HAPPY BIRTHDAY WESLEY!!!!

It's the big #1 for Mr. Wesley, and this guy is ready to party!! He has heard something about this new thing called "cake" and he wants to know all about it. He also understands that there will be presents, like on Christmas but this time only for him. For that, he even agreed to wear a silly hat.First, his admirers and friends arrive. Here are a few of them. All together he had about 25 of his closest friends in attendance.
His grandparents were, of course, on the other side of the world. Lucky for Wesley Mr. and Mrs. Panjabi (our landlord and lady) have assigned themselves surrogate grandparents until the real ones come to visit.
Now, friends are great and all, but what about this cake thing? Don't hold out on me anymore! Ahh.. there it is! His friends the PTs brought it for him!
In India, there is a tradition of mashing the cake in the face of the birthday boy. When in Rome...

As in all good parties, this got a little out of hand. It was also our friend Shruti's birthday, and so eventually everyone smashed cake on everyone else. Here Garima is helping clean off Mamta.
But smashing on the face is only half of the fun. The really good part is to eat it!! Here is Shashi helping Wesley out in this department. The look in Wesley's eyes is utter rapture mixed with a serious sugar high.
And of course, the presents!! Wesley hit the Jackpot. Thanks everyone for a great first birthday!

Indian Wedding part 2

Wesley couldn't come out to play this evening, but we wanted to share these pictures anyway. We'll pick up with his adventures in the next post.

This is the groom arriving. The prince in his horse drawn carriage. What isn't shown here is the 30+ piece band and the hundreds of family and friends dancing in front of the carriage. The procession moves about 10 feet per hour because the partying is so crazy.

This is the groom himself (the one with the ornate turban, of course). Next to him in the red and gold is his sister Sakshi, who is one of the PTs that we work with. On either side are Shashikant and Jevene, who are also both PTs.

And finally, the only outfit that could outshine the groom is...

The bride, of course! Here she is pictured again with Sakshi. It was about 12:30 on a "school night" when she prepared to leave her preparation place and go to meet the groom. You can't tell it from the picture, but she is wearing about 20 Kgs of bells in addition to that bling covered saree, so she didn't move too fast. So we had to leave before the ceremony actually started. Sakshi took the next day off, and she reported that the party didn't end until 11 am the next morning. Then the next day's party began that afternoon! All told, it was three days and nights and cost approximately 2 years salary to host. And I thought Erin and I had a nice wedding!

Charlie borrowed some traditional Indian formal wear from Shashi, one of the PT's and purchased a pair of pointy toed shoes after much haggling of course. Erin relied on her Western maternity clothes for the Indian wedding. Wesley stayed home with his ayah, Anjana. We got to the wedding around 10:30pm and the party was in full swing, people dancing, the groom arriving slowly in a horse drawn carriage, lights and music blaring, kinda like Disneyland. Once we got inside there were hundreds of people in beautiful colors still dancing but now also eating all kinds of fried delicacies and drinking sweet tropical drinks. I'm sure it was not Orlando even though we did take a picture with the groom dressed like an Indian prince.

Our new place is HUGE (3 bedrooms, 3 baths)! Especially when you compare it to our tiny one bedroom in New York. No, we did not pick out the furniture. This is Erin passed out on the couch after the move. We have two balconies, one with our washing machine the other with our drying rack, several parks and markets in the neighborhood and it's a 10 minute walk from the clinic.

Saying goodbye to our friends at 6 SP (6 Sardar Patel Marg, the Jain guest house) was hard. Wesley had quite a few friends there but we try to visit once a week.

It's about time...

We have finally gotten our home internet up and running. Some things occur frustratingly slow around here. But now we don't have any excuses for not keeping the blog up to date. That is of course until we have a power outage which occur here on a regular basis. Scenes from our last episode include Wesley walking and kissing Mommy. Since then we have moved into our new apartment, opened the FMT clinic, attended an Indian wedding and had Wesley's one year old birthday party.