The body language

Once Sahil started talking about something that had happened six or so months ago.

What had happened was this. He was driving a bumper car in an amusement park. His car was stuck and I thought he was not pressing the accelerator. Shouting over all the noise around was impossible, so showed him what to do. I raised my leg in front of me till he could see it and made the motion of pressing the foot forward. I did it again and again and really made the pressing-the-foot action visible.

So, six months later, out of the blue, Sahil said, "Baba, you remember that day in the amusement park?". Then added some description to remind me. "You were telling me to press the accelerator, right?"

"Yes", I said.

He hesitated for a moment. He was bit unsure if he should say it or not. Then he made up his mind, lowered his voice, and said...

"Baba, but do you know, everyone else thought you were weird."

Cool car

Sahil was not happy about a lack of some feature in the van (driver's inability to change the direction of the vents without getting up, to be precise). So I asked him to design a car for himself. Here are some highlights.

"I will press a button and a van can turn to a sedan and a sedan can turn to a van. "

"If I want a break, I will press a button and a robot will drive the van."

"If I want to play foosball, I will press a button and another robot will play foosball with me."

"If I want to hear a story..." (you get the drift)

So I asked him - if you have a bunch of robots doing nothing most of the time, won't they get bored?

And he said...

"They won't get bored, unless I press the 'get bored' button."

Saying No

Kids ask for candies and such sugary stuff all the time. Sometimes I say yes, but I never say yes if it's past, say, 6:00pm.

So Sahil got very irritated one time and said -

"You always say no when it's dark. You would say no to Mom as well. Like this - (imitating Mom) 'can I marry you?' (imitating me) 'NO'. So she must have asked you when it was sunny."

And she is right

"I have a big mouth"

(Sanjana, after I told her to eat with smaller bites)

Observation

Based on her observation, mainly in her day care center, one day Sanjana concluded

"Any grown-up who does not have a kid is a teacher."