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.

Until few days ago, baby tabi was a social butterfly. She loved strangers. She never feared going to people she had never seen before. It was a blessing for us parents as we could leave her with anyone without worrying about how she might behave.

But lately things have changed. She has developed an anxiety for strangers. This first happened when we visited a friend few days back. She cried when someone picked her up. She had never cried like that before. Throughout that evening tabi never went to that person, crying every time he tried to make contact with her.

Then it started happening more frequently. A crying session starts even when she is picked up by people more familiar to her. She just wants to be in mama’s or papa’s lap.

A brief research on internet revealed that this is normal for 8-month old babies. They suddenly develop stranger anxiety which goes away in few weeks. So I guess this phase is temporary.

A breakthrough just happened.

We left tabi at the baby sitters for 7 hours and nothing happened. She was fine.

We had to go to a desert excursion organized by my office and it seemed too risky to take tabi with us. So we decided to leave tabi at my wife’s friends place as she had been there many times and it worked well. As much as we were skeptical and nervous about it, we went ahead with the plan, because as they say, if you never try you will never know.

So when we picked up tabi in the night, tabi appeared to be perfectly normal. She didn’t cry upon seeing us nor created any scene. Our friends said she didn’t cry at all throughout the day. We were pleasantly surprised, needless to say.

This event has created many new possibilities for future. Let’s see.

Tabi turned 8 months few days ago.

She is doing most if not all of the things 8 month olds are supposed to do. She does her baby talk, which seems very random but repetitive. She laughs when someone makes funny faces in front of her, or tickles her. She still likes to see and meet new people, and never lets go an opportunity to let a stranger carry her. We have left her with the baby sitters a couple of more times and she has behaved perfectly well. She is very moody when it comes to eating her food. Sometimes she eats whatever is given to her as if its her favorite food and sometimes she refuses to eat anything for an entire day. She still loves ice-cream and never refuses that. She has learned to stand up by holding on to different objects. She loves to stand up and makes an effort to stand up whenever she can. She has also taken a few steps by holding on to whatever she is holding on to standing. I predict she will learn to walk in a couple of months, definitely before her 1st birthday.

It’s a delight to watch her grow and do new things. The anticipation of what she will do next is ineffable feeling.

I love ice-cream. There was a time when I ate nothing but ice-cream for an entire week. My wife loves ice cream too.

And now it seems like the genes have been transferred to tabi. She is hardly 8 months but she gets excited to see ice-cream as if its her most favorite thing. The way her eyes start shining, the way she starts jumping on her seat, the way she shakes her hands and moves her head forward, it’s just amazing. We have to struggle to make her eat something but for ice-cream it’s opposite. She just wants to eat ice-cream even if we don’t want her to have it. We can only wonder how things will be when she gets a little older.

It is going to be the ice-cream family.