Before and After - a Baby

Before: When we went to restaurants and the food arrived, we would relish it and eat it slowly in between a long conversation.
After: When we go to restaurants and the food arrives, we first keep aside a portion that is tried and tested to be less spicy for her, gobble the food up real fast and beam over her in between.

Before: When we got back home from work, it was lazy evenings in front of the TV, cooking together recipes from a cookbook or Chinese take-outs.
After: When we get back from work, it is energy filled running around controlling the mischief like switching on and off the TV continuously, quick meals with less spice keeping her in mind.

Before: On weekends bright sunlight awakened us sometime mid morning.
After: On weekends bright eyes and a smile lit face awakens us early morning.

Before: Most outings were impromptu; we decided now and were out of the door in 30 minutes.
After: We plan outings in advance; when we are adventurous we decide now and the plan is out of the door in 30 minutes.

Before: We grumbled about going to birthday parties and when we did go to a few we would be the first ones to eat and leave.
After: We get excited to see birthday invites; plan her dress in advance and are the last ones to leave as she is having so much fun.

Before: Friday nights were dinner at a restaurant and a movie at the cinema.
After: Friday nights are dinner at home and a movie on our laptop in our room to aid us to sleep in the middle of it.

Before: Conversations over the phone with family was about us, our progress at work, fun things we did on the weekend.
After: Conversations over the phone with family is about her, her progress, the fun with her, and all this only when we get a chance to speak over the phone after her.

Before: Days could be categorized as happy days, sad days, boring days, eventful days and so on.
After: Days can only be categorized as Fun days.

Fun at One

A (my baby) has started stringing 2-3 words together to make sentences. I thought I will capture all the baby talk and her funny ways to communicate before it turns into little toddler sentences.

Let me start with my favorite, what is your name and she says Anana. If she wants something she pats her chest and says Anana.

She knows two numbers. How old are you and she shoots up her index finger. And if you ask how many of anything are there, she says t-ree, with her index and middle finger wrapped together.

She has given me a new name, mi-mi. Don’t know how this started, she just came up with it one day (maybe its something to do with B referring to me as mommy to her). She also calls me amma at times, but it is mostly mi-mi, and if she is trying real hard to convince me about something it is mi-mi-ma.

If she feels a lot of love for someone, and she wants to express it she adds her name to ours, like, mi-mi-nana (that is mi-mi + anana) or appa-nana.

She was gifted the same kind of teddy bear by two people, so my parents told her that they were twin teddies and named them Ina and Mina. She calls out to them all the time as Ina-Mina as though its one word.

Her first animal sound was inney for neigh. When it started all farm animals said inney and we listened to it all day when she pointed to a pig, a horse, a cow and everything. Now she has added meow-meow, bow-bow and moo to her vocab.

She now knows how to communicate so that she gets what she wants. Like when we are asking her to finish up her dinner while we are eating ours, and she wants to tell B that she rather eat what is on his plate she says, appa mamm mamm. If B looks up at her to say what about my food, she pats herself and says anana.

She calls all kids ‘baby’ irrespective of their age. She is the youngest at her day care home and calls all the other kids baby. A few days after she started her day care, I asked her what do all the babies tell you at the day care, she pulls her cheeks with her hand and says, baby,baby much to my amusement!

She loves to ask for kisses (abba in her language), she points to her cheeks and says mi-mi abba.

She loves to talk over the phone to her thatu, tapi (she cant say pati), amamma, thata and her aunt (whom she calls by name!) She does a lot of pretend talk with her toy phone, and paces the room when she is talking. (We realized that is how B and I talk over the phone!)

Who says you cannot play Dumb Charades at 14 months. We had just blown candles and cut a cake when celebrating an occasion recently, after which she loved licking the icing. I put the whole cake away from her sight and started feeding her a piece I had cut. It did not have any icing and she did not like it. She tried to tell us something, but could not find the cake to point to. So she enacted the whole scene of blowing the candles and licking the icing to tell us she what she wants.

She knows what a restaurant is and gets all excited when we tell her we are going to one. When in a Chinese restaurant once, she kept nodding to the waitress indicating she wants food, when she realized that she is not understanding, she took her cheerios cup and showed it to her and said cup tappathi anana. Anything edible and circular is tappathi (chappathi) in her language, until she heard me tell naan at an indian restaurant last night. Every time the waiter came to fill our water glasses she called out her newly learnt word naan.

If she finds a book or a newspaper she pretends to read it and says, Ae-Eee or Ae-B.

She can understand 3 languages, thanks to the fact that I speak to her in Kannada, B speaks to her in Tamil and she is spoken to in English at the day care. It is amazing how kids learn at this age; though people told us we are burdening her with 3 languages she seems to treat it like second nature. When she talks she mixes all the 3 like mimi ba(come in kannada), baby tutam(water in tamil).

She absolutely loves the songs of the movie jungle book, and keeps walking on all her four limbs to imitate the elephants and mowgli march and sings akung akung.

Birds

We spent the last weekend in a cottage on a bay amidst water and wilderness. The scenery was beautiful and the whole experience very relaxing. But amidst all that I was enlightened about something. Birds! There were a lot of birds that came in front of the cottage to peck on the bird seeds we had scattered. There was one bird that caught our attention the most, the northern cardinal. The color of its feathers was a beautiful red and it looked by far the most attractive amidst the others. Not being very knowledgeable about birds, I took the help of a book at the cottage to identify some. And here I found a very interesting fact. The female specie of the northern cardinal looks a lot different and has dull brown feathers. As I looked through the pictures in the book it so appeared that the males of most kinds were far more attractive than their female counterparts. Well maybe this was well known, but I had no clue about it. And then I thought, of course peacock and peahen, duh!!