoying airlines would have to go to Indigo, who behaved like Govt. babus with PMS and wouldn't let us sit even side by side across the aisle even though the seats were empty! That led to a first - the usually calm and patient Vj losing his temper, yelling to see the Captain and refusing to let the flight take off till he saw the rule book, with me playing peacemaker while having visions of security staff dragging Vj away to prison! 

But those were the lows. And how can we end this post without mentioning the highs? 

The Vs soldiered on like real troopers inspite of all sickness and pain.

They slept like logs throughout the trip and even better, learnt to put themselves back to sleep, giving Vj and me the relief we had been praying for months for.

Aeroplanes got bumped up to the Vs' 3rd favourite vehicles right after motorcycles and buses!

They fell head over heels in love with their little sister Bubbly, the tortoise & the shark in their Maasi's aquarium and not necessarily in that order. 

They took their little sister Bubbly on rides every day - in the mornings while she sat patiently on her toilet seat and in the evenings when she was belted up in her pram! 

Together with their sister, they learnt to create symphony - all 3of them crying in unison - a torture device that I barely managed to survive!

Like true bongs, they discovered the pleasure of eating fish fry with its skin and kalakand and ice cream and Alu bhaja made by their grandmom. 

They beat up my sister's 4yr old neighbor 2 days in a row and made her cry! 

Assault on my mom's terrace garden

They attacked my mom's prized plants with brooms and tried to clean all the soil off her pots, much to her horror. 

They created a new game of hitting balls with broomsticks!

They went ballistic chasing cows in Bhubneswar and pigeons in Mumbai. 

They took great joy in throwing things off our 3rd floor balcony in Bengaluru and making a normally sedentary Uncle Jar run around! 

They gaped open mouthed as Priyanka Chopra/ Katrina Kaif/ Deepika Padukone lit up the TV screen. 

They discovered Bollywood item numbers and brought back home some of the dance moves they picked up in India.

They were doted upon by an army of grandparents, uncles & aunts and were swamped with more jewellery than I got at my wedding! 

Running amok in church prior to baptism

Then, the baptism ceremony went off like a dream - complete with a beautiful church, flowers, a choir and a moving ceremony, complete with our families. There were no mishaps, no sudden diaper changing was required in between, and none of the anticipated and feared tears or howls or screams happened; albeit we did have the Vs running amok in church, causing a commotion that caused the nuns inside to come out, pulling the Bible from the priests during the ceremony and attacking the holy water that the choir boys carried!

And most importantly, we discovered that the Vs were an effective weapon in clearing seats - one howl from either V, a look at 2 hyperactive boys and seats near us would get empty immediately as fellow passengers departed in a hurry for some peace and quiet; a discovery which I hope will hold me in good stead in all my next trips!

As of now, am on a "wait and watch" to see when that happens, when we gather up enough courage to pack our bags and take our next "holiday" with the Vs. As I also eagerly wait for the day when they are grown up enough for the 4 of us to take real holidays together, ones without the apostrophes, ones where I can share with them my love of travelling, and see with them the places that I have fallen in love with and dreamt of ....... dinners in a beautiful piazza in Rome, a train to the top of the Alps, a boat to a deserted little island in Lombok with crystal clear waters and no people around, a walk into the crater of a volcano, driving through Scotland when the heather is in bloom ...... to castles and moors, museums, pubs, village inns, vineyards and ice-hotels.....

Till then, I wait....

"The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready" Henry David Thoreau