Life is full of decisions - questions, comments, concerns - comments that need to be followed-up with questions…things like the one below…stuff you don’t want to know more about…
The toddler declared to me this evening, “We don’t eat poopies, mommy! We don’t eat boogers! We eat food!”
I was driving the now almost-3-years-old little one to his day care this morning when he exclaims, “Mommy, XXXX is black!” about a dark-skinned classmate. I was a little surprised at the tone of that, and recognizing a theme for a lecture, asked him, “so, what color are you?”.
He looks down at his shirt for only a moment before he triumphantly answers back, “I am striped!”.
It is kinda not right to call this baby stuff anymore - have you seen him recently? (I promise to put up his picture in his Halloween costume this evening). He went as Buzz Lightyear, his favorite Space Ranger. This was Neel’s first ever trick-or-treating, so mommy was a little curious to see how her shy boy would fare in the kid-eat-kid-for-candy world of Halloween.
Not too shabby, really!
He did start of initially by mumbling “trickatreat” from behind his mommy before grabbing the candy and taking off after another mumbled “thankyou”. As the candy started collecting in his little pumpkin pail, he started getting bolder and into the thick of things. He was screaming, “To infinity and beyond!” like Buzz Lightyear and his “trickatreat” (that is how is says it, all one word) was a little more audible than before.
We managed to tour around the block for about an hour before I convinced him we needed to turn back. He was so excited about his candy, he could have gone on the entire night :) It was a fun experience - even funnier was how tightly he clutched his pail to himself every time some trick-or-treaters rang our doorbell - he was afraid mommy might give his candy away…Heh!
Believe me, this is for all those women (including me) who soldiered on armed with their massive breastpump bags - trying to ooze a little bit of IQ at a time for their children in the privacy of cars, bathroom stalls and new mother rooms (for a few lucky ones, like me). This is also for those who want to tease us - “nyah, nyah, nyah - my baby’s smarter because I brestfed him”. Yay! aparrently that was not the point!
Can you imagine how much guilt you offload off of a new mom who is trying to reconcile her career, her non-baby-oriented-life and the guilt of not being able to do something so simple for her baby?
Now, don’t get me wrong - I am not against breast-feeding considering how many advantages there are to it - the baby’s health, the mother’s health, the whole bonding experience. I loved it and I missed it when it was over. It is just that I don’t appreciate people beating thos moms who are unlucky enough to not have the facilities to keep doing it over their head with guilt sticks for being unable to breastfeed for longer.
The column starts off with people complaining that kids these days are brats and (oh! horrors!) their parents are letting them get away with it. Get this, parents even want to go outside of the house with their kids…Waaah!
Josephine Charlton, a public relations consultant in West Hollywood, Calif., says she loves children but feels they are becoming public nuisances nonetheless. Her local Whole Foods has been overrun by “breeders” with an oversized sense of entitlement, she says, museums are now inappropriately clogged with strollers, and even first-class travel has morphed into “Romper Room” in the air.
So, to want to expose your children to culture by taking them to a place like a museum is considered overrunning it now? Hey lady, here is a newsflash - we “breeders” pay for the museum upkeep as much as you do and what etiquette requires that there be absolute silence in a museum or for that matter in a Whole Foods Market?
Now, I have traveled around with my son - I have been to restaurants, on airplanes - all sorts of things. He can be awesome sometimes and dump all the salt on that table other times. I try my best to calm him down, but a little help is appreciated in moments like that. For example, in the packed sardine can that was the airplane we were flying on, I would have appreicated a little baby room where my tot could safely run a little bit or stretch his legs out without bothering anyone. I prefer to go to places where there are baby-areas that let my son vent all he wants before the tired, little guy wants sit down calmly again. It is really that easy!
I am not asking for millions in government-grants to create child-friendly places, but think about this - how much money is spent in making all places handi-capped accessible? Couldn’t we have asked the handi-capped to stay home? Why not extend the same kind of courtesy to our future citizens and do them the favor of a little kid-friendly area in shops where they can scream to their hearts’ content while the parents end up spending tons of money in your establishment? win-win, right? Instead of that, I see vile people like the woman above who actually thinks children are some kind of a disease and would rather complain than lift a finger to help.
There are a lot of good points made in the column, so read it all…
Here is more fun stuff in the reader responses -
When I go to a restaurant, movie or other public places, I do not want to hear crying babies, and children. I want peace and quiet!
Carol, Pearce, Ariz.
Sure, Carol - that is exactly why people leave their homes and go out - to find peace and quiet in public places.
It has been a while since I put up any baby updates, so here is one of the little demon :)…
He is all of 16-1/2 months now and is soon to be promoted to the toddler class in his daycare. One more thing - I am leaving to India with him for a 2-week wedding trip this October 28th, so we will be celebrating his first Diwali there.
Before I forget, Happy Dasara to you all!
Last update - I have just been offered a dinner on my arrival to Mumbai on the 30th of October and a blogger meet by Yaz - I am holding the Mumbai-wallahs (that means you, Ravi!) to the promise of at least a meet…
Yep, after all those vivaldi CDs, Baby Mozarts, Baby Bachs and the entire array of music of both the classical and the kiddie variety, my son has decided his favorite song is “Hotel California” by the Eagles. My husband says he shows real good taste in music for a 9-month-old, but I am really baffled by it all. Neel (my son) refuses to go to sleep unless we play this song before bedtime. It soothes him the best next to my holding him.
Consider this - Neel is old enough to get stranger anxiety. He is a little scared around strangers. My husband wanted to get him used to others, so he took him to a friend’s place. Apparently, the little one just kept crying, sobbing real bad through the visit. After about 15 minutes, my husband couldn’t take it anymore and played “Hotel California” in the friends’ CD player. It was magic, how it calmed the baby and soothed him enough that he was actually quite happy and playing with the people around by the time I showed up there. Interesting choice in music, my baby’s got!
Here is someone who I wish would get sterilized for life - This great mother gave birth and within an hour threw her baby out of a moving car onto the street along with his umbilical cord still attached, wrapped in a plastic bag. I wouldn’t want to force another baby on this woman or even force her to a life of abstinence. All I ask is for her uterus to be removed so she cannot repeat stunts like this again.
Hey, a hysterectomy works great for birth control, especially if you are as empathetic a mother as in this case!
(p.s. I do understand that per the article, and the police testimony, we are still not sure if it was the mother who threw the baby out - I still stand by my words. If she cannot stay away from people who abuse her, she has no right to expose her babies to abusers).
Update: Guess what! Turns out that the so-called rescue lady was the baby’s mother and she made up the entire baby-thrown-from-car incident. If she had to go to these lengths inspite of Florida’s safe harbor law (within the infant’s first three days, you can leave him at any hospital or fire station - no questions asked), she still deserves to be sterilized!
Neel is turning out to be one vocal baby - he lets you know with different tones of voice, every mood of his. (I wonder where he could have got this incessant desire to blab from!) He loves listening to people talk to him on the phone - he even responds with appropriate “mmm”s at intervals. When I call him up, he actually recognizes my voice and starts smiling, or so I am told. I called him two days ago from work and our conversation was pretty typical (you know, I go, “Hi Neel!” and he says “mmmmm!”) except for a little while where he didn’t say anything. I was wondering if he was still on the phone when he goes, “mmmmmmaaa, ammmmaa, amma!”. If I hadn’t been at work, that would have had me crying so hard :)
So many things in this list sound cliched, it is really interesting why we don’t them more often. It took seeing my son practice these day in and day out that made me think how easy and how awesome it is to be like him -
Express yourself - with my son, you are never in a doubt where you stand with him. When he sees the people he likes, his eyes, his face and his entire being lights up. He shows in no uncertain way that you have made him very happy just by being there and looking at him. He is also not afraid to ask for attention. He wants a hug? You see his arms spread wide and when you hold him he will smother you in a tight embrace.
He makes me think of all the times I was afraid of showing emotion thinking I will be hurt or when I was sulking at something and refused to show how happy I really was to see someone. This also brings me to the next thing -
Don’t hold a grudge - He doesn’t sulk - he doesn’t remember a grudge long enough to hold it. He can be crying hard because of something you did, but the minute you tickle him or do something crazy he forgets all and starts laughing. How often is it that we waste precious moments because we are too caught up in proving points to others by sulking or being angry and petty over unimportant things.
Don’t give up - I keep wondering at what point in our lives do we lose that spirit of not giving up till we master something. If you count the number of times my son fell down before he finally managed to crawl around, it was heartbreaking as a mom for me. He didn’t care. He tried pushups till he made his little arms and legs strong enough till they could support his weight, he then tried to crawl only to figure out he couldn’t balance himself. He fell forward so many times his nose turned red. None of these setbacks meant he was giving up. Now he is on his way to standing up by holding on to the sofa - he is almost ready to walk - once he figures out how to balance himself on his pudgy feet…after about another 100 or so falls I guess.
Explore - There is a reason behind all that determination of his to learn how to crawl and walk. He is extremely curious. He wants to see everything - touch, feel (and lick) everything. There is no satisfying his appetite for new things. Everything is a new challenge to be dissected and understood completely. When I see that, I wonder at point do we lose that curiosity and settle for monotonous apathy in our lives. How exciting it would be to be exploring relentlessly and learning as much as we can about everything through our lives!
There have been two in the news lately - one sad and one happy. I am just thrilled to pieces on the story about the world’s smallest baby who survived after being born with less weight than a coke can (imagine that!). She was 9.4 inches tall, which was less than half of what my son was at birth and he was early by 2 weeks himself. I am glad we have the technology to make miracles happen and help keep the life within a tiny being that would have had no chance a few years ago.
It also kind of makes you wonder how some people will move heaven and earth to keep a 26-week-old-pregnancy baby alive while some will do the same and more to have the right to kill an even older child since the baby is still in the mother’s womb.
As for the sad story about the expectant mom strangled so another woman could cut out her baby and pretend it was her own, it was awful. I can so see the fancies, fears, wishes and hopes the pregnant lady must have harbored in her heart for little girl, it breaks my heart to think she was killed before she could even see her baby. It is nice to see the baby is doing well after being brought into the world in such a heinous fashion, but I really feel for the mom who is not here anymore. I went through my entire pregnancy trying to imagine what my baby would be like and what it would be like the first time I saw him. I feel for anyone who had to miss out on it.
Now that you have all seen that adorable little tyke in the picture below, let me tell you how it was after he came to be. It was a pretty hurried labor - My doctor had checked me up on Monday and told me I was not ready in any way whatsoever to give birth. I started having cramps on Tuesday and by Wednesday night, the cramps became pretty rhythmic - every ten minutes. My husband and I went to the hospital early morning Thursday and they sent us back saying I was still not ready and needed another day or so.
I decided to stay home take it easy for the daya nd my husband left to work. At 2:30 in the afternoon I had gotten tired of timing the contractions so I decided I would go to bed when hell, sorry, my water broke. I needed to get to the hospital at once, but my husband was at work in a meeting 20 minutes away, so I simply got dressed and drove to the hospital with my in-laws. Once there it was the usual pandemonium and cacophony of pains, deep-breaths, screaming for my husband and ultimately the welcome hush brought to you courtesy of “Epidural”. I swear, all the people on my floor must have heaved a sigh of relief after all the ruckus I made.
At about 7:00, I started throwing up (yeah, I am the queen of throwing up - my hangovers suck!) and the nurses realized it was time to push - there was three hours of that interrupted occasionally by cell-phone calls to my husband from people at work asking for help - I am not making this up, he was taking calls while holding my feet and helping me push - he had to tell them he was in the middle of his wife’s frigging delivery before they would hang up. Well, it was about 10:20 already and the doctor had had it with me. She told me it was two more pushes - my son had to come out or she was cutting me up for a caesarian.
Next push, the little head was out enough to be vaccuumed out, which was when we discovered he had wrapped the umbilical cord around his neck that was preventing him from coming out. Of course, it seems like a little thing now, but it freaked me out then to realize how close we had come to choking the poor little one before we finally got him out.
That though folks, was just the beginning. It was the beginning of a two-week-long nightmare that to me was punctuated by sleep, feeding baby, trying to eat while feeding baby, trying to sleep while feeding baby, trying to feed baby while trying to feed baby…oops, where was I again? But then that was the reality of those days - the little bundle of joy did only three things - eat, sleep and poop - and did them on an hourly basis. 24/7. Even the most patient, mommy-like people can get exasperated by all this.
Husbands, if you have any compassion at all, please do not piss off your women during this time. Try to do everything they ask you to do - no more, no less. Remember that there is a lot of hormonal fluctuation going on and emotionally and physically it is a roller-coaster ride that only a woman who has been through this can truly imagine. Another piece of advice would be - don’t take anything personal. Seriously, you might start wondering why she hates you so much but it is not really you - it is the hormones talking. Remember the voices talking through the girl in Exorcist? Kinda like that. Take the baby away from her for a few hours a day - let her rest - it might help save your marriage.
People give you lots of advice when you get pregnant and have a baby - take care of yourself, eat good, sleep good (whenever you can), yadda yadda yadda. The one thing most people will either not tell you or you are too miserable to notice is how important it is to live in the moment. I know it sounds very cliched, but it is very true. There are so many moments in the past 18 months that I wish I could remember a little more about…I wish I could relive again.
It starts off with the pregnancy, of course! Sure, it sucks when your daily food intake consists of 15 grapes, 2 whipped yoghurts, 3 pieces of sour candy and 10 marinated olives (don’t ask!). You are constantly hungry, nauseous or both and you are still trying to get your act together trying to be all motherly while wondering what the hell you have gotten yourself into. You find yourself wondering if you are doing the right thing - is it all worth it - weren’t you happy just by yourself - being responsible for another human being is such a scary thing!
Now when I think back to it, I wish I had remembered a little more about what it was like the first time I felt my baby move (at 12 weeks) - the first time I saw the tiny lump in my womb that would soon grow an extremely fast-beating heart that would move me to tears when I saw it on the grainy black-and-white screen - the first time I felt something else other than pure selfishness of being - the first time I fell in love with someone I had never seen in person - the first time I fell in love with a person I knew absolutely nothing about.
It is true - you hear about the constant backache, the difficulty you have with sleeping, the heartburn, all the myriad problems that are part and parcel of the pregnancy. Once it is over though, you wish you could remember a little better that first time you saw the huge head in the sonogram - when you found out it would be a boy or a girl and all of a sudden it is “my boy/girl!” when you think about the baby now - when you heard the racing heartbeat and wondered what the baby was up to - the kicks in the stomach and the tiny punches that would bulge out of you when the tiny one got excited - those times when all you had to do to find your baby was to look down at your tummy - you could speak to your baby, sing to him any time you felt like it since the baby is with you all the time!
Oh, all that extra attention you get when you are pregnant? You will miss it way more than you would imagine once it is over. Have fun while you can :)
Now a British company has devised a way of immortalising vaccines by wrapping them in sugar molecules and excluding water. The trick is used by plants, animals and by yeasts to survive when drought strikes.
Some plant species, such as the Resurrection Plant, Selaginella lepidophylla, have come back to life after more than a century of hibernation just by adding water. “Within minutes or hours they turn back into active, fully-functioning plants,” Bruce Roser, of Cambridge Biostability, the company behind the development, said.
STUDY: MOTHERS TURN FEARLESS WHEN PEPTIDE LEVEL DROPS
MADISON - Everyone knows not to get between a mother and her offspring. What makes these females unafraid when it comes to protecting their young may be low levels of a peptide, or small piece of protein, released in the brain that normally activates fear and anxiety, according to new research published in the August issue of Behavioral Neuroscience.
“We see this fierce protection of offspring is so many animals,” says Stephen Gammie, a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor of zoology and lead author of the recent paper. “There are stories of cats rescuing their kittens from burning buildings and birds swooping down at people when their chicks are on the ground.”
My boy got his first four shots today at the doctor. Poor thing cried his head off, so they gave him Tylenol. I wonder when they are going to come up with something for moms who feel like their hearts hurt way worse than the little ones’ bodies…
If you think I am going all senti on you guys, relax! Not likely. This is more a reflection of how I have changed in the last 10 months or so - some changes I made willingly, some happened to me whether I liked them or not and I was dragged kicking and screaming into a few more…10 months ago, if someone had asked me about kids, I had two replies - one was that I already had four, Buddy, Rocky, Sammy and Raju - the second was that I would have a baby when I can put him in a crate with food and water and go to work and not worry about him for the rest of the day. All my husband needed to get me to change my mind was a bottle of wine (I know, I am not too expensive) and a good massage.
Now when I look at myself in the mirror, I can barely recognize myself (I will kill the person who points out it must be because of the dark circles under my eyes from lack of sleep the last 5 weeks). I actually feel pretty maternal towards my son (I am allowed to stretch words to mean whatever I want them to mean on my blog) and I don’t even mind the hour-long feeding sessions every three hours, as long as they give me the chance to catch up on my reading. So far, I haven’t dropped my baby on his head even once - I probably changed about 200 diapers so far and spent 514.75 hours feeding him (not that I am counting or anything).
The most surprising thing is that inspite of my chronic backache from all the feeding, the lack of sleep and the lack of anything close to a life of my own, I am extremely happy with how my life is at this point. I see my cutie smile at me once, and I am his for this life and more. I grumble at him when he wakes me up at 11:00 PM, 12:30 AM, 2:00 AM, 3:00 AM and 5:00 AM - sometimes all in the same night - I threaten to ground him for life, but then suddenly when he flashes that little toothless grin of his as soon as I show up at his crib is more than enough to make up for everything. I feel so in love with this tiny little baby, I sometimes feel my heart will burst - do I sound like a new mom now? It must be the sleep-deprived, addled brain of mine talking :)
Thank you, thank you and thank you all again for your good wishes and congrats and lovely sentiments for my little one :) I am sorry I could not get to the thanking part earlier - it is a little hard to type when there is a tiny, little mouth constantly attached to your breast…fortunately, I happen to be totally in love with the tiny body that is in turn part of the package deal with the mouth :)
I will be coming back to blogging once the baby settles down a bit - I am too much of a loudmouth to stay away for too long - the Mela for this month will be up soon and we will be bringing one of our favorite bloggers out of retirement to do that post…guess who that might be ;) I am really happy to know such wonderful people as you all and I promise I will try to turn Neel into world’s youngest basketball blogger while keeping my fingers crossed that he will sign his first million-dollar b-ball contract soon (no, I am not into day-dreaming - why would you ask?)…
Born: 05/20/2004 10:22 PM - 6lb, 15.8 oz - 20.5 in
My mom was tech-backward enough to not have a laptop at the hospital, so here is me saying “Hi” to all of you as soon as we came back home ;) - Baby Neel
My uterus wants to “liberate” the innocent prisoner living in it for the past 38-1/2 weeks - my cervix thinks “containing” him in my stomach has worked wonders so far and he is no “imminent threat”, so why change the status quo? I am “pro-liberation” of course, considering my uterus is contracting pretty strongly every 7-8 minutes or so and lasting about 45 seconds since 11:15 PM last night (contraction starts - oops, missed the time-frame for the cleansing breath - do we do breating technique 1 or 2? screw it, they don’t work anyways - AAAARRGGHH - when will this stop? what do you mean this is early labor and will get much worse? breathe easy - it is over…for now). That is where baby and me are at this point - will let you know what happens as soon as something (please, anything) happens.
My in-laws flew in from India yesterday, so expect my lazy self to get even lazier about blogging. The baby’s EDD was May 31st, but the doctor estimated he was about 7.5lb right now (amazing considering I put on only 12lb so far in my pregnancy), so they might try to pop him out a couple weeks early so I can avoid the dreaded c-section (no, it isn’t the scars I am afraid of - just the side-effects for me and the baby). All in all, I am living in interesting times. I hope everything turns out for the best in the end.
Hmmm… if this report is to be believed - Chocolate in pregnancy keeps baby happy - my baby is going to be born a hippie. I am eating enough chocolate to keep him in happy, fun Lalaland for decades ;)
Kalyan, now you know why I eat all that chocolate every day - it is all for the baby™!
Well, had a tiny, little scare because of which I spent a couple of hours in the hospital - everything is fine now. Will be back with a review of “Hidalgo” tomorrow.
Well, after being my abrasive best in yesterday’s post, here is some diabetes-inducing sweetness for y’all :) One of the really fun and weird things about being pregnant, is the baby kicking you from inside your tummy. Now that he is about 1.5lb in weight, he kicks hard enough for me to really feel it. It is nice sometimes when I am bored - he kicks me, I poke him back and we play this game of responding to each others’ gestures. Of course, it is not so fun sometimes like when he kicked me so hard in the bladder that it was a good thing I was at home and could run to the bathroom before I peed in my pants…literally.
I am reading books to him and playing lots of classical music (Mozart and Vivaldi, in particular) in hopes of somehow jumpstarting his brain-growth (yeah, I know I am playing right into the hands of people who are making money preying on the eagerness of many young parents like me).
On the professional side, I had a .NET interview this morning that went really well and it will be a good opportunity for me to jump into if it works out. They said I might be overqualified for the position (I know, first time someone said that to me), but I am still keeping my fingers crossed, so let us see what happens. Keep in touch all of you - tell me what is going on!
p.s. Oh yeah, JK’s back and blogging away furiously, as is Kingsley. Welcome back, guys - it is good to see you both again.
We are going to have a baby boy! He is absolutely normal and healthy as far as we could tell - weighs 373 grams and is expected into this world about May 31st :) He is very rambunctious as I can tell from all the times he keeps kicking at me from inside, so I better stock up on plenty of Ritalin (just kidding!).
Well, there is plenty of interesting stuff going on (if you actually care) on the baby side, so here is a totally unnecessary update :) I will be at 20 weeks next Tuesday, so we are almost at that half-way mark and will be haiving the ultrasound and finding out the gender of the baby on the 14th. My husband wants a boy and me, a girl (big surprise there!), so we will see who wins :)
I can feel the baby kicking around pretty often these days, but don’t look very pregnant owing to the fact that I still haven’t put on a single pound that I lost in the first trimester. The nausea is gone (Thank God!), the heartburn is here - the weirdest part is my craving for Dal these days. I refuse to eat anything but dal these days and cannot stand the sight of non-vegetarian food - this is really strange since I couldn’t stand dal my whole life and chicken is my favoritest food in the whole world :o
Watch this space for an update on the 14th about who my baby is going to be - a boy or a girl!
People with a weak gag reflex and relatively less tolerance for gushy, mommy-stuff need read no further ;)
I felt my baby last night!!! Yes, I did! I will be about 14 weeks along this Wednesday, so it was a real surprise to me when this happened. I had just laid down to go to sleep last night when I felt a little fluttering sensation in the left side of my stomach (I was lying on that side) - it went on for about a minute - a constant sensation of something moving within me - probably heady with the sugar rush a glass of pomegranate juice might leave you with ;)
I have to say it was an extremely amazing experience. It was something that made it very real to me that I had a living being inside of me, something that no grainy sonogram will ever match - btw, we saw the baby turning somersaults even in last week’s sonogram, so I think I have a pretty active baby on my hands (I am sure my mom can sympathize with me on this, though she probably is thinking, “payback time”). Well, that was it for now, so we can go back to our regularly scheduled happy, fun programming now.
