Mornings ala Interspersed Insanity

I have to say, holidays are the strangest times in my life. My mom doesn’t let me sleep in, so everyday she wakes me up at 8 before she leaves for work, and everyday I sit up in bed, blabber inanely and go back to sleep around 8:05, the moment I hear the car go out the gate. On weekends we have special sleep concessions till 10:00 (that’s when mom wakes up herself and then raises hell for those of us still in bed.)

On weekdays, I wake up to the sweet sound of nothing. No little cousins screaming outside, no mother stripping my blankets off, no bleeping alarm clock. NOTHING. Nothing is bliss incarnate.

After shuffling into my socks and sweater without letting my head slip out from under the blankets, I emerge into the argh-so-cold! air. It takes a while to drag myself to the bathroom and brush my teeth what with my brain shutting down every two minutes, so by the time I haul myself downstairs and unlock the front door, it’s usually 11 am. Sometimes 12. Once it was 1:30 and I had to scramble to get the place cleaned up before mom got home.

The house is usually quiet, often creepily so, so I turn the TV on and call up the main house for a meetha paratha and tea. Or when I’m particularly awake drag myself and my lounge blanket to the kitchen and make myself some cheese-scrambled eggs on toast. Our house has REALLY tall windows, from the floor to the ceiling, and we haven’t gotten around to putting up curtains yet, so it’s very pretty on winter mornings with the light slanting in.

So I curl up on the couch, chomping down my breakfast and absent-mindedly staring at the TV till it suddenly hits me that I’ve been watching something like “Na Aaana Is Des…Laado!” for the past fifteen minutes, at which point I thank God I’m alone and flip channels till I hit Discovery, or History or MTV.

At around 12 one of my littler cousins will always come in, lugging my fat toddler nephew Saud, aka Bubble behind them. Bubble is this adorable tube-light-white ball of flub (hence Bubble) on a constant sugar high. As usual the kid goes crazy, he can’t talk properly yet, but jabbers on and on in his ‘Bubblish.’ As is his custom every morning these days, he comes in all sober and collected, stands squarely in front on me and states: Mama, baba, saad, ball, bhaiya, mum; the extent of his vocabulary. Then he promptly turns around and starts waging war on the Playstation with inspired intensity.

Prying him away from the playstation makes him poke fingers in the heater, throw his ball at the tv screen or try to stick his tongue into the electrical sockets. And scolding him makes him pose adorably so you HAVE to pick him up and cuddle him. The kid’s going to be so spoiled, but I don’t CARE!!!

So yeah, after finally having enough and sending the kids on to their next destination on the morning Saud House Tour, I flip open my laptop and fiddle with it till I realize that oh, crap! Mom’s going to be back any freakin’ minute!

After that it’s a mess, with me tripping over to-be-folded blankets and falling down stairs to the tunes of YUI, Buck-Tick and the GooGoo Dolls. The falling down the stairs is routine, it happens everyday without fail. And while I lay recuperating at the bottom of the stairwell, hoping I didn’t break the glass sliding door to my left, Mom came in.

Mom: I’m baaaack! *abrupt stop* Uh, did you just fall down the stairs?

Me: Um… What’s my name again?

Mom: Oh shutup you wiseass and get off the floor.

Me: *whine* But mooooooom, what if I was really broken???

Mom: If you were ‘broken’ you would be doing better things than cracking bad jokes.

Yeah, that’s my mom. You can’t argue with that.

So I fix my limbs, get up and reattach myself to the couch.

And it just gets worse from there…

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