Pretty cupcakes
"Happy Birthday to yoooooo"
Hurray!!
Leela really made us giggle because she was making some pretty good attempts at singing the Happy Birthday song, long after we finished. She was doing a pretty good job of it and managed "happy...happy...bur...bur...happy....ooooo", which she repeated, off and on, for the next hour or so! Very sweet.
And the other thing that tickled us (and astonished us) was what she did when she saw the birthday candles:
In this picture you can see Leela folding her hands together in the traditional 'Namaste' greeting used in India. I was wondering for a moment why she was doing it to the cakes. Then it dawned on me. Now, don't get me wrong, Leela's dad and I are Buddhist but we don't believe in 'making'children any religion at all and believe faith is down to individual choices when a child is old enough to make such choices. Of course, we will guide her in our faith as this is what we are, but we never force or overly encourage her to to be a part of anything overtly Buddhist, as such. But when I saw Leela folding her hands here, it melted my heart. I realised that she had been watching her father lighting candles on his Buddhist shrine and saluting the shrine with folded hands. Both my Aunt and I were stunned that she had remembered such a simple, yet beautiful gesture. She hasn't seen her Dad in over a month and I know she didn't witness this very often. She always finds ways to amaze me.
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