Favorite 5, out of the 63 blogs that we read!!

Just 13 more days to go before we kick-off our sabbatical. There is a growing flutter in our stomach as the date approaches 🙂 🙂 Though our life has been very busy with Vivek’s office, packing/ selling stuff and planning 5 months sabbatical, but we are already in sabbatical mood 🙂 We are way more productive these days and have a lot more drive to do things. Because of all this excitement, Vivek gets up very early in the morning and that too without an alarm – Getting up early gives Vivek more number of hours to relish the sabbatical euphoria. We are utilizing this extra time and energy to identify new goals in life – Koshika recently got Zumba instructor license and is about to start offering Zumba classes.

Vivek has joined a mastermind group consisting of entrepreneurs (Expect a separate post on this soon!), has started regular meditation sessions through Headspace app and is preparing for a 5K race. He is also planning to experiment with toastmaster sessions and to attend the introduction session of Rising Tide Capital (Community Business Academy)!!!

With so many interesting things going on, our life is definitely on a roll. But among all these, there is one thing that is closest to Vivek’s heart, something that he yearns to do whole day and is kind of a meditation to him… Any guesses? You are absolutely right – that is Blog reading!!! You win a prize for answering such a tough question correctly! 🙂

After 60 hours of research, this is the itinerary that we came up for our Bhutan trip

Pre-FI, Vivek avoided traveling as it added to his workload (Research, ticket booking, hotel booking – All this added more items to his already exploding to-do list!!!) but now it is altogether a different ball game. We now spend countless hours researching the new destination and try to learn as much as possible about it.

If you have read our sabbatical post, you already know that we are planning a Bhutan trip in the month of Oct 2016. In our post-FI life, we prefer slow travel but this Bhutan trip is an exception as it is with Vivek’s parents and we don’t think they will enjoy our style of slow travel 🙂 but we have tried to keep the trip a little laid back. Research is complete, itinerary is complete, the only thing left is booking and the actual trip 🙂

Finally kicking off new phase of our life – Going on a 5 months sabbatical on 1st June 2016

Finally finally finally 🙂 Yes Yes Yes !!!! We are going on a 5 months sabbatical to get a feel of how life is without a full time corporate job 🙂 After the sabbatical, there is a possibility that Vivek will join back corporate job with replenished energy and enthusiasm or he might enjoy sabbatical so much that he might decide to discontinue the corporate job soon.. It is all about choices, choices and choices… that’s what FI is all about. Right? 🙂
Pari’s (Our beloved daughter) comment – ‘Daddy, Nice that you have used 3 words 3 times in this para, you should do this with all the words as I am 3 years old

It feels like deja vu…. Around 2 years back, Vivek had similar plans but at the last moment, circumstances changed and Vivek was pulled back into corporate job crushing his grand plans

This time, again Vivek has planned out things with rejuvenated determination of not letting anything crush the plans (Koshika’s comment – Vivek said this last time as well… Huh!!). Vivek is going on a 5 month sabbatical on 1st June 2016 and will be joining back on 1st Nov 2016 and we plan to spend all these 5 months in India. Hurray!!

5 Must-have Toys for a 2-yr old Girl

“It is in playing, and only in playing, that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.”                                      -DW Winnicott (1896-1971), a renowned British Pediatrician and Psychoanalyst

Yesterday, while randomly browsing over the internet, I came across the above quote. It immediately caught my eyes, and led me to think of the truth in it.

For a child, though the formal schooling starts much later, the learning starts as soon as he is born. Initially, a child learns from his environment. Once he is familiar with the environment, he uses toys to keep himself entertained, and in the process, learns from them. As parent, it is our responsibility to foster this learning by providing appropriate toys to our kids. How often it happens, that in the process of fulfilling this responsibility, we spend endless hours in the toy store to find the right toy.  But when given to the kid, the toy spends no more than 30 minutes with him, only to be thrown away in the toy box with multitude of other toys.

But few toys always remain kids’ favorites. Same is with our 2 yr daughter, Pari.

Often, we wish that someone could tell us which toys would strike a chord with our kids. Here, we are presenting a list of toys that are my 2 year daughter, Pari’s, all-time favorites. In case you are looking for toys for a similar age-group girl, you might want to give one of these a try. We are purposely not providing detailed description of the toys as you can anyways find that on internet. As we did some price research on these toys while purchasing them, we are also mentioning the price at which we purchased to provide a benchmark.

Updated page – What’s this Blog all about?

We have just now updated our ‘What’s this Blog all about?’ page so as to better communicate the purpose and usefulness of this blog to our readers. Hope you revisit the page.

Happy Reading!!!