Pranav

Cracked open

2010-02-23T22:41:00.007+11:00

I can't crack an egg and not have a major tantrum thrown my way any more!

As he ate a hard-boiled egg yesterday, I cracked open an egg to scramble it with some butter. He came in to the kitchen and threw a major fit because he didn't get to crack the egg as he usually does when we make an omelette. He didn't want to crack a different egg, oh, no, that won't do. He needs to crack the very one that lay cracked and empty. The jumping up and down and crying lasted five minutes until his dad tried to put him in the laundry at which point he started insisting," I will listen to you daddy, don't put me in the laundry". He stopped the crying but sulked for another 15 minutes and refused to eat his chapathi. Got me to cajole him for a while and then he was all smiles.

It's so easy to lose it when he gets into such typical three-year old tantrums. No amount of reasoning will get through to him. It's as though he fully understands that the egg can't be put back together and that's precisely why he is crying - because he grasps the irreversibility of the situation. We just have to wait for him to throw his tantrum and get over it on his own.

Talking of omelettes and eggs, I found a bottle of cream in the fridge today and wondered why Praveen bought one as we don't usually have it at home unless I have a dessert planned. Apparently, my son is buying the groceries these days; he insisted on buying a bottle of cream because "we need to put it in the omelette". A while ago, he also bought himself a tiny whisk that he uses to whisk the egg and cream. I am never allowed to use a fork when that whisk goes missing either. It's more expensive than my own, so I guess he has a point!

Sleepover H(z)ero

2010-02-14T18:01:00.005+11:00

The plan was for him to spend the day at Rohan's house on Saturday by himself ; all part of a new plan to hold collective kid care alternatively at each other's houses so the kids are out of our hair for a whole day. He didn't agree to go until Rohan proposed over the phone that they can both play with his new rocket and aliens. So we rushed through shower and breakfast and his dad dropped him a little after noon expecting to pick him up later in the evening.

We got home around 6pm from an afternoon show of Avatar - which did not end a moment too soon for me, by the way - and rang up Rohan's place. Our little bugger didn't even want to come to the phone to talk. The unspoken message was obviously that he had no intentions of returning home any time soon. We settled ourselves with an offer from Naresh to drop him home when he was ready to leave. When the phone rang next, it was to let me know that the two were so tired, they read some books and fell asleep! The little betrayer! He almost always needs his mum to sleep and now, he had been gone half a day and didn't even ask for me before bed. This day had to come too, I thought.

Not so fast, as it turns out. The phone rang at 3am because our very first unplanned sleepover had quickly turned into a sob fest to go home right away after our hero woke up in the middle of the night and found no mummy and daddy around! Poor Naresh had to drive down 20 minutes in the wee hours of the morning to bring him back.

He came into the bed all smiles - no traces of having cried - and I was so glad to have him back. I asked him in the morning if he had cried, he admitted that he did, but also insisted that he had only cried "half, only little bit, just little bit" with his thumb and index finger placed very close to each other to indicate the apparently insignificant amount he had cried. I checked with Kalpana and of course, his story didn't tally: he burst out in tears when told that he can go back home when the sun comes up.

So my mental note of first night spentaway from each other since his birth quickly erased itself. We have more time; my baby hasn't grown up yet...

Can we fix it?

2010-02-12T08:23:00.003+11:00

Friday morning conversation:
I: Pranav, brush quickly and let's go to K-mart for a little while
P: No, mama.
After second thoughts,
P: What do you want to buy in K-mart, mama?
I: A skirt.
Employing his classic statement for dalliance,
P: We will go a little bit later.
I: No, we have to go soon, because someone is coming to fix our dishwasher later.
P: Is it Bob the Builder, or someone else, mama?
I: Ha, ha, this is so going on your blog, Pranav.
I turn to leave the room,
P: My blocks are here in this room, where are you going, mama?
I: Ha ha, not blocks Pranav, "blog", "blog".
P: Blog, what is blog?
I: It has your name on it and it's on the computer. Let me show you

Ote, Bees and What up!

2010-02-11T18:43:00.004+11:00

What did you eat at lunch today, Pranav?"
"Mmm....I ote....rice, mama"

On the one hand, he uses the words "expensive" and "ridiculous" and on the other, he thinks the past tense of 'eat' is 'ote' and uses a self-made plural form of 'be' as a verb to indicate simple present tense
"The car bees in the garage" - means "The car is in the garage and that's where you will always find it"

I have taken to watching downloaded episodes of the series "How I met your mother" and he sometimes gives me company. He likes the title music and recognises the characters, at least by face. I have been teaching him one of Barney's trademark phrases, 'What up!' and reaching out fora high-five. I obvisouly got through to him: yesterday, I was watching an episode and he came along, looked at the screen and called out 'What up!' and gave me a high-five!
He did wonder the other day why that show was on the TV too, shouldn't it be only on my computer? Thanks to my downloading and watching on the computer, he has got his concepts of network television all mixed up. He also doesn't get why the episodes are not on back-to-back like when I watch them on the computer. He threw a big tantrum two days ago because he wanted to watch more!

Flip-Flop!

2010-02-08T21:13:00.003+11:00

He is currently a fan of the British show Charlie and Lola, a very well-made show depicting the sibling relationship between an affectionate elder brother and his precocious little sister. In one of the shows, they play a game called flip-flop, which is a cousin of the memory game we know, except that the pair of cards make a flip-flop when the pictures complement each other in some way rather than being the same image.

So we have taken to calling the memory game we play flip-flop these days. He likes playing it almost everyday and calls upon one of us to play at least three games in a row. I am not sure if it is my not paying attention much, or he being good at it, he seems to have the cards memorised better than I do, sometimes. In the beginning, he would keep opening the cards until he found a pair, but he understands the concept much better now. If he happens to open mismatched cards during his turn and he remembers where the pair of one of the cards was, he reserves it for his next turn and won't let us open those cards. When he can't remember where the other card of the pair was, he starts pointing to each card and asks, "Is it this one? Is it this one?" He doesn't buy any of the "I don't know, or I don't remember", either. He seeks help and helps us out too: he will point to the matching card when we open one, when he remembers.

He misplaced one of the cards today and didn't understand when I said one of the cards is missing and pointed out the gap in the rows. He insisted that "It bees like that(bees = will be/should be/must be). When you play, the gap goes away." The look of consternation on his face when three unopened cards remained at the end was priceless. The wheels slowly turned in his head and then he agreed that we should go downstairs and look for the missing card.

Lunch Provided?

2010-02-07T19:01:00.004+11:00

After-breakfast conversation between Pranav and I, few weeks ago, as I am packing a lunch for work:

P: Mama, why are you putting food in that box?

I: To take it to work

P: Why, mama?

I: To eat it during lunch, Pranav

P: No, mama. You should not take lunch to work. They will give you lunch at work in the afternoon.

I: No Pranav, my work is not like your child care, unfortunately...

Tadpole

2010-02-07T18:44:00.004+11:00

We have been noticing that he gets bored during the weekends playing by himself and there is only so long that his dad - and when I am in the mood for it, I - can entertain him. He gets crabby and whines for the silliest things thus getting on our nerves. So we decided it's time for him to get in to some organised activity as a weekly routine and I enrolled him in a swimming lesson.

It was his first lesson today and just as I had feared he refused to go the lesson and instead wanted to play on the water slide play equipment pool. The place was brimming with kids in various lanes taking lessons and he stood there watching them, still steadfastly refusing to get out of his shorts and step into the water. It was only when his dad offered to go in along with him that he consented, and from there it was a fairly smooth journey, given the agony I put myself through going over all my options if he continued to remain in his shell.

The instructor was very kid-friendly and that put me at ease. It was very basic skills like holding on to a floatie and flapping legs, fetching an object that was lying on the bottom of the shallow pool, and trying to float lying on the back. He was paying attention to the instructor and didn't cringe away when he spoke to him as I fully expected him to. It appears that as long as one of us is in the water with him, at least for the first term, he will enjoy himself. He said he had fun listening to that babu during the swim lesson but that next time he would like to go to the big swimming pool and play on the slide, instead. Have to see what next Sunday brings.

A Year in the Making

2010-02-04T23:11:00.005+11:00

It's still February, but of the next year and inspiration came calling again to me in the form of a generous comment from an anonymous person about one of the previous posts. So, thank you, to this unexpected visitor!

Here we are again, and, let's take stock of what has changed and what hasn't since the last year.

Pranav is fully potty-trained now - what an unpleasant topic to start with, eh? I am not surprised I am leading with this, as I know how parents and kids alike, struggle in that department. The food department has seen major progress, although, it would be nice if he faced vegetables full on, instead of my having to disguise them in his rotis. Still loves his meat, and recently, his eggs. Sunday ho ya Monday, roj khao ande is our principle with him. The tantrums have kept coming and were at the worst just after he turned 3. He can get extremely cranky about the silliest thing; more like, childishly obstinate about something unimportant. I find his tantrums are easy to deal with when I am in control of my mood myself; else it gets pretty ugly between us. It's a different thing we exchange 'I love you mama' and 'I love you too, Raja', soon afterwards.

He has grown into an extremely shy child, socially. When he is faced with the prospect of entering a room full of strangers, he literally hides behind my skirt at best and pulls me by my hand out of the room, at worst. I remember being extremely upset when I was first confronted with this behaviour from him. Now I understand better(a girl is allowed to delude herself, right?) and think about how I can make him more comfortable in the surroundings. It does draw a lot of attention to you, when your child behaves like he is being ambushed by aliens, which makes me uncomfortable too. It's a journey of perseverance, just like everything else. It's clear he needs more time than the average child to warm to new people. Definitely not an extrovert in the making!

He has learnt to write his name, as of today. I believe he can write most of the alphabet, sometimes writes 'M' like a 'W', and once, added an extra stroke to 'E' when I asked him to write two E's together, but other than that, I think he is on his way. Not much progress with numbers; there's apparently a number that's called 'eleventeen'. We have to work on our numeracy pretty soon.

The Bottle and The Potty

2009-02-09T22:18:00.002+11:00

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

2009-02-09T22:13:00.002+11:00

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?

2009-02-09T22:06:00.003+11:00

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"

2009-01-22T21:39:00.004+11:00

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

2009-01-22T21:23:00.002+11:00

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

2008-12-30T14:48:00.002+11:00

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

2008-12-30T14:28:00.003+11:00

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.

Zoo

2008-12-30T14:24:00.002+11:00

We planned to take him to the zoo yesterday, so I asked him which animals he would like to see at the zoo. He started off quickly with "tiger", "lion", "elephant", "giraffe", thought a little, then "zebra", thought a bit more and stumped me with, "Dinosaur, I wanna see dinosaur!" So we are looking for a time machine now or may be a copy of Jurassic Park.

Talking is the order of the day

2008-12-26T20:48:00.002+11:00

We can see a marked advancement in his sentence construction these days. He still falls over himself trying to get words out most times. He often repeats the most important word with some incomprehensible mumblings in between - the mumblings generally come in the place where prepositions or verbs would go. He also mixes a good number of Telugu in his sentences: "That's amma's buvva, that's nanna's buvva..", "No cheekati pappoyi"(not dark yet), which he acutely observes when we ask him to have his afternoon nap. His latest new question is "Where are you, nanna?" when he can't find his dad around. I was in the kitchen when he woke today; he came down the stairs announcing, "I coming down amma, I waking up, I coming down".
This morning he was literally trying to drive his toy stroller on the TV screen so Praveen switched the TV off and we tried to pretend that it doesn't work any more. He looked from the TV to us for a few moments and declared, "Nanna switch off, nanna switch off TV. Why switching off, nanna? Switch on TV, can't see it."
During breakfast, he asked for the jam and Vegemite to be served on the plate(like when he eats chapati) instead of having it spread on the bread slice. I exclaimed rhetorically, "How can you eat it like this!" which he took literally and explained, "Open mouth aaa, bite (showed the action of biting) and eat mummy.." Well, thanks for clearing that up!
He has picked up the habit of blessing people when they sneeze from the childcare. He also blesses himself with "Bless you!" as we both never remember to do it for him. We were driving back from the childcare the other day when he sneezed twice in a row and said, "Two bless you!"

"Hurting me"

2008-12-15T22:39:00.003+11:00

After what was a welcome long time, he fell sick two weeks ago. He manages to catch a cold even before the existing one leaves him, what with the childcare and the seasonal changes. The constantly blocked/running nose led to an ear infection. He didn't develop any fever so we didn't see it coming. He has either never had such a severe one or he didn't know how to express pain before, but all three of us had an almost sleepless night on that ocassion. When he complained "hurting me" pointing to his right ear I couldn't at first decide if he was crying from the pain or if it was a sympathy cry. He doesn't usually demand attention for the sake of it unless he is in pain, so we decided to give him a dose of Nurofen. That definitely calmed him down as he understands the concept of medicine and is always willing to gulp down the entire bottle if only he could. We thought that should give him a good night's sleep but he kept waking abruptly through out the night crying for pain. I had worked late that night and slept only at 2am and he pretty much kept me awake since then. At about 5am Praveen decided to try a bottle of milk and that thankfully helped all of us sleep. The next morning, the doctor decided the middle ear was sore enough to call for antibiotics straight away. Pranav was of course only too happy to go on "white mandu" and insisted every time on taking it himself.
He developed a fever through the rest of the day but you would have had to swear ten times that he was unwell. I think he gets that from his father: he continues on in his own vein even when he is considerably warm to the touch. All the jumping, playing and much to my peace of mind, feeding too. So far I can only remember one ocassion when his sickness really affected him behaviourally and that was when he was 9 months old and had his first ear infection. I remember I was very concerned then as that was the first time for all three of us. He had the most pitiable expression on his face for two days to go with his high fever. I am glad he didn't take on me here; I am such a pathetic, self-pitying moaner when I am sick.

Baby-sitting

2008-12-15T22:27:00.002+11:00

For the first time yesterday, after much deliberation, consideration, cajoling, preparing and planning, we baby-sat Meera in the evening for a few hours so Ganesh and Niru could enjoy their anniversary dinner at a restaurant. It was a cake-walk really. There, I said it. All we needed to do was sit them in front of the laptop with Mickey Mouse and Dora. I have never seen Meera finish her dinner of pumpkin pasta in under 5 minutes. She was done by the time Pranav could finish a few mouthfuls. Dinner was followed by a long stretch of watching cartoons and then she decided she was very tired and wanted to "lie down on the bed". She might even have fallen asleep if they had come to pick her up a few minutes later. We have decided it is Pranav's turn next. Let's see if Niru gets to write such an eventless report.

"Mana intlo..."

2008-12-05T22:38:00.002+11:00

He has learnt to co-relate objects he notices when he is outdoors to similar ones we have at home and happily for me he expresses it in Telugu saying, "Mana intlo..."(in our house). I try to get him to add the verb part "undi" (it is there) but it hasn't stuck with him yet.

Most placed objects are his toys, DVD's he watches, kitchen appliances and sometimes even food items. He also gets similarly excited when he goes through catalogues from the junk mail. He positively squealed with delight the other day when they came to the kitchen page that displayed - you guessed it - saucepans and spoons. He kept flipping back to that page and insisted on pulling out the particular similar pan from the cupboard and having it placed before his eyes.

We were with Niru and Meera at the Glen Target today when I was narrating to her about this new habit. We were in the toy section and the toy Niru gifted for his birthday was on display on one of the top shelves. It is a colourful, four-in-one wonder and has a dentist's that teaches oral hygiene, a pizza shop that teaches shapes, a numbers apple tree and a animal abacus-like window that teaches colours. He is quite fond of it and it showed when he got thoroughly excited to have spotted it at the store. He almost fell over himself with "Mana intlo..mana intlo..". I asked what the toy is called and only after a few more "mana intlo..", he could bring himself to remember that he calls it "Pizza shop".

"Mama here..."

2008-12-01T14:18:00.001+11:00

Praveen decided to work from home today and as the father and son were still going through their morning ablutions when I was nearly dressed, I decided to take the bus to the station instead of waiting for them. I knew it will be a bit of a risk leaving his dad to drop him instead of dropping him at the childcare personally, but I wanted to test if he will be OK with it. I did ask his permission too; I asked if amma can take the bus and go to the office and he nodded. I should have known better. Praveen told me later that he went through every room upstairs looking for me crying "mama here"(which means mama is wanted here). Praveen went looking for him downstairs and heard him crying through the closed powder room door. Apparently he looked for me in the laundry and then went into the powder room, closed the door and cried. Praveen had to distract him with PlaySchool on TV and then he settled down to drink his milk. So, point taken: never ever leave the house without him in tow. When Praveen leaves early, he asks for him and might sometimes even cry but he is quickly pacified. Apparently that doesn't happen when I leave early. This is why we switched our roles recently; Praveen leaves early and picks him up in the evenings, so I can drop him in the mornings and get back late. We will have to stick to that even when Praveen works from home.

The Four Questions

2008-11-24T16:38:00.006+11:00

What with his diction refining by the day, he is at the stage of posing a question at every chance. The four often used ones are, "Whatu dooooing mummy?", "What is this one(like 'won' but with extra o's)" and "What happened mummy?" with the cutest tilt of his head and Praveen's peeve, "Whata noooooiiise!" The last one could be an exclamation or a question, we are still not very sure. Praveen is constantly correcting him, "It's not noise, it's sound, sound..". All the questions have an adorable tone of innocence and genuine curioisty with a raising inflection at the end.

His "What is this one?" most often refers to objects he is very familar with and very rarely you find the need to give him an answer he doesn't already know. Yesterday I tried Niru's idea of answering him with some non-sense, like saying "spider" when he pointed to my mobile and asked the question. Of course, he came back emphatically with, "That's a spider(he swallows the 'not' and instead shakes his head to indicate the negation), that's a phone" and repeated it until I agreed that it was a phone and not a spider.

He also repeats his requests until they have been granted or attended to fully. All through the making of a jam and cheese sandwich, you will hear, "I wanna sandwich...I wanna sandwich..I wanna sandwich..". Alright, I am making it right before your eyes, aren't I? Niru says I haven't seen the end of this parroting!

"Pranav Kitchen"

2008-11-24T16:21:00.004+11:00

He plays in the kitchen with renewed interest these days. You can also tell his style of playing has matured; he pretends to cut up vegetables with the edge of his palm and puts them in the saucepan and stirs them while making hissing sounds. He also has the idea of adding salt and oil. When I cook, I have noticed that he very intricately follows what I am doing.

He is not content with a few utensils, he empties the entire cupboard and arranges them in a neat half-cirlce around himself, complete with the proper lids. Every pot and pan should have a proper lid on; no swaps and supplantations allowed. He will bug you to insanity with, "Where is mootha?" until you give him the right lid. Unfortunately, I have two saucepans which share the same lid and the day they are both available for him to play with, good luck to us!

He pretends everything is hot to the touch and also uses my pattakaru to hold things. He genuinely believes they are meant for him to play with; when Praveen asked him to come out of the kitchen so amma can cook, he replied pointing to the cupboard, "This is no amma kitchen, this is Pranav kitchen. Amma kitchen up there" and pointed to the gas burners on the platform above the cupboard. Who is setting whose boundaries, I ask myself.

"Indian Shop"

2008-11-20T11:08:00.004+11:00

When I dress him in clothes that Vijay or Amma brought for him, I tell him that "babai" or "ammamma" gave him those clothes. I then also try to teach him that babai is in America and Ammamma is in India. The babai part seems to have stuck because when I asked him this morning who gave him the shirt he wore, he said it came from "babai", who lives in "Nicca..". I wanted to know if he remembers where ammamma is, to which he replied, "Indian shop"! Obvisouly, he is more familiar with the idea of "Indian shop" which he visits often to buy his favorite "Idli pindi" rather than "India" as a place...

"Go to Safeway"

2008-11-18T23:30:00.002+11:00

When he was 22 months old, (I remember because that was the month Praveen went to India for 4 weeks), one morning during breakfast, he asked for juice. Not wanting to ruin his appetite, I tried to evade it with the popular excuse of the juice carton being empty. Imagine my surprise when he actually said, "Go Safeway". You have to know, this was when he had barely started to talk and only just grasped the concept of a supermarket. Clearly, he grasped it a lot better than I gave him credit for.

"Go Safeway", has thus come to be a panacea for all our running out of stuff issues. My son tries to buy a variety of things from Safeway when he discovers that we have run out of them at home: milk, laundry powder, eggs, batteries, his bath lotion, nappies, soap, ear buds and other sundry items. You would have thought he visits the supermarket with my weekly list! He did get carried away with the concept the other day when he said that we ought to buy his new shirt from Safeway...

"Not working, amma!"

2008-11-18T23:29:00.001+11:00

One of his often-used phrases is "not working", while twisting his palm . He mostly reserves it for electrical and electronic equipment but has recently stretched it refer to his own piece of equipment too. When I asked him to pee during his bath, he responded with, "Not working, amma!"

"Chal Nanna!"

2008-11-18T23:26:00.002+11:00

Praveen and the other fathers see each other off with the Hindi farewell, "Chal!" followed by the name of the person and a hand wave. He now gets on his bike, raises his right arm and says, "Chal, nanna!" and "Chal, amma!" before setting off.

He rides his bike in the living room most times and has an annoying habit of continuing to press his foot down on the accelerator in the forward mode when he hits an obstacle. He is well aware of the switch to reverse the bike, but it almost seems like he lets it whirl for a few seconds against the obstacle just to test its limits, as though hoping that one fine evening he will be able to break through it and continue on. He always needs a yell from me or a reminder from his dad - as the case may be - to use the reverse switch.

Weekday Morning routine

2008-11-18T23:08:00.003+11:00

He usually serves as our alarm clock, irrespective of what time he wakes up, which is usually anywhere between 7 and 8 am. He needs to warm up for a good 15 minutes while holding his brush with the paste on it if he is to brush on his own. Since 15 minutes is an ill-afforded luxury at 7:30 in the morning, brushing is usually an ordeal, involving one of my arms around his neck holding his face in position and the other trying to reach all areas of his mouth through his screaming. I tell him that he doesn't realise his screaming with his mouth wide open only makes my job of brushing easier about. These days he takes his revenge on me by neatly swallowing the entire foamy spit and eyeing me vindictively. I, in turn, have taken to cleaning his mouth before he has a chance to swallow to by absorbing it all with a tissue. Cleaning his tongue proves a bit more challenging, which I mostly fail at, as he simply won't open his mouth for that part. Forcing an object like a tongue-cleaner on a two-year old, is, I am sure not highly recommended, so I give up there. Who's the boss now, I hear him say.

This neatly sets the stage for the next operation of having a shower at which point he refuses to part with his night-suit. Sometimes Praveen pretending to jump in the shower before he does, tends to do the trick. Most other times the crying will continue until about half-way through the shower. He will insist on soaping his tummy and few other choice parts of the anatomy during this. The crying will resume when the time comes to switch off the taps and get out of the tub. If I thought at first leaving him to enjoy the running water for a little while will get him out without a fuss, I had another think coming. Even 30 minutes won't do it. Praveen's trick for this is to surrepticiously reduce the flow of the hot water and then accusing him of finishing off all the hot water and leaving nothing for amma and nanna. Works like a charm, everytime. My improvisation on this is to run the hot water from the other outlet at the wash-basin. Aah, the joys of a two year old's innocence and our taking advantage of them!

He will sometimes insist on going back into his night-suit after the shower. If I can appease that with a promise of a Tigger trouser or a Pooh-bear shirt, he is all set to happily drink milk and play around leaving us to dress in peace. If I can manage to get through the first 30 minutes of his morning with a cleaned and dressed Pranav at the end of them, without loosing my temper, it's a good start to the day.

Long time no see...still a baby, though

2008-11-18T22:53:00.005+11:00

It has nearly been a year since I updated his blog, and needless to say, Pranav is a very different person now. As much as I still think of him as my baby, especially when people back home remind me that if he were in India he would be going off to school in six months' time, he is very much a toddler now, reminding us on a frequent basis the provenance of the term "terrible two's".
He is very much his own person, always trying to assert his independence and eager to try his hand at things. Starting with heating up his milk bottle in the microwave to climbing into his car seat, loading his animation "DVDV's", cleaning up his spills, blowing his nose into a tissue, emptying the dishwasher and stacking the dishes away neatly, there is no end to the number of things he insists on doing on his own.

His current motto in life seems to be: it's not important whether the job is done; it's important who did it. As can be expected, the said person tends to be himself, more often that not. He has proved to be a strict disciple of this: he will re-open the microwave door after you have closed it and will close it again, same with a tap or a bottle lid or a DVD in the DVD player and even something thrown in the dustbin. This also sometimes manifests itself in the insistence of "the favoured parent of the moment" doing a job, which, can sometimes mean that we have to switch dish-washer loading and feeding duties half-way through or that he has to be re-buckled to the car seat so the preferred parent can unbuckle him.

On the other hand, he still cries when left at the childcare, still instinctively calls out for me when he wakes during the night, still wants mummy or daddy to feed him, still wipes his dirty hands on his shirt, still refuses to brush his teeth, still refuses to come out of his bath and still refuses to tell us when he has pooped in his nappy.

Yes, he is still only a baby...

15 months and 10 days

2007-12-10T21:08:00.000+11:00

He has learnt quite a few tricks in the recent days. Most significantly, he has started to say a couple of words, one of which is only really an exclamation - "Uh-oh-oh!" and the other is "Ta"(Aussie slang for "Thanks"), which they say at the childcare when asking him to hand over something. He now says "Ta" when he is trying to hand over to us the myriad of objects lying on the floor which we don't really want picked up. He also says it when he is asking us to give him something. He couples this with a new way of pointing to things: he points with his index finger by stretching his arm out and moving his wrist up and down as if to stress the point. He probably picked up the "Uh-oh-oh!" from the childcare because we don't say it all that often at home. He says it with a raising and falling inflection in a sing-song fashion when he sees a spill or an object falling to the ground.

Another tooth has popped out on his lower right jaw bringing the current count to seven.

He is very fond of coins possibly because we don't allow him to play with them. He now knows that the first drawer of the buffet in the living room has a stash of coins and points to it when that drawer is opened.

He sings songs of his own tune when he is travelling in the car or when he is on a full stomach and playing by himself.

He has learnt to tickle us under the neck because I do that to him, except, his tickling borders more on poking and pinching while laughing himself. We are meant to be amused and laugh at his actions, apparently. He is very ticklish himself and one funny way is with his warm bottle in my hand touching his stomach when I pick him up with the same hand I have the bottle in. He is very amused by that.

Reading books to him is a bit of a challenge, especially as he always tries to close them. I am not sure if he finds the cover page more attractive than the contents or if he is trying to tell me something not very subtly. He does respond to one his board books, though. It is basically a picture book and he points to a different location in the house or his body part for each object in there. For shoes and socks it is his feet, for hats and caps it is his head, for bananas and apples it is the fruit bowl in the kitchen, for cars it is the kitchen window along with a kiss and wave. I was pleasantly surprised when he did this the first time as I kept turning the pages because I only used to point to the picture and name it and never actually taught him to point to the locations. That he figured out on his own.

The two of us went to a mum's group meet on Friday after a very long time. We had Cris cringe and he got a cute ceramic brightly painted bowl with a matching mug and an egg cup from Suellen. There was also a soap in the shape of a cow. I told her it is too cute to ever get used, the soap, I mean. The bowl was used the same afternoon.

Breakfast in the morning today was an unpleasant affair. He went through half of his porridge(it's all he eats for breakky these days) and then wasn't interested any more. Here I was waiting for him to finish so we can get dressed and leave and he was pointing to go upstairs. I thought the traffic from the retreat window might distract him and help with the eating but that wasn't happening either. He kept dancing around the table and knocked over the bowl of porridge in the end. Fuming, I I went into the bathroom to wash up and I hear from behind me a soft and clear "Uh-oh!"

14 months and 29 days

2007-11-29T16:05:00.000+11:00

People always say he smiles just the way Praveen does but I can never tell. It doesn't seem that way to me at all. Considering I can tell he looks like Praveen quite a lot, it surprises me why I can't see a resemblance in their smiles. The resemblances seem to stop there, however. He is showing us more and more of his hot temperament as he is growing up what with having learnt to smack people on their faces. We have tried the methods of shouting "Pranav!" very loudly and putting him down, shaking our heads vigorously to indicate that it's not on to do that, holding his hands tightly, and a few others, one more unsuccessful than the previous. I spoke to Anna about it and she said that she has noticed how he hooks his finger and tries to get the other person's eye when he wants to get something from them. She says it's normal behaviour for this age. As they can't express feelings in words, this is their way of talking and getting attention(needless to say, all my speech lessons are failing miserably). With hitting she suggested saying things like "Stop, no more!" and then saying "Be gentle" and showing him to pat the person gently by taking his hand. It all sounds very promising and is clearly progressive parenting I suppose but hard to persevere with it when all he does is hit you first and then pat you gently later! Yeah, not really working, is it? Still, we will have to stick with it. If there is one thing I don't want him to grow up doing, it is hitting and shoving people. That just crosses the line for me, somehow. The way he is keeping at it though, we seem to have a long, rocky journey ahead of us.

On to more pleasant doings, I think I have said before too, he is now at the stage of waving to everything that moves - cars, trucks, the bus, passers-by, trains and sometimes even to either of us for no good reason. It seems that's his way of greeting people now because when he sees his dad in the evening coming up to the front door through the kitchen window, he smiles and starts waving at him. He also associates waving with going out and associates going out with objects his dad or I use when we go out - like the car keys, his dad's sunnies, my handbag and watches. He has taken to swinging my handbag around his shoulders with one strap falling out and threatening to trip him and waving, pointing to the steps leading towards the garage. He also wore my watch and did the same thing once. He points only to the garage when he does this, not towards the front door which we don't normally use when we go out, as it generally goes in these countries. He points to the front door only when he wants to go outside for a play in the front yard.
He seems to have outgrown his nappies these days. He is waking up almost every day with wet pants and full nappy even though it's summer. The bugger hates covering a blanket on himself so I can't do much to keep him warm. We are not sure if it's the cold or his outgrowing the nappy that's causing this. We have decided to move on to the next size anyway. It's another way of seeing your baby grow: growing nappy sizes!

He is again in the lowest trough of his hunger strike days. Yesterday he absolutely ate no breakfast or dinner. Just refused point-blank. I have to wonder what he really is eating at the childcare because the girls don't seem to complain that he is not eating there. They are always encouraging me to let him feed himself sitting on his hig-chair but that doesn't work either. I have been giving him a different variety of meal each day and trying distractions of all kinds and I can still only get him to eat about half of what he usually eats and yesterday was the worst. In the end, after I decide that I should stop trying ti feed him immediately if I want to hang on to my wits, I have been giving him a bread slice with a lot of cream cheese on the side. He accepted his porridge in the morning today, so may be that's a good sign of improvement. I have hope yet, because he has done this before and he returns to his eating phase eventually. I just hope it is soon. If only my good-mood-meter didn't depend so much on the level of contents of his stomach! Are all mothers like this? Why is feeding our kids so important to us? As much as common sense dictates that they won't starve themselves, it's simply impossible for me to not get worked up about his not eating through any of his meals. Is this a plain nurturing instinct that humans and for that matter, animals are wired with? I guess I should learn to relax a little, but I know that's harder than feeding him!

Praveen is always complaining how overgrown his hair looks these days but I am putting up a resistance. I think kids look cute with lots of hair. I told him all child male models in all catalogues have long, wild-looking hair and they are cuter for it. He says its summer and will bother him, but I am not giving in yet. That's the difference between Praveen and me: he always thinks about what's right for Pranav in a practical way, I always impose my likes and dislikes on Pranav without giving his comfort enough thought. Typical, bossy parent. It's a good thing I have Praveen to balance me sometimes.

Bits and Pieces

2007-11-06T21:26:00.000+11:00

There are lot of little things that he does which are hard to string together into a narrative so I thought I will just list them out individually because they all seem worth mentioning

He can pick the right toy if I sing the song that comes out of it. Other than that he doesn't particularly care for them.

He has learnt to wave bye with both his hands at any moving object whether it be on the road, on the TV, or as a way of letting his father know that he prefers his mum while going upstairs with his mum to sleep.

He has learnt to do a silly kind of salute to "good night"
When left in the middle of the hall he can point to the light, the stove in the kitchen, the phone and the bus outside.

He does the action to "Twinkle Twinkle" by closing and opening his fists repeatedly.

He can pick up the bark of a dog however faint it is and exclaims "tha-tha"!

He has learnt to imitate our actions like applying perfume to both his ears, moisturiser to his feet and rubbing his palms together, pretending to spit by bending into the basin in between brushing his teeth.

He stuffed all the tissues back in when I told him off for pulling them all out of the box.

He knows which shoes belong to which member of the family and can go to great lengths to ensure they reach the right person if found too far away from the person.

He is not taken by TV but likes listening to music sometimes even pointing to the music system to be turned on.

He pretends to vacuum like I do using - you will never guess - the wooden stick I use to make rotis. He does it with so much purpose including going over to all the corners that it can't be anything other than that.

The game he most likes playing is my pretending to chase after him and he walking away as fast his can without watching where he is headed.

He gets thoroughly annoyed and yells when he is trying to do something beyond his means like trying to push through a tiny wedge between the wall and the sofa or even something silly like trying to walk off with his baby monitor when it is still connected to its socket.

He seems to have aquired his seemingly short temper from his mother.

After having fallen off a few stairs once, he is terrified of coming downstairs on his own.

He always wears his gold chain across his neck and thanfully he hasn't exactly discovered that it can make a good play thing when pulled and tugged at.

He hates having his nappy changed. Screams like a banshee to lie down which means putting clothes on is also a battle and test of patience for us.

Everyday in the evening after childcare, he sits on the benchtop in the kitchen while I cook and we wait for Praveen to come home. He can sit there for as long as it takes and that's the only way he will let me cook in peace.

I can absolutely not get him to finish a meal sitting in his high-chair. That's got to be my fault. I tried putting my foot down the other day like when we newly bought it, but whom am I kidding!

He is not the most friendly child you will come across but strangers always remark what a happy little boy he is when they see him running around gleefully in the aisles. Like I always say, children are always cute when they are not yours...

Lot of strangers think he is a girl. This is the most unexpected remark for us as he has always had a boyish face. They tell me it's because of his eyes and curls. Praveen insists it's because of the mushroom-cut I have given him!

He still has only 6 teeth and his dad and I are always asking him if and when the others are going to turn up.

His cutest face is with his mouth open willing to eat what I am feeding him.

His best look for me is with his stomach full.

I love him the most when he has been sleeping for the past 2 hours.

His eyes are his best feature followed by his hair, eye brows, pot belly, his baby fat-lined thighs, feet and palms. Yes, that about covers all parts of his body I think...

14 Months and 6 Days

2007-11-06T20:52:00.000+11:00

I knew this blogging is hard to do regularly and this long absence of mine proves it. This, despite my having the mood and material to write. I kept writing up small notes every week for the past 4 weeks but none of them got converted into a full-length blog for reasons not more significant than failing to make the time to sit down. There are too many bits and prices to write about now.
There haven't been any significant milestones since I last wrote; I don't suppose there will be any more until he starts talking which, by the looks of it will be taking some time yet.
I always have something to talk about his food habits, so let me start there. His dinner or lunch generally has rice with vegies/dal and yoghurt in the end with some variations of pasta, soup fish patties and mince meat on occasion. I feel guilty about not giving him enough variety, so I made him vegetable cheese squares from a Heinz recipe book last week. Like I was expecting, he kept spitting it out. He doesn't like textured foods; he prefers things he can just swallow without having to chew much, or rather, not at all. Finally I had to grind the vegie squares to a paste with milk to get him to eat it. And after all that, he woke twice in the middle of the night and Praveen's theory was that he didn't have his usual heavy carbohydrate dose of rice and so kept waking for hunger . So much for me trying to introduce variety!
One food he does like chewing on is sultanas. The only problem is the chewing never ends. He can go on with one like a bubble gum. When I added sultanas to his bowl from which he was already eating banana pieces, he spat out the banana in his mouth(which until then was very likable) and picked sultanas from the bowl. His dad tried to be clever by hiding the sultanas under the banana pieces but guess who is smarter? The remainder of the banana pieces were left to go black in the end.

With summer almost upon us, feeding has become an outdoor activity. Suits both of us well: he is happy to roam around the entire garden, climbing up and down the stairs, hanging by the gate and pointing and waving with both hands to the cars going past and this means he eats well. He did, meanwhile, officially kill his first fly last weekend during one such outdoor feeding fest. The poor fly got in and was flitting around the blinds and was too sluggish for my son who simply crushed it between his index finger and the window pane. He kept coming back to it later on to look at the spot it had fallen and wanted to crush it further.

I brought him home early last Friday and took him to the Glen. It is such an arduous task taking him to a shopping centre on my own! I end up having to manage two things: him and the pram because after about 10 minutes of riding in the pram sitting like a king with both hands on the arm rests, he decides to start a freedom struggle. He wriggles around so much that he gets stuck between the seat and the safety bar while trying to slide off the seat. Before you ask why his belts are not strapped, I must explain that he would have gone in and come out of it so many times by now, that I don't bother strapping his belt on after the first couple of times. If you think about it from his perspective, you can imagine it must be terribly boring to just sit around watching when he could be pulling out and exploring so many things if only we they let him free! Sometimes I let him walk by my side, but even there he has his own mind: neither should I hold his hand nor will he hold my hand. If left alone, he will wander off in completely the opposite direction, walk into any shop and promptly pull out the display items from the lower racks. And after all this, he got treated with his first ever soft serve from Wendy's. I am happy to say he wasn't exactly smitten although he did enjoy it. I also tried to put him on the mini rides but he seemed too scared to sit on them on his own. I am told once they get hooked onto those rides, there is no stopping them. Can't wait for that!

I taught him the "bow-wow" sound of a dog so he now associates the bark and the word "kukka" (dog) with his rendition of the bark- "tha-tha". Praveen took him to Chadstone yesterday and he tells me I missed a sight at the pet shop. The Pet's Paradise apparently caused him to go wild with excitement because of the puppies in the display playing around. He pointed to them running here and there crying "tha-tha" "tha-tha" all the while.
I had to move my microwave out of his reach up to the workbench level because he had learnt to press the buttons. He insists on banging its door closed if it left open. Praveen was telling me today afternoon that new microwave's empty carton in the garage caught his eye today and he went over to press the buttons on the life-size image of the microwave!

The other day there was a little girl when we went clothes-shopping for him. He was good to her for a few minutes, pointing and showing her the dresses hanging off the racks and trying to cuddle her. When she went over to the playpen and started to play with a toy there, he kept trying to poke her eye, tried to pull the toy from her and held her at arm's length when she tried to approach for the toy. For someone who goes to the childcare everyday he seems very unfriendly! Is it just a boy thing? He has never exactly been an open-arm receiver of people but I thought he will be more accepting of other kids after spending so much time around them. Part of the disappointment I suppose is also because something we full-time childcare mums tell ourselves will be an upside of full-time childcare isn't turning out to be so. Only goes to prove they are always born with their personalities and sometimes there is only so much we can do to mould them. I am forced to believe nature rather than nurture has a stronger hold over children since I have had Pranav.

A rare occurrence

2007-10-19T11:27:00.000+10:00

I just had to write this down because this is one of those rare treasurable moments that I am sure won't come along often. He had his entire serve of dinner in under ten minutes yesterday! I know, you were expecting to read something more impressive, but hey, if you are a mother with a fussy-eater, you know that it is impressive. The meal was nothing fancy - just some rice with broccoli mashed with tomato dal for some flavour. It was a warm day, so I took him out in the garden to feed. He pointed to the gate so I sat him down on one of the gate posts. He looked at the cars zooming past and ate it all without a single turn away of the head. I kept waiting for the moment he will refuse to open his mouth as it usually happens after a few mouthfuls, but it never came. I used to have days like that a long time ago but it has been a very long time since. Long enough for me to want to write and record it. All the while I was thinking how people who noticed us there must be tut-tutting about the appropriateness of my feeding location!

My 12 month immunisation

2007-10-16T22:14:00.000+10:00

It's Pranav here again!

Just came by to talk about my 12 month immunisation episode. Actually, it wasn't much of an episode if you discount mum crying looking at the blood on my left arm and dad wanting to smack the nurse for almost jabbing the shots into me. I didn't expect to get shots on my arms so soon, either. I had to have one on each arm and one on the thigh. It was the first time dad accompanied us to the immunisations, so I sat in his lap as the nurse gave the shots. And according to dad, this nurse was probably the reason they are called "shots". He kept complaining all day about how inconsiderate and ridiculous it was the way she just jabbed me as though I am not a baby but a cow! I was pretty brave with them though and I only cried during the shots. Unlike mum feared, I didn't develop a temperature either. In fact, mum reckons that was the smoothest immunisation session so far. I was so hyper-active during the rest of the day that dad was sure I got some saline injected along with the vaccine.

Mum took a great picture to go with this blog but blogger seems to be having a problem uploading images. Shall try again later.

13 Months and 11 days

2007-10-11T23:30:00.000+10:00

I have been jotting the list of things to write about from the past 2 weeks and organised that I am, I did it at work and I have sat down to write this at home. Let's see how far my memory takes me.

I finally gave in to his vision being clouded by his overgrown locks of hair and gave his first hair cut. I wanted to put off cutting his hair for as long as possible as I had this notion that cutting it would mean an end to his untouched, unblemished, natural babyhood. I knew it would make him look grown up and it does.
I do like his look now, though. Found him exceedingly cute the first two days. We ditched Praveen the Sleepyhead because he was asleep even after 9AM and did it all by ourselves with the video camera running in the background.

I have finally decided to cut down on his milk intake to see if he will accept more food instead. I have been reading too much about nutrition information for toddlers and they have all put me up to this. A glass of milk, a piece of cheese and a tub of yoghurt is apparently the way to go. His lunch intake seems to have improved marginally, according to Anna as he now has a big gap between his breakfast bottle and lunch . I am still putting off starting him on cow's milk instead of the formula. Cow's milk being thinner than his formula he couldn't handle the flow from the bottle. Obviously, the progressive way to go is to drop his bottle and put him on a sipper cup but I don't think he will drink enough that way(have to admit, I haven't tried). Besides, he still likes the idea of a bottle and it soothes him at the worst of times. So I am just buying time here.

He is happy to be left in the childcare these days. I left him at the door of his room and he asked for it to be opened, walked in and just blended into the crowd. After a while I heard an upset cry from him and I wondered if he had fallen or hit himself against something. Anna walks in and tells me, "Oh, it's nothing. He is crying because I walked in. That's how he greets me everyday..." It's his way of showing his attachment to the person. Like I said before, it is the same cry I sometimes get when I pick him up in the evenings. I have noticed that a lot of babies have the same cry when parents pick them up.

He associates keys with going outdoors. He knows that keys get put in the door and that can lead to going outside. He also associates the sound of keys at the door to Praveen's coming home in the evening. He once heard the noise sitting on the kitchen bench top and opened his arms grinning, looking at the door even before Praveen opened the door. I am trying to teach him to associate the sound of the bus at our doorstep to Praveen's coming home as well. I think we are slowly getting there: he gets quiet when he hears the screeching of the bus brakes and listens pointing to the bus.

Talking of pointing, he does that quite a lot now. He has also made it a habit of picking up anything on the floor or within his reach and handing it over to the closest person. This is something I have noticed a lot of babies do. What it means to me is that I am repeatedly asked to accept each of my slippers in turn when I put my feet up on the couch. If I drop them behind the sofa hoping it will put him off the exercise, he will walk around and fetch them back.

He has become quite annoying and is whinging a lot these days. And that seems to coincide with his dinner times. He wants to be picked up, wants to constantly change the person carrying him, gets very restless and generally doesn't quite know what he wants. This is really frustrating because it means he won't eat and that usually leads very quickly to my loss of patience. So he is ending up with his dad for a while in the evenings until I can fill up on my patience levels again. I find that walking away from the scene and ignoring him for a while helps me to do that. It probably sounds harsh and insensitive but it's what works for me. Remaining in the scene longer with my ill temper never did anyone good so far.

Year and 29 Days

2007-09-29T22:08:00.000+10:00

It's official. Of all the words in the Telugu language he could have learned first, he has chosen to pick up "Idugo", which effectively means "Here you go, take this". I obviously say a lot of "idugo" when I hand him things like his milk, toys or just generally catching his attention. He has been saying a rough form of it for the past 2 weeks and he has perfected it now. We are still trying to get him to say "amma" and "nanna" but no joy yet.

It appears he is teething again as he has been refusing food on and off. I don't know what is worse: not opening his mouth at all or taking it in and sending it right back out. Yogurt rice is a boon at times like this: that always seems to go down and stay there. He also has a bad cold again which means he has cylinders of bogeys through both his nostrils all the time. Praveen and I are constantly saying "Mukku, mukku" (nose) to each other, which is our way to get the other person to wipe his nose. Talking of wiping the nose, he sometimes takes the tissues out of the box and puts it against his face and throws it away mimicking our way of wiping him. If we don't take the tissue box away, it will be empty in no time. Niru says, "Wait until he starts to stuff them all back in and tries to have a very apologetic expression on his face!"

His latest dance move is to move each shoulder up and down alternately while tilting his head to the appropriate side. He was playing the radio today, increasing and decreasing the volume and enjoyed himself dancing and swaying his hands clamped together. Another recent way of enjoying his music is to press the appropriate button, turn around himself until it stops and repeat the process. He has figured out the right buttons to press on his Fisher Price puppy that Vijay got him(This one sings in a very strong US accent unlike Meera's which has an Australian accent and Rohan's is in the UK accent).

Sometimes when he is tired, he lies down on a cushion or the sofa with his bum in the air and his face to the side. He usually goes to sleep in my lap, sometimes while drinking his bottle. I have a habit of cradling his face in the hook of my left arm as he sleeps(a remnant of the breastfeeding days as it means he stays close to my body). I didn't realise it is a habit with him too until I noticed recently when I didn't do that and he lifted his head and did a stomach-crunch kind of movement trying to move closer to my left arm. If I stop rocking him and he hasn't fallen asleep yet, he has also taken to moving and shaking his body as a way of asking me to continue rocking.

When he ends up in our bed and wakes in the middle of the night, he tosses and turns around so much that it gets really annoying. He tries so many different positions, tries to put his arms under the pillows and sweeps the covers as though trying to smooth them, or digs underneath our bodies with the arms, even roll over both of us, all with his eyes closed and apparently trying to go back to sleep. At times like that he seems to prefer one position: he lies against me facing away from me, puts his head on my face and rests his cheek on one of my cheeks. Don't ask me how he manages to get into that position; he just does. That seems to settle him and there I am stuck in that position unable to move as he has fallen asleep!

To leave or not to leave

2007-09-25T12:14:00.000+10:00

One of those days again at the childcare today morning. Praveen had to leave early so I took him around 8:45. All the babies were still in the toddlers' room. He refused to even move away from my body when I tried to put him down and clinged to my arms. One of the babies sitting on the floor was crying with his nose running. This prompted what seemed to be sympathetic crying from the one sitting next to him. Her nose was running too with tears dripping down the cheeks. I couldn't help notice that the girl in charge was making no attempt to calm them or wipe their noses. I wondered what would be worse: they not caring at all, or pretending to care at least in front of the parents so we can keep deluding ourselves that all is well when we are gone from the scene.

I put Pranav down meanwhile thinking how unwelcome it felt to leave him there. Another girl came up and wiped the running noses and attempted to calm them down. Pranav was hanging on to my legs and I tried to turn his attention to a puzzle on the nearby table. During his momentary change of attention, I slipped out of the room to put his bag away and continued watching him through the glass doors. He stood there watching his surroundings for a moment, looked around and knew that I had gone through the glass doors. He came up to the doors but couldn't see me, so he just sat there and cried looking through the glass doors. His expression showed clearly his sense of being left there. It was so pathetic to see him searching for me, trying to come through the door with tears welling up in his eyes. It felt like he already knew that I was gone. I turned away, put
his bag in its place, signed him in and walked out of the room. As I was walking past his room, I saw him in the arms of one of the girls who was showing him a porcupine-like, orange rubber ball. It was the same girl who didn't attend to the crying babies previously. He had stopped crying but I still am.

Year and 22 Days

2007-09-22T17:59:00.000+10:00

He has been doing this for a while now, I didn't remember this until we saw him do it again the other day. We decorated his nursery with a Winnie the Pooh theme so there are felt cut-outs of Winnie, Tigger and Piglet on the facing wall of the room. As it happens, the Blue Tack I have used is apparently absolutely no good to hold up Winnie the Pooh felt cut-outs and I have heard this from more than one mother. So whenever Tigger or Piglet or Winnie finds themselves on the floor instead of the wall - which is quite often - my Mr.Little Fix-It here tries to stick them back on the wall! I have no clue how he figured out that they have to go on the wall, but he places them against the wall with one hand - sometimes their heads down - and hits them with the other. He does this a few times and finds that as soon as he takes his hand off they are back on the floor. He too has given up on Blue Tak. Praveen got some re-usable adhesive strips, hopefully they will keep our decoration up better.

I said before he gets off beds and sofas, he has now successfully applied the theory of getting off raised surfaces to the staircase. The plus part of this is we get to watch him crawl: he has completely stopped that since he discovered his feet, and the flip side is that Praveen is living on the staircase more than in any other part of the house what with having to watch him go up and down like it's no body's business. The cuteness factor here is that he crawls backwards which he never did even when he was learning to crawl. I have heard babies end up crawling backwards for a while when they first try to crawl. In his sixth month he commando-crawled for a fortnight and then just crawled on his knees straight away. What I found using yesterday was that even though there is a distance of about three or four feet from the bedroom door to the staircase going down from the retreat, as soon as he had reached the bedroom door he got down on his knees, crawled backwards to the top of the staircase (which he would previously walk to, stand there and yell out for someone to come and take him down the stairs) and neatly started climbing off. He saw me approach and tried to scramble down even quicker. We are worried about the place were the staircase turns to the left and has a couple of uneven width stairs which can cause him to loose his grip easily. I am so bad at keeping watch on him as it is. I tell myself I ought to be a little paranoid when it comes to his safety but can't get myself to practice it as much as I would like. Anyway, back to the subject of stairs, we seem to have a little inertia there too. He continued his backward crawl for a while after he had gotten pas the last stair until he realised it is taking him further into the living room and not further down the staircase.

No week can go by without some new talent displayed in the eating department, it seems. This is one of those I could do away with as soon as he possible but I have a feeling it is here to stay and be a dreaded phase. He has started to soak, marinate and ferment his food in his mouth. I say ferment because he actually had a mouthful of banana and yoghurt for a whole 20 minutes the other day! It lasted all through his play and his bath and only when I squeezed his cheeks together to try and wash his mouth out did he finally open it. In his attempt to swallow it, a little dribbled out into the tub and now he wants to pick it up and put it in his mouth! I mean, seriously, what school of cleanliness are you from? He clearly does this soaking business when he has lost interest in the food or when he completely doesn't care for its taste. He shuts his mouth so tight, there is nothing I can do to get him to swallow it short of closing his nostrils, which, believe me, I have done (which has sometimes ended in a few chokes and splutters from Pranav and a few dagger-looks from his father directed towards me, although, if you know Praveen, you know I have just exaggerated, but you get the idea). What is amazing is how he can retain the food in the mouth and still do all the crying and whining and laughing - even if he feels like laughing he will just make it a tight-lipped affair but will not swallow the food!

On the other end of this spectrum is how he stuffs his face with food when he likes it. Give him banana in his hand and he seems to think everything in his hand needs to transferred into the mouth cavity as soon as possible even though the cavity is not exactly being emptied at the same rate. The other day he finished his strawberry fruit bar in less than 5 minutes. I thought, "Wow! He really likes this!" I put him in the car soon after to go to the grocery store and I saw him making retching and gagging actions. I delve into his mouth and out comes the entire fruit bar- all 4 bitten-off, soaked pieces of it! He was trying to swallow all of them together I suspect. So much for me being excited that he can handle finger food now.

Poor guy wakes up around 7 or 7:30 each morning and amuses himself on the bed talking and gesticulating to himself(he chats a lot, and I mean a lot, these days). Praveen and I never won the early-rising competition, which means he is left to lie between us(of course he has ditched his cot during the early morning and settled down between us) until we wake up . After a while, the slapping of faces and rolling over our bodies and stamping and kicking all organs of our bodies, mostly, the faces, will start. This is the alarm clock we use these days - each other's groans. OK - I just exaggerated again, but hey, you get the idea.

He didn't cry when I picked him last two days. I am glad Polly has changed her shifts which means she will be with him everyday until I go in the evening. It's good to have a constant person that stays with him through out the day and whom you can talk to everyday instead of whoever is on shift. He seems to be getting to know Polly now. It's wonderful to see him walking towards me with a big grin and both arms open, raised above his shoulders in a welcoming gesture. This reminds of me of one of the evenings in his first month at childcare(he had just begun to crawl) when I watched one of the older boys run up to his dad who had come to pick him up, crying "Dad!" and jump up into his arms. It was such a satisfying thing to watch and I remember wondering about the time Pranav will do that to me. At that time it felt like I had a fair while to go for something like that. Although we aren't quite to the jumping into the arms crying "Mum!" bit, I think we are getting there soon enough. Oh! This motherhood is not so bad sometimes...

My 12 month Progress Report

2007-09-15T17:29:00.000+10:00

This is Pranav again!
I wanted to tell you all about my latest report card from the 12 month check up with the child health nurse so I asked mom to take a break. So there we were, all three of us in the nurse's office and the first question that comes up is about how much milk I am drinking. The nurse seemed to think I currently drink too much milk and I ought to cut it down because it could mean that I could become iron-deficient if I had too much milk and too little food. Now, these nurses, I really don't get them. The same people who insisted not so long ago that I drink milk and only milk now want something entirely different! I am glad mum decided to use her ears like a wind-pipe and let the advice out through her other ear. Anyway, even if she did reduce my milk it's not like I was going to start eating a lot more food. I do love my bottles.

As this subject died down, there was talk about the need to brush my teeth every night before bed. I tried to tell her that I do that every morning with mum's and dad's brushes after they are done with them but she seemed to think I needed to have a small brush of my own. I was hoping she will ask mum to use that yummy toothpaste whose tube I love to chew on, but no; apparently, I am too young and might swallow the paste. Surely, soemthing so yummy is for eating? Turns out no toothpaste for me until I turn three!

I think she was pretty impressed that I have been walking since I was 10 and a half months old. I know mum is very proud about it. Teh nurse was glad to know that I eat a lot of vegies and fruits and rice and pasta and meat. She also said I should eat some cheese and yoghurt everyday which I already do and love them too. Inspite of all this good beahviour mum found something to complain about: why do I absolutely refuse to eat sometimes? Hey, didn't I tell you why? It's because when I am teething, I don't like anything in my mouth, especially things that are hot and too chunky. Yes, thank you nurse. Now you know, mum. And beware, it will happen again from time to time as I teeth and when it happens you are supposed to just let me go like the nurse asked you to and not pester me to 'eat just a little bit', 'another little bit' and 'just a bit more'. And please don't use your ears like a wind-pipe with this advice.

Then came the embarrassing part: dad started stripping me off until I was only in my singlet and nappy! I mean, hello? Are we even allowed to do this outside of the house? Apparently, we babies are allowed. What's with these double standards? So, anyway, they laid me on my back against a scale and measured how tall I am and then measured how big my head is. Then the nappy came off too and this when I wanted to annoy them all by weeing on the scales for making me so uncomfortable but I had just done so in the nappy a while ago and it wouldn't come again! With the weighing done too I could get back into my clothes and shoes but I started protesting. You can't just dress and undress me as and when you like! Scream! Wriggle! Scream! But it was time go and I had to give in. Dad asked to wave bye to the nurse and I twirled both my hands and waved bye to her. And she said, "Good boy! He is a clever boy!" And when mum told Anna this when she dropped me off at the childcare later, guess what Anna said? "Oh, but we already knew that!" See, I told you I am too clever for my own good!

Year and 15 days

2007-09-15T17:12:00.000+10:00

I taught him to push blocks through a hole and then clap. Now it's a habit with him. He follows the pushing immediately with the clapping and sometimes he is so keen that he merely places the block somewhere near the hole and starts clapping. He can do a round block quite easily but can't quite tell the different shapes apart yet. I figured out that he remembers the location of the hole that he last pushed through because when I had turned it around, he was still trying to push it through the hole in the bottom right hand corner which wasn't round any more. He sometimes gets annoyed when he is not able to do something and just comes into my lap with a very irritated cry.

He can get off the bed and sofa with relative ease now. We taught him to face away from the edge and slide himself down slowly (which I am sure is what everyone does). Ofcourse, it's the 'slowly' part that has taken him so long to master. I can tell you the initial few trys on his own ended with him tumbling down the edge as his legs couldn't quite reach the bottom. The other day he was drinking his milk on the bed as I changed his nappy and I went to the bathroom for literally a minute to wash my hands. When I got back he wasn't on the bed! He had chucked his bottle aside, got off the bed and gone up to the bedside drawers and was fiddling with the contents. The bedside drawers are his current fascination. Any thing that has a knob that can be pulled open, actually. I think we have a Kramer in the making: he opens the bathroom vanity door with an alacrity and vigour that would have forced Kramer to rethink his door-opening style. He is only as tall as the vanity and if his face were to ever come in the way of the opening door...well, let's not go there.

Meera and he officially fought for the same toy yesterday. They both wanted the blocks. This guy didn't relent until Meera decided to be the good older sister and shared one of them with him. I can only hope she will continue to find her noble side or we are all going to be spending a lot of time pulling these two out of each other's hair.

His recent talent is to close the lid on anything that comes with a lid. He doesn't let me make take the formula out of its container, doesn't let me take yoghurt out of the tub, doesn't let me fill his sipper with water. He insists on putting the lid on before I am finished with them.

He has also taken to conducting the music that comes out of his toys. He has a toy aeroplane with a button that when pressed alternates with a song, some beeps, and a welcome note. He presses the button until the song plays and pauses to wave and twirl his hands to the music rythmically and walks off. When he realises the music stopped, he comes back from whatever he is doing and starts pressing the button again. He has always had a thing for music; or may be all kids are like this and I am just being hopelessly vain about mine.

Today is Vinayaka Chavithi and he is wearing his embroidered lalchi with a bottom that looks like a panchi. Looks a million dollars. We figured out that we can use the remote control of the camcorder and take lots of family pictures so we had a bit of fun with that in the afternoon. Lunch with bisibelebath and undrallu are for the evening which unfortunately have turned out a little more than mush.

Year and 13 days

2007-09-13T14:49:00.000+10:00

He just got out of another bout of gastro. I hate that thing because it means I have to take him off his milk and give him ganji neellu (rice broth) in his bottles instead because, apparently, lactose tends to aggravate gastro and I still need to keep his fluid intake up. This prompts Praveen to call him "Mr. Ganji Neellu" from time to time. This time, the new GP we took him to recommended I use a lactose-free formula instead of the regular formula for a week. So no more ganji neellu.
He has started to cry at the child care again when I pick him up in the evenings. Anna leaves sometime during his afternoon nap these days and I think he misses the presence of someone he bonds to when he wakes up. He cries with a sad face when he sees me in the evening like he used to when he was adjusting to the child care.
On the growing up side, he has started his tantrum phase it seems. Apparently, it is never too early for that phase according to Niru and seems true enough. He cries insistently when we take something away from him. Our choice method to deal with his tantrums at the moment: ignore him. He has also learned to do a phony, pitiful kind of "abba abba abba" cry with his face all screwed up into a I-am-in-distress-here expression. It is cute, really cute and hilarious. Wonder how long that will last.
I may have uncovered a big weapon in our fight against his occasional hunger strikes. He likes anything flavoured with spicy gravies. All the child experts out there are probably up in arms but hey, if it gets him to eat, I am going to use it. The other day I made him a mild vegetable pilaf which he was not keen on until I added a little chicken chettinad gravy to it which made him open his mouth widest and finish the bowl in under 15 minutes. So, there you go. Again, wonder how long this will last. I have strong reason to will this particular phase to last as long as possible.
It turns out he is an outdoor person. I am sure he gets that from Praveen. During the party, he refused to come back inside to cut the cake. He is happy to play around in the garden on his own. Anna also commented about the same thing the other day, that he enjoys his play outside and watching the other kids playing. This is only going to mean sand-filled shoes and clothes, not to mention the house!

Twelfth Month

2007-09-13T14:04:00.001+10:00

I love walking around holding my shoes, one in each hand. I don't understand any form of "No", "Don't" and "Can't", though. I do say a lot of things of my own but no one seems to get me. Oh, well! I can wave bye-bye, put a phone to my ear when someone says "hello", clap when asked, play peekabo with mum using my towel and with dad by hiding behind the sofa, can "kick" and "throw" a ball, hand things over when asked "Ta" and a lot more! Wow, I am all grown up and I am ONE!!!

Eleventh Month

2007-09-13T14:01:00.000+10:00

Yay! I am walking now! Car keys are my favourite toy along with mobile phones, laptops and wires. I change mum's laptop settings and she can never figure out how to change them back. I am still quite the mummy's boy. I need her especially if I wake up in the middle of the night. I ignore dad completely such times even though I am OK with him bathing and feeding me and playing with me. If it's bedtime, it's mummy time.

Tenth Month

2007-09-13T13:39:00.000+10:00

I can stand up on my own for a short while now. The first time I did it mum was so excited that she yelled loudly; I was so freaked out and started crying! I enjoy music quite a lot; I bounce on the spot or shake my bum or body rythmically to any up beat music. My favorite one is the title music of Sex and the City. I also have a lot more teeth now both on the lower and upper jaws.

Ninth Month

2007-09-13T13:36:00.000+10:00

Mum and dad were very worried when I had high fever for the first time. Turns out my tonsils are inflammed and I had to take antibiotics. I did feel very sick and I missed Meera's birthday party too! I can walk around the edges holding on to things now. My first tooth appeared on the lower left side. Not a tooth-less grin anymore!

Eigth Month

2007-09-13T13:04:00.000+10:00

May be the childcare is not so bad after all. I do love Anna and it's only two days of the week when mum goes to work. I still cry when mum leaves and picks me up, though. I know it makes mum feel very guilty but it is so sad to leave her. I can't wait to drink milk from my bottles these days; I get very frantic as soon as I see one in mum's hands! I can stand up holding on to things on my own. It's a lot of fun playing with dad too. We play in the evenings after dinner time. I can also climb stairs with ease, especially if dad is not watchful enough.

Seventh Month

2007-09-13T13:01:00.000+10:00

We are back home in Melbourne and there is some new person at home with us. Never met him before. Oh, wait, it could be the person who went sleepless for the first couple of months with me. Yeah - I think this is dad. I still prefer being with mum though. I can crawl all on fours now. My foods now include fruit purees and lentil soup and I enjoy them. Mum has started taking me to this strange place where there are a lot of other kids and someone else is trying to feed me and play with me. I am not so sure that this child care thing is a good idea, mum! And what's with these bottles you are tring to feed me milk in? They are disgusting, you know?

Sixth Month

2007-09-13T12:58:00.001+10:00

Mum gives me Farex twice a day now but I am still troubling her with milk because I tend to gag and throw up quite easily. I think she is distressed these days. On the bright side, I can commando crawl now and this is simply great! I can get hold of anything I want with a little effort. I can also sit up unsupported for a short length of time.

Fifth Month

2007-09-13T12:52:00.000+10:00

I rolled over on the 1st of January! Mum and dad are absolutely thrilled! Now that I can do it I don't like staying on my back any more. I had my first plane ride to Sydney and don't think I enjoyed that too much. I am a Farex baby now and this makes a good change from milk. Mum and I are in India for a few months now and turns out I have a huge fan following here! I am getting oil massages everyday from my Great GrandMa too. I have found my biggest fan in the world in Uncle Vivek! He is always trying to cuddle and kiss me even when I am asleep. Grandma and he reckon I am too cute and adorable to be mum's son. I like bath times in my little tub too. I don't stay in the place I have been put anymore. When someone helps me stand holding my hands I like jumping and hopping on my feet. Talking of feet, people say I have big feet. Hmmm...

Fourth Month

2007-09-13T12:42:00.001+10:00

Uncle Vijay is here to see me from the US and he is the best! I sometimes tell him off in loud noises when he doesn't pick me up and then he tells me stories of tennis stars and race cars. I love playing in my play gym and kick the hell out of it sometimes. I like having people around all the time if I can manage it and I seem to do that quite well. I am also holding up my head well now.

Third Month

2007-09-13T12:17:00.000+10:00

I have been a good boy so far so I think it's time I start troubling mum with feeding. Don't really like the milk so much these days. How come I have to drink only milk all the time? Mum insists on putting me on my tummy for play but I don't like it one bit! I can reach for toys when somebody hands them out to me, though. I have also gotten quite good at sleeping during the night and I think mum and like me a lot better now.

Second Month

2007-09-13T12:02:00.000+10:00

GrandMa is here from India! And she already thinks I am the cutest thing she ever laid eyes on. Dad's gone back to work and mum is being pampered by GrandMa so I have plenty of attention from mum because now she doesn't have to worry about things around the house. I can already tell when I am in mum's arms because I stop crying as soon as she picks me up. I smiled at mum for the first time when I was exactly 6 weeks old and she cried. Mums! You never know what's going on with them! I have started cooing too and we have made new friends in the Mum's group.

First Month

2007-09-13T11:45:00.000+10:00

Mum and dad have absolutely no clue what's going on with me. I try to tell them all I need is lots of milk and plenty of sleep(I do love my cradle) and even more change of nappies. I have lost all my birth hair on my head and my skin is still dry and flaky. Getting loads of oil in my bath. Talking of bath time, I hate it with a passion. I think it looks like mum and dad are not getting any food and sleep at all.

Birth

2007-09-13T11:25:00.000+10:00

I arrived at 8:09AM on Friday after having stayed 2 days beyond the date mum and dad were told I would come. I didn't want to share mum's birthday, you see; I wanted my own and so turned out to be a spring baby arriving on the 1st of September. I weighed 3325 gms and was exactly 50 cm long.

Naught to Twelve: The best and worst

2007-09-04T15:46:00.000+10:00

Pranav is a year and 3 days old today and this is how the journey of the past twelve months took place. Apparently he has excellent linguistic skills so I will let him narrate his story in his own words