Ruk jaana nahin....

…tum kaheen haarke. That is BabyN’s slogan, and he takes it very seriously, crawling all day, all over the place.

In 10 more days my baby will be 8 months old, and I cannot stop kissing him and cuddling him and hugging him! If it is not me, it is his dad cuddling him. He gets cuddled all day, right until he falls asleep at night. Then we close the door on him and celebrate our freedom for the next 12 hours …LOL. Jokes apart, he is undeniably the love of our life. If someone asked me if I love my husband more or my baby, I don’t know what I would say. That reminds me of an incident my colleague narrated. her daughter is 5 and my colleague believes in being truthful and frank. Consequently, the daughter knows there’s no Santa, and that people love and hate etc. So when the daughter asked mommy if she loved daddy more or her, the mom replied that she loved them both in different ways, so there really is no way to compare. This made the little girl mad and she refused to accept the answer until the mom conceded that she loved the little girl more than the husband! Phew, kids!

The  house is my baby’s oyster, he crawls about everywhere and puts everything in his mouth. Nothing is spared, not the door mat, not footwear, not even small specks of dirt on the floor. So much so that this harried mom is forever cleaning debris off the floor so it doesn’t end up in his mouth. All day I crawl with him, trying to see the world from his perspective, and I must say it is hard work! I wonder where babies get the energy from, to crawl and observe and explore their environment on mere ounces of milk and couple spoons of goopy food. Speaking of food, introduction of solids was fun but he is losing interest in eating. All he wants to do is hold the spoon in his hands and bang it on his high chair tray, and then drop it to the ground, and yell at me to pick it up and give it to him, so he can repeat.

My baby has 2 sleep personalities. The day personality is never-shut-your-eyes-to-get-sleep-coz-that-cuts-time-off-exploration. HE DOES NOT SLEEP UNLESS ROCKED FOR 30-45 MINS. He just won’t sleep, and even if he does, it is only for 30-45 minutes, and that too sprawled on mom’s or dad’s chest. One movement from them and he is up and ready for action! The night personality, on the other hand, is an amazing sleeper who barely utters a peep until morning. We think the day personality enables the night one. Since he is so active and moving during the day, he has barely any energy to stay awake beyond 7:00pm. Of course we haven’t tried breaking the night routine by taking him out anywhere after 5 yet. That would be an interesting exercise.

So all this crawling and bending down to retrieve his choice toys and rocking him to sleep is sure a nice exercise, but it is throwing my back out every so often. That is what you get with age I guess!

Coming back to baby antics. So every morning we go into the room when he cries for us, usually around 7:00am. The other day when I went in to pick him up coz he was crying, he wasn’t in his crib. To our horror we saw him on all fours on the floor, and crying. This is a shocking moment in every parent’s life, scared that your baby is injured. We checked him for bruises or cuts or bumps, for fever and were glad that he was ok. But this prompted us to quickly lower the crib mattress height! Now he can barely reach the rail standing up and all is right with the world.

We haven’t really bought many toys for him, and he takes to the unlikeliest of things to play with. Nowadays, the hottest things are a blue sock and a plastic jar lid, so we are really not too keen on showering him with toys that could overwhelm his creativity (That there is lazy parenting at work)

The last 8 months have been a roller coaster ride. The first one or two were overwhelming, me wondering and second guessing myself, the next few wondering about his personality, and the last one or two just enjoying him for what he is, a wide awake, widely curious and fun baby. Hell, he even lets me go shop, and keeps quiet until he is absolutely bored, even the husband never afforded me that luxury! As his personality develops and becomes more apparent, I am amazed at how much he learns and changes every single day. And he figures out ways to adapt so he can outsmart us every second of the day. But I keep reminding him -

“Bachche, tum jis school me jaoge hum uske principal reh chuke hain”

Love you my baby, may you do din duni raat chauguni tarakki in life. You mom and dad are always with you, and will keep observing you from a distance, far enough to let you figure things out on your own, but near enough to hold you when you fall.

 

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