My diary

My school diary had the above words in it, which was written by my English teacher in UKG. My Mom checks the school diary every day and makes sure I complete all my home work before going to school the next day. It is expected that, on a daily basis, every set of homework carries my Mom’s signature. Promptly my Mom does the same and places the school diary in my bag.

By the time I completed KG I knew all the alphabets in English…in fact the class started writing English words in the four line hand writing notebook.

Subsequently, in First grade we had to construct small sentences.

Mrs. Gamble, my ‘First grade‘ teacher wanted us to get into the habit of letter writing and in fact in one of the parents- teachers meeting she wanted the parents to inculcate the habit of diary writing to their kids. She also encouraged kids to write letters to each other or to her…during the winter and summer holidays.

Great initiative isn’t it?…

My Mom a big fan of “Gamble Miss” and with her kids’ ‘future in this world‘ being utmost priority gave me and my Sister a diary. I was as usual excited about something new, and started thinking about what to write. My Mom instructed us to note down all our activities for the day in the dairy before going to bed.

I knew my Sister with a better grey matter than me… because of her age and nature, would do it promptly. Me on the other hand was too playful and can hardly sit still in a place…quite literally even for 2 min max. There are very rare instances where I stay focused for a longer time…like hide and seek, 7 stones etc…that too only outdoor activity. If there was anything apart from outdoor activity that attracted my attention at that age… it was the Diary writing… may be because…whatever I wrote in there was confidential and my Mom assured me that no one would read my diary without my permission. The ‘my permission‘ part attracted me a lot.

Since it was my confidential data ‘My Diary‘ I wanted to decorate it before using it.

And meanwhile back in school we were taught a little drawing… like a flower, potted plant, grass etc. in our art class and apart from that…we also colored some of the already drawn pictures of animals, birds etc.

With couple of these fresh in my mind, I wanted to decorate ‘my diary‘ with some of those images. Decided to draw a cow grazing on a field and another reason for choosing that was the day-to- day scenes I see when I walk towards my school everyday…the lush green meadow where the cows were grazing surrounded by tea estates in the Nilgris.                                             

Being a six year old I should be extremely talented to bring the same seen on paper.

I had the constraint of the paper being half of A4 sheet with lots of lines in between and only a pencil…I think a black ink pen as well…and also did not want to make it obvious about the decoration part to my sister.           

I quickly drew a ‘Cow‘ [see pic. below] …I recollected the image in my mind …the cow was always tied to a peg or a tree…slowly shifting my image to the end of rope towards the cow…the rope went through the nose.
It was a little complicated…so decided to do something else completely different. It is for you to see in the pic below.

For people who could not figure out… I tied the so called cow’s tail to…I was not taught to draw a tree…so used my art class experience to draw a potted plant.

Creative isn’t it? My Mom still has the Diary… isn’t that precious than gold?

And also like the heading says “will you ever lose cattle?”