19 June 2005

A special day for Father’s around the world.  A day when their children express their
love and gratitude to their father.  Natasha bought me a present.  She picked it herself and remembered to
wish me and hand over the present first thing upon waking up this morning.  Smyan, you are in my thoughts every
second of the day.  You are missing
out on your right to express yourself and you right to celebrate Father’s
day.  This is the second year in a
row that you have been denied your opportunity and mine to be able to celebrate
Father’s day.  I promise you I
will make it up to you and for all the precious lost time between us.  I hope you have a great day.

Natasha has been her great wonderful self.  Ajji’s
house is full of A4 sized pages stuck all over the place.  Each page has a new word for Natasha to
read and learn.  Smyan, your sister
is now trying to remember the spellings of many of the words.  Yesterday she wanted to do some
history.  So, we started off with
matching famous people with their deeds.  She got them all one hundred percent
right.  There was Edison matched to
bulb and record player, Newton to gravity, Wright brothers to airplanes, Neil
Armstrong to landing on the moon, Henry Ford to the car and for some unearthly
reason, Bill Clinton to the American President.  She was very excited to have been able
to identify Queen Elizabeth while watching the Ascot
races.  She then wanted to know
about the Swedish King and Queen, the Australian King (I gave up trying to
explain this one).  During the evening
on Friday, the Chemistry set was briefly out.

Yes, I almost forgot.
Natasha wanted to send mails to her friends and teacher back in Australia.  So off we went to the Post Office to
pick up some stamps.  Natasha is a
regular there and the woman who deals with stamps is now a friend of hers.  Coming back N wrote 3 letters – one
to Robyn, another, collectively to her school friends at Warrawee and finally
the last one to the Wiggles.  This
is 5th or 6th letter to the Wiggles, the folks down at
the Wiggles studio are now friends of hers, and she receives very personalized responses.
The Wiggles also want to know about
Smyan and also when N and S will be back in Sydney.

Early last week Natasha also painted a fire engine and Barney and mailed
them to Barney and Dora.

I have also uploaded some photographs from Priyanka’s
birthday party and our visit to a waterfalls.