Hype, Hype, More Hype

First, a Belated

"Happy Valentines Day"

to all of you!




To a desi family, Valentine's day is as important as Halloween, President's day or MLK Day. The socio-cultural tie is missing, but the same goes for Republic day or Independence day for most of today's generation for countries which got indendence before their parents were born. In short, we celebrate Valentine's day very seriously!!!! Serious enough to make Mr. Valentine proud!

Thanks to this little custom, and its hidden implications of love, we managed to create a baby six years ago and repeated the feat three years ago. Being an engineer who has a tendency to graph things in his head, I extrapolated the line and was agahst! The next data point on the "Baby as a function of year" graph was 2008!

This thought was still resonating in daddy's head when something happened. A virus hitherto unknown to daddy's body, played havoc with his respiratory system earlier this week. He was pretty much bed ridden, just him and his little virus.

Now this post is more about Valentine's day hype and the cards that were purchased, filled out and sent to all of Jr.'s classmates. I am sure at this point that there is a Hallmark Lobby in Congress!

Valentine cards : US :: Diwali Firecrackers : India

Fun for the kids, but not for the parents and definitely not good for the environment!

Today it was Daddy's day out. Mom and the cousin family decided to get daddy out in the open to get some fresh air! Where else but the new combo Toysrus-Babysrus opening day in San Jose!!

Here are some pictures!




They had a huge discount sale, characters dressed up to greet the kids, freebies at the door....








There was a spiderman also, but the line to take a photo with the spiderman was at least 200 kids strong, so we skipped that photo.

Now for the hype part! Dora decided to go on lunch break just as our kids got their photo-op turn. We had to wait for 30 minutes to take a picture with "Dora the explorer" and as people in the head of the line, tell all passers by that the line was for "Dora". Toysrus should have paid us for being their informers!

The funny thing was that Dora was pretty much blind and a helper walked Dora to her designated spot! The kids were all screaming and we had less than 30 seconds to take "one picture per family!" and move on so other kids could have their picture taken!

Unfreaking believable! The queue at Thirupathi came to mind!

What we do for our kids happiness!!! The list keeps going...

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