All About Arya - You Notti

This was way back when Arya was just 2 years old. She had learned two things - sometimes she was a good girl and at other times she was naughty, or notti (tti pronounced as the word for "her" in marathi)
To our amusement, she would pick herself up when she would fall and call the ground 'notti', when it rained while she was enjoying herself in the playground, she would look at the sky and say 'notti', the TV would be called 'notti' if her fat little fingers weren't able to press the remote power on button, if a biscuit fell out of her hand, she would just look at it with a great deal of frustration and say - you guessed it - notti!

Kushal found this very amusing and so he started teasing her and calling her notti whenever it caught his fancy. This used to make her really angry and she would fly into a rage and say - YOU Notti - to which he would reply with the same fervour - it's you who's notti, only to enrage her further and further till her anger drove her to tears.

Poor thing, she had only a limited vocabulary back then. So everything around her was just notti. Today things range from the mildly crazy to idiotic to horrible, terrible, miserable and extremely bad. She often rolls up her eyes skywards and tells me that the food can't be called bad, it's just tasteless, or tastes awful. Mumma, don't say it's "not good" to touch stray animals - Say that they aren't clean so wash your hands afterwards. Mumma, why do you say your teeth will become 'kharab' if you don't brush, just say that they will decay. The list goes on.

Of course, I miss the fat little cherubic toddler who simply said - You Notti!