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.