A Father’s Diary

1. The way she falls asleep on my shoulder while we are out. It’s magical. One moment she is up and next moment is deep asleep.

2. The way she reacts upon seeing me when I come home from work. It’s like she saw her best friend after years.

3. The way she is always calm and peaceful when I am carrying her. When she is with her mom she is all hyper and rebellious (we still don’t know why).

4. The way she likes to go out and meet with total strangers. It’s such a blessing. We never have to worry about how she might behave with new people and it has never been a problem leaving her at friends place for few hours.

5. The way she plays games with us and learns new tricks every day. Who needs a pleo when you have a baby!

Taby is one of those kids who don’t like to sleep. She enjoys the world so much and gets so excited by looking at all the interesting things around here that she doesn’t realize that she also has to get some rest and sleep. So at nights when we are all tired and going to bed, she is wide awake and active, looking forward to more action. Unless she had a very eventful day that made her really tired, she takes a very long time to sleep. She hardly sleeps during the day as well. So in order to make her tired we take her out and let her meet with new people, look at new things, just do something to stimulate her mind and get tired and sleepy. This works out pretty well and she sleeps relatively easily after that. Another thing we have noticed is that she sleeps easily in the car. But on the days when we don’t go out and taby doesn’t do anything to get tired, making her sleep is a difficult task.

We are hoping that as she grows into a toddler and starts walking, this sleeping (or sleeplessness) problem will be solved. She will be stimulating her mind a lot by walking and exploring, resulting in both physical and mental exercise, and as a result fall asleep easily. This is just our guess let’s see what really happens.

Talk about sleeping, the thing I adore the most about taby is when she falls asleep on my shoulder. This usually happens when we are out walking in a mall and taby is already feeling sleepy. So I carry her, put her head on my shoulder and gently tap her on the back. Within a few minutes she is deep asleep. It gives me a great feeling to know that for her I am a secure place where she can peacefully fall asleep. However, it only works when we are out. At home she always wants to sleep with her mom. I am still waiting for the day when she will sleep on my arm all night long, and let her mother sleep peacefully as well.

Ever since Tabi turned 9-months, we have been noticing some major changes in her. Firstly, the stranger anxiety is gone and she is back to her social self, so that’s a good news.

But what’s significant is that she has started developing a personality. She can now express what she likes or dislikes. If you take a toy (or whatever she thinks is a toy) away from her hands, she will start protesting. Couple of months ago she stayed indifferent of whatever was snatched away from her hands. But now, if she is holding something and playing with it you dare not take it away from her, else you are gonna wish you were deaf!

She is a keen lover of chocolates. I don’t know how she detects the other person is having chocolate. How can someone, who has been in the world for less than 10 months, know there is chocolate inside this wrapper, even when she sees it for the first time. She just WANTS to have it, and nothing else.

Same is the case with ice-cream. We try to fool her by making yogurt look like ice-cream but she’s smarter than that. Bring in real ice-cream and she is game.

She has also learnt to tease people. When she sees somebody, she reacts as if she wants to go to that person, but when they come close to pick her up, she turns around and hugs the person originally carrying her, leaving the other person embarrassed.

It is very exciting to see her grow up and learn new tricks every day. We are always curious to see what she is going to do next.