Feliz Cumpleanos, BigGeek

So, BigGeek turned, err, ok, I am not telling how many years. Let’s just say it was his birthday yesterday (happy budday, love and now en espanol, feliz cumpleanos, querido). The thing with BigGeek and birthdays is this. Two words. Low maintenance. The poor man will ask for something nice to eat and want to spend time in company of family and a few friends. It is a fairly easy birthday (or not) wish to grant. Throw in a gadget or two and the man is in budday heaven.

Which is how the day started. By receiving customary phone calls. And Chip singing Happy budday in a cute, ear splitting voice – an oxymoron only your own child is capable of executing with aplomb. Chip had also made, with not so gentle nudging from his Aie a card for his Baba. He is not big on drawing – he has inherited my genes in that regard - the only things he draws are things that look like people. But they are encoded. In squiggles and strokes and furious scratches that only a mother’s love and father’s adoration can decipher. So the card was basically, an Easter bunny cut from a catalog, stuck with blue glitter glue – for who would not like a little sparkle in their life? Inside, I drew a line for Chip to write the words Baba, but the pressure it generated for Chip was a bit much. In the end, after much hemming and hawing, he made me hold his hand and write the letters. Then he scribbled a picture of Baba with a wide grin and some hair, cut it out and pasted that alongside the lettering (for what if Baba can’t read?) with some more glittery glue.

Chip was so happy with the result, he was jealous. Of his own self for making such a fab card for baba. So from the bits and pieces of scrap left over, he fashioned another birthday card from himself, with huge globs of blue glitter glue. And made a train ticket for him to ride the train at the mall while he was at it too.

This year, BigGeek wanted pooran-polis for his birthday. Which is what he got (and het also got to grind the pooran in my very buggy Anjali food mill.) Unlimited quantities of pooran poli. And sabudana khichadi. No cake. (Chip asked BigGeek several times in the course of the day if he would like some cake, made with “special” eggs that doesn't cause an allergy.)

The gift I ordered for BigGeek did not arrive because they sent an email saying it was backordered. A fancy telescope with a motorized drive that will allow him to take pictures of nebulae and the moon and stars. And, in his own words, other “heavenly bodies”.

But that was not all. What a birthday without a little excitement? While we were talking with the ILs (mine, not his) over sykpe yesterday afternoon, Chip, who was pottering nearby, came in and told me he had a bead up his nose. I peered inside his snotty nostril and true enough a bright pink plastic bead lay wedged. I panicked. BigGeek did not. He is the man that does not panic. He has nerves of steel. He is the rock of Gibraltar. A man with derring-do. And lots of it. While I was blurting out words like “drive” and “E.R.” and “now” with as much coherence and syntactic accuracy as a pet goldfish, BigGeek leaped in the bathroom and came out flashing a tweezer. As I held Chip down, he very carefully, inserted the tweezer up Chip’s nose and extricated the bead. I don’t think I know anybody who was extricated a bead from their kid’s nose while their parent’s looked on the other side of the world in a different time zone on skpe, on their birthday? Do you? See? Told you BigGeek was one of a kind.