My toddler and I - and some NRI banter

Reading a fellow blogger's recent post sparked this new post after about 7 months. Little Garima will be all of 3 in May and our days seem to be filled with all variety of learning and entertainment, errands, books and lots of "why,s" from her end and an effort to answer her reasonably on my end. I do have to strain the grey matter a bit when she asks for reasons for everything which for an adult would generally be obvious. Curiosity is the mother of knowledge they say, so I tell myself, its all good in the end. Apart from asking questions all day, she sings a line or two from her fast growing repertoire of hindi,kannada and telugu songs and also shakes a mean hip, wrapped up in her "Saawee"(sari) which is one of my dupattas being put to very good use.
She is our resident shrink too as she reads us like a open book and sweetens us in a jiffy in case one of us gets a bit sour with her. She is involved in all that I do and vice versa.
I,ve been a peoples person all my life and the entry of Garima into our life has slowly and subtly changed me in more ways than one. Every parent worth her/his salt knows what I,m talking about. Apart from the regular stuff I have learnt to really love staying home. Now this is an accomplishment for me and all who know me will understand why. Ever since I knew right from wrong I had a penchant for being out with friends in a lot of my free time. After migrating to Australia, weekends would mean regularly inviting others or being invited for dinner and chitchat long into the nights. This must be an NRI malady since most of them seem to indulge themselves in similar pursuits, at least till they have children.
Very soon something started gnawing at me. I had this huge group of acquaintances who were very familiar by now but still were likely never to become friends except one or two. This was a bit strange because back in India I never ever socialised in this meaningless manner. Only once friendship had blossomed would we start to hang out together making it a rewarding experience. To cut a long story short, now I,ve gone back to socialising with a few likeminded people and not very often at that.
I had intended to do some food blogging too but I,ve proved to myself time and again that my love of reading, cooking and eating far surpasses my photographic abilities and the pereseverance required to blog about it. All the food bloggers continue to amaze me and they provide me with constant inspiration to try new recipes. I will end this post with a thanks to them. Keep up the good work guys.