More Little Things…

“This one just begins from where I left on the last one… more little things that I am reminded of…”

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Dear Riddhie,

Just continuing on the last post where I listed a few of the little random things that you picked up (and lost) over time. I must admit that couple of these things have been way too cute for me to reminisce about for perhaps, the rest of my life.

Continuing from the previous list, here are a few more of those little things...   

1. Baby goes “Thhaaaaa” – I have a vague recollection of how it started actually. We were still at our parental house and you were sitting over a mat on the verandah and we were around watching you play with an empty steel bowl (katori) and a spoon. You were in early days of testing your grip and were happily beating the spoon on the bowl when it just fell out from your grasp and hit the floor with a significant louder metallic clang which startled you a bit. Your grandmother was sitting besides you on a chair and she tried to reassure you and exclaimed ‘What happened Riddhie? Thaaa ho gayi?’ and you just picked up the sound Thaa… Minutes later, you were throwing the bowl away on the floor deliberately and exclaiming ‘Thaa’ every time it hit the tiles. It soon got converted to a standard warning phrase of communication with you. Every time someone in the family wanted to warn you about falling over they would say ‘Riddhie Thaaa’ and you would immediately stop in your track, no matter what you were doing. As the case is with the babies when they learn to roll over, a common phenomenon is them falling off the bed as well. No matter how much caution we examined, you did have your share of falls. The first time it happened you just rolled off on the carpet from a low bedside and though it did not hurt, you got up looking all bewildered and the moment I picked you up, you said ‘Thaa’. I could not help smiling at that look you gave and at your assessment of the situation. ‘Thaa’ thereafter has been our warning signal to you when you get too close to the edge of the bed or are playful around the furniture in the house. It has been proving its worth till date as I key this in. 

2. Give, Riddhie Give: This happens to be one of the most useful things we could teach you as you were growing up. You are just about an year and two weeks old as I write this and we have been able to teach you the concept of picking up a thing and giving it to us. Of course, it still comes more like a game to you, nonetheless it’s both fun and help for us since it prevents you from taking things and articles you can find within your reach and putting them in your mouth. It started with us calling out to you, reaching out our hands and making gestures with our palms and fingers for you to come and hand out whatever you had picked up to us, chanting ‘give, give, give…’ all the while. This had to be followed with a big smile and a loud ‘Thank You’ to help you understand that your effort is appreciated. Soon you started enjoying this little exercise and looked forward to that big Thank-You. In fact, it has come to a point where you just find anything that you can reach out to and bring it to either your mom or me and wait for us to say thanks to you. The list of articles is growing as you have extended your reach to telephone in the living room, slippers lying around, TV remotes, mobile phones, any books you find on the coffee table and of course your toys around you.

I guess most of these things shall go away as you grow up. Along the line, you would become wise in worldly ways, lose some of your innocence and shall add more shades to your personality. I would wish and expect that you learn more and study well and develop a balanced and healthy emotional and intelligence quotient but then I believe I can not even close eyes to the fact that you shall also pick up a few grey traits along. I can already see you act stubborn at times and show anger when your will is not done. Sigh..I guess no matter what future brings us, we, as your parents shall always look back at these little stories of your early childhood with the same warmth and cherish them as ever. So, for now enjoying this golden period of our lives with you, hoping that you pick up new tricks on a daily basis and I continue keying them in. 

Love,

Dad.

Little Things You Do…

“Everyone is trying to accomplish something big, not realizing that life is made up of little things” - Frank Howard Clark

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Dear Riddhie,

There have been a host of little things that you have picked up in recent times and before they are lost to the dust of time and to the amnesia of life, let me just put them up together for you and compile them in this letter. These are little things which do not necessarily warrant a separate post and a couple of them are events which I just want to briefly touch upon so as to remember them and give you the details in person when you come back and ask me and those which I do not wish to deliberately elaborate upon here to avoid causing you any embarrassment since I am publishing these letters to a public domain.

Let me begin by talking about the most recent ones.   

1. Using the Straw – This perhaps has been your early feat. I was looking up and reading various articles on infant growth and development patters and came across references where it said that children learn to use a straw as a tool for drinking from a cup when they are between 14 to 18 months of age. October 23, 2011 happened to be the first day when you successfully learnt to use a straw for drinking water from a cup. Maybe I would come across as an obsessed parent to most readers as it really is something that all kids eventually learn, but nonetheless, since it happened before me, I guess there is no harm in noting it down here. 

2. The Sound of Static -  At your age, you do not totally understand things and there are not many things that invoke a sense of fear. However, the topmost item on the list of things that make you scream and howl and really cry out loud is the static noise as coming from a vacuum cleaner, hair dryer or the rumbling of a dish washer. The other items which you feared a few weeks ago and are now able to deal with are whistle from a pressure cooker and the sound through the air vent of a microwave oven. I guess this list shall grow and shrink to include and strike off various items as grow up. Perhaps your list shall some day coincide with mine and I shall fear things that I haven’t been afraid of so far in my life. Hopefully we shall stand by each other on all those days. 

3. Go – Go – Go: I don’t know how this one got missed out earlier but ‘GO’ was perhaps the first thing you learnt to say after ‘mmmaaa’. In fact you would say a GO for almost everything that you wanted to respond to. Later when you realized that Go was something you could use to tell others to pick you up and take you out for a walk, it became ‘Go, Go, Go’ the repetition underlining the emphasis that you wanted to assert. A few days down the line you had almost christened your grandpa as ‘Go’ and as soon as he entered home after work, you would start chiming ‘go, go, go’ as an indication for him to take you out and show you the lights on the road and the moving traffic. As it had to be you lost out on this when you picked up more syllables on your vocab. 

4. The Rock star move: Another of those early moves that you learnt to make was to bang your head in a rock star motion. Be it to the sound of music or perhaps just something playing inside your head you would rock your head back and forth in a rhythmic trance as if dancing to some rock beat. With your little hair blossoming into fine curls, this sure looked one move to die for. I simply loved it when you started doing it and never really stopped you or tried to check you on this. Well, as I just mentioned, it looked brilliant till it lasted. Maybe it had again to do something with your teething and you got out it once you had your incisors out and biting.

5. Baby and the Ball: Now, this one really came off as a surprise to us. When, after our arrival here in US, I set out to buy toys for you, one thing which I thought would be an obvious pick was a ball. I set out to buy a few – different sizes and light weight kinds, one you could just see floating around and the one which would bounce up a bit. To my surprise, once we were home and threw them across to you, you saw them as some alien species and started crying out big time. In fact it became so bad that we had to eventually hide them up for a few days. It was only after a lot of coaxing that you finally got ‘friendly’ with them and started playing around. However, as I key this in, you still haven’t learnt how to kick them or throw them around. All you do is pick them up with both hands and bring them over to us and wait for us to thank you in a loud jovial tone and throw it back again so you could go and bring it back to us. For now, I am calling it as the little pup game (your mom hates the name though) and waiting for you to start throwing it back and play ‘catch’ with me.

I guess now that I have started putting in all the little stories together I am reminded of a couple more. Maybe I would break this letter here and should do another adding up a few more of these little random things you did or still do at the time of keying this in or maybe I should just keep making little snippet posts. I guess I shall figure it out all the same, I hope reading about these shall give you as much pleasure as it gives me while noting them in here.  

Love,

Dad.