My dancing Ninja

I asked Monster to strike a pose and this is what she gives me:

I really do think she's about to pounce! After many blurry pictures of begging her to stop moving (how DO you make a toddler stop moving??? Benadryl? But how do they pose?), we had one worthy of sharing.

Well, it's better than the rest of the 15 shots I took...

Thank you Emilie for the gorgeous gift =) You, Miranda and Bruce are one of the kindest people I came to love in Sunnyside, NY! We miss you *muah*

My first Granola made at home

Granola is the one thing that even Wizard doesn't hesitate from splurging on regularly. If I can find it for cheap, his eyes light up and he chalks the store down as the preferred granola source for a long time.

I got some great/cheap/tasty/crunchy granola from the Honest Weight Food Coop here in Albany but something got me thinking, and I picked up rolled oats, organic raisings, dried cranberries too. One month later, I gather all required ingredients including real maple syrup and hunker down to look up recipes.

By the time I find one that I like, we've drained the maple syrup on the Fluffiest Pancakes on the Planet. Shucks!

Plan B, honey. Now, honey is not cheap! Especially the one Wizard has in his browser Favorites and that he orders every few months. More on that later when our next order comes in.

I had to improvise and keep costs down, so instead of the fancier $10 variety, I picked up a Hannoford store brand blue berry honey...which isn't bad, not bad at all.

I mashed up a few recipes to include all the ingredients that I did have, and exclude the ones that I didn't. This was the base recipe:

Ingredients:

2 cups rolled oats

1/2 cup sliced almonds

1/4 cup packed light brown sugar*

Smattering of ground cinnamon

1/4 cup honey

2 tbsp+2 tsp canola oil

Two drops of vanilla (I hate the artificial vanilla I have at hand)

Mix all dry ingredients together, I added chopped cashews and hazelnuts, maybe a fistful.

Mix all wet ingredients well and pour over the oats, nuts combo. Stir together well and spread out on an ungreased baking sheet. I took bunches of oats and squeezed them into balls to make them stick to each other. Then stuck in a preheated over at 345 degrees for 10 minutes.

Facebooked for 10 minutes, thought about Nutella and how I must. not. buy. another jar.

Came back, stirred the now nicely toasting oats and added a handful of raisins and cranberries. Stuck back in the over for another 5 minutes.

I love looking at my jarful of homemade granola =) All it needs is a little yogurt topping, maybe a a tablespoon of strawberry preserve and it makes the crunchiest parfait I've ever had.

Of course, I eat it most regularly to make my midnight cereal snack crunchier =)

Snowflakes

In school, I used to be obsessed with creating geometric snowflakes. While girls were doodling FLAMEs with their names and names of cute boys, I was busy with filling my notebook with snowflakes everywhere. Drawing them inspired me, so it is no surprise to me that watching snowflakes stick to my car window made me want to take photographs again....even in this dreary snowpocalypse weather.

New Year, New Place, Same old Me

Like a new chapter of a story, our January started.

On the morning of January 1st, in the midst of mountains of snow from the blizzard, my brother, Wizard and his friend C started emptying out our Sunnyside apartment. One by one, my memories were taken down and out: the dreamcatcher hanging in the foyer because I didn't know it was a dreamcatcher until a friend told me, the kitchen shelf that caught a small fire when Monster stuck a plastic bowl inside and turned it on just before heading out with Wizard and which I discovered just before I went for a shower! It was trashed of course.

I had packed all the fridge magnets the night before and emptied it out. I hated staring at that white blank piece of thing: it had suddenly lost all personality.

In my mind, I held on to the thoughts of my friends and who will still be here when I make my way back. I hadn't even left Sunnyside yet, and was already dreaming of coming back in a year.

By 4 o'clock--5 hours off schedule, we were ready to strike the tarmac. My brother left with the uHaul first, C and his girl friend took my brother's van and Wizard, I and Monster led them into Albany.

Late into the night, the men worked to heave everything up into our third floor apartment. It will take even longer for me to put everything in its place not just for organization, but to also restore some of the character our knick knacks collected over the years tend to bring to our space.

I'm still working on it. I had to work on getting Monster to accept this space as her new home first though. Only recently does she not yell at me angrily when I say "we're going home" and drive her to this apartment. The first few days, she'd think we're going back to Sunnyside everytime we got into the car. It broke my heart and it took a lot of strenght to not break down into tears in the middle of I-87 South and just keep driving till I entered NYC.

Even now, whenever I am driving along this route, I have to fight the urge to miss all exits and just keep going South, south to my home.

Not here, not for now

365Tasveerain will be going on a temporary hiatus, until I find my will to take pictures and write about life again.

Till then, send positive vibes towards the general direction of Albany, NY. I'm sure the sheer force of gravity of my specific blackhole will attract them all in. Many thanks, Ayesha

Play dates and friends

December 26th, 2010

So my lovely friend Wafa decides to make life easier for me and invites us over for her son's birthday (he turned 4!) on the day we were dreading spending all alone due to the impending snow storm/blizzard creeping towards the North East.

It was so exciting! The prospect of hanging out with my cool desi friend (plus some more!) and add to that her cooking and CAKE?! Are the lucky stars shining down on me at the end of this year or what? Armed with a gift (that was a snap to shop for by the way! Shopping for boys' clothes may be a pain in the butt, but much to my delight, I've discovered that shopping for toys for them is a fun filled snap.)

Iza's first question to me when I told her where we're going was "Who is Mus-tafa?"

Of course, when "Mustafa" opened the door she immediately shouted MU-FADA! So apparently, that's the only way she knows him and that's how he shall stay =)

It's the most wonderful time of the year!

Just like Eid is to Pakistan (and other Muslim countries), Christmas is to NYC. Some stores do the wild thing and stay open 24/7 for last minute shoppers, unaware that in a country far away, 24/7 shopping is the norm during Ramadan.

To me, the crowds in NYC are no different, the streets lit with holiday lighting none the brighter that what I grew up seeing in the streets of Karachi, Pakistan. In my own personal mind, when I'm in the middle of NY shoppers and tourists, I'm back in my country during Eid. Which is probably the real reason why I love Christmas time now so much.

We'd tried taking Monster to see the huge tree at Rockefeller Center twice before, once in 2008 and then in 2009. Both times, little miss Routine was fast asleep.

Above, 2008,

And here, again she's asleep on Wizard's back.

Finally this year, we saw her face light up brighter than the tree when she craned her neck upwards to taken in the giant!

We managed to show her the nutcrackers outside Radio City Hall in 2008 below:

But it was in 2010 she showed any interest in the giant-sized toys:

In spite of all that she does to make us tear our hair out and make Wizard go prematurely gray haired, I can't help but fall in love with her and every time she gives me this sweet big smile.

This girl is truly my little super Star!