The Bottle and The Potty

It's silly probably, but only a parent will appreciate the following without committing the area between my ears to vacuum: he told us he wanted to poo yesterday and did his first potty on the toilet all by himself and I actually felt proud and a little sad that he was growing up! I know, it's absolutely pathetic to feel that way about something like this, but it is what it is. I can be such a wuss sometimes!
We are a long way off from being fully toilet-trained, of course, but we are definitely on the way. Praveen has somehow taken up the onus with this particular job. He has been harping on about weaning him off the bottle and toilet-training him since he turned two and he seems to be doing OK with his second job given the above pride-generating moment.
As for the bottle, for the past two weekends we have been giving him milk in his "zoo mug"(it has pictures of all the animals he visited at the zoo) and he seems to find incentive to drink from it so far. There's just the constant nagging of "Drink your milk, Pranav", "Don't spill, Pranav", "Watch where you are putting your mug, Pranav", "Don't swirl the milk around, Pranav", "The giraffe will drink all your milk if you don't drink it, Pranav"...Yeah, we will get there eventually, in a year or fifteen, if he turns out like I did with milk-drinking.

More Tenglish

I remember the days in engineering when we tried to prove how geeky we computer science kids are by saying things like "Alt+s'ing" for searching. Pranav has definitely taken on those traits from me or, let's be honest really: it's what happens when your kid really thinks and speaks English and you are trying to teach him another language along the way. These are some of the gems that have been thrown at us:

"I want to goku carrots mummy"
(Goku: scratch in Telugu. He meant that he wanted to grate the carrots like I was)

"No biting ice-cream mummy, I am naaking ice-cream"
(Naku: lick in Telugu)

Prepositions? What's that now?

Recent dialogues often heard at home these days:

Pranav: "I am going in the childcare, mummy"
Mummy: "I am going TO the childcare, Pranav"
Pranav: "I going TO... in the childcare"

Pranav: "I sitting in the bench, mummy"
Mummy: "I AM sitting ON the bench, Pranav"
Pranav: "I AM ... I sitting ON... in the bench"

Pranav: "R is for Rain, falling in the overhead"
Mummy: "R is for rain, falling FROM overhead"
Pranav: "R is for rain, falling in FROM over..over fed"

You get the idea. Basically, we have done away with the need for more than one preposition in the English language.

"Boo-a-Baa"

It's actually the title of a story book from the library he has taken a great liking to. Well, the title really is "Boo and Baa" but we swallow the "and". It's a very well-drawn picture story of a sheep couple Boo and Baa who one day find a cat stuck in their garden tree and try different methods to help it come down. We have taken to reading it during meal times(a major improvement from Mickey Mouse and Tom & Jerry) and this book is an excellent demonstration of how reading improves their vocabulary: he has picked up "wheel-barrow", "plank", "ladder" and "rake", words which are less common in our daily vocabulary. Of course, he insists to both his parents that Boo is Baa and Baa is Boo and we can live with that sort of confusion for now. If I get distracted while reading, he goads me on with "read a book, mummy, read a book". Most times I stop reading just to hear him say it. I like the way he uses the indefinite article and says, "a book" instead of "the book". It's just one of those things.

Pre-Kinder Room

There are two ways, among numerous others, that indicate clearly that your child is growing up: bigger nappy sizes(especially for lazy mums like I who don't bother with toilet-training early) and moving up rooms at the child care. The new year brought along with it our concerns about his adjusting to the pre-kinder room. I wasn't keen on moving him up so early( he barely turned two and the pre-kinders' has always been a 3+ room). It seemed to me that he was more attached to his carers in the toddlers' room than his roommates and so was very reluctant to move him up even though most of his roommates were going to the pre-kinder room from the start of the year. My fears were slightly misplaced though: I was told that he did feel a little misplaced and lonely during the first week back in the toddlers'. I was glad that he had to be moved up to the pre-kinders' the very next week because of the high demand in the toddlers'.
The major plus point with the pre-kinder room is Meera. The girls can't tell us enough about how chummy the two are with each other, how he imitates everything Meera does and how protective she is of him. It is suiting us all quite well. I drop him every morning with the promise of being able to play with Meera. He has also taken to waving me bye from the window of his room which conveniently looks out into the driveway of the child care. He still has on and off days - he screamed like a banshee and brought the whole place to his attention the day before because he had taken it into his mind to go the Glen for shopping instead of the child care.

Tenglish

The sad state of affairs which is his Telugu speaking is plainly visible in this sentence where he meant to say that his dad is pulling out weeds in the garden: "Nanna is peeking trees". He has obviously mastered the art of using root words("peeku" - to pull) from Telugu and anglicising them by adding the -ing. As nice as it is to hear him belt out English words and sentences, it will be very welcome to hear him speak some real Telugu. All in good time, we hope.

ABC's

He has a book of the alphabet with Winnie the Pooh theme. His dad and he used to play a game of arranging the fridge magnet letters using the letters in the book. As Praveen would turn the pages, he would move the corresponding letter from the bottom door to the top door of the fridge(have I written about this previously?). He therefore associates the letters with the pictures in this book so much so that when asked to name a letter he sometimes names the object instead of the letter itself, or he recites in one breath, "M for Milk". It is never just "M", it is always "M for milk".
So far he recognises about 15 letters without any prompting from us. A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H are very quick, he knows "I" only as "Ice Cream" and can't name the letter, "J for jump", "K for Kangaroo", "L for lollipop", doesn't know "N" properly yet, "O" is sometimes a "circle" and sometimes "Owl", "P for Piglet", "Q" is more like "kuu" and as it stands for "quiet time" he shushes us with a finger on his nose, "R for vaddit(rabbit, in case you are wondering)", "S for sun", "T for Tigger" always comes out louder than the rest, he only remembers "Umbrella" and can't name "U", V also apparently stands for "Umbrella", and the rest is all "don't know.." until "Zip".
Give us another month or so and hopefully we will have all the 26 down with a pat.