Kids Update

In spite of many good intentions and several actual half written posts, blogging has had to wait till right now because my life is like this, except TIMES TWO.

But to make up for it, I have a totally adorable kids-post. Aww yeah.

Nupur turned 7 months old just a couple of weeks ago. She’s such a proper baby now: big enough with lots of head control so people can hold her without freaking out, still completely toothless so her smiles are sooo freakin adorable, squishy and fluffy and silly and really, at peak cuteness overall (going by Angad’s old photos the cutest age is from 7 to about 10 months).

She has just begun to move around, dragging herself along with sheer elbow power, very fond of getting under chairs and tables. She’s not very fast, because she doesn’t have good technique. Angad was better at this dragging business. Nupur keeps trying to do a proper crawl, lifting her butt up with every stroke of her elbow and collapsing because she hasn’t figured out how to use her knees yet. It’s like watching a slug flop around piteously. I have no idea how she still manages to get where she wants to go.

And she’s so different from Angad! It’s fascinating how personalities can emerge at such a young age. Nupur is an “easier” baby than Angad – she sleeps for me, god, remember how I used to call Angad “Awakey Pants”? – and she’s much more stubborn and assertive and less distracted by shiny things when she’s after a prize.

The best part is watching the two of them interact. Angad is impossibly, heartbreakingly careful with Nupur, and completely besotted by her. He comes up with a million nicknames for her and gives her hugs and kisses all the time. And on her part, she only has eyes – and giggles and coos – for him. I could try all day to get one halfhearted gurgle from this girl… and all Angad has to do is walk into the room for her to start squealing happily at him.

Angad is three-and-three-quarters years old, and ever since Nupur was born, he seems very grown up in comparison. We have proper, functional, mutually educative conversations. We can tell him “go get dressed for outside play” and he’ll do it. He outruns me, outjumps me, outlasts me in every physical and mental endeavour. Sometimes this makes me forget he’s really a little kid…

… but not for long, because every few minutes he will pull some spectacularly weird shit, usually pertaining to one of this current obsessions. Right now, said obsessions include:

• Timers. Angad has access to four: the oven timer, the microwave timer, the stopwatch in my phone, and an online countdown timer we’ve got bookmarked in the browser for him. Thanks to this impressive arsenal, not a minute of our day goes untimed. He times the washing machine, my dinner prep (20 minutes, by his decree, but I cheat), episodes of Dora the Explorer, my showers (10 minutes, no cheating), and most obsessively of all he sets my phone timer several times a day (I keep turning it off to conserve battery) to alert him to…

• Twilight. Not Edward-and-Bella Twilight, thank god, but the real after-sunset-before-dark hour. One evening last year he noticed suddenly that it was neither dark nor light out, and found it hysterically funny. He rolled around the kitchen floor laughing and shouting “Is it morning? NOOOOOO! Is it night? NOOOOOOOO! Hahahahaha!” I told him it was called twilight. And ever since then he looks forward to twilight like regular kids look forward to their birthdays. The weirdest side effect of this obsession is that I am now just intrinsically aware of how many hours it is to the next twilight at any given moment of the day, because he keeps asking me in order to set the goddamn timer.

• The dishwasher. Angad loves our new dishwasher so much that he still remembers with great affection the plumber who came over to install it eight months ago – that is a fifth of this child’s entire life. He throws tantrums if he isn’t the one to open the dishwasher at the end of a cycle, he’s got rituals where he drags his dad to show him which buttons lit up when the cycle was complete, and it’s all he talks about when grandparents call these days. A couple of weeks ago we were in Sears and happened to pass by a model very similar to ours on the shop floor. Angad immediately noticed that some of the buttons were in the “wrong” spot, and proceeded to shout about it to me and the salespeople and anybody in the store who would let themselves be dragged to see dishwashers, laughing hysterically the whole time. Two days later he dreamt that the buttons on our dishwasher had also moved around, and told me about it breathlessly in the morning… the very first time he has told me about a dream.

And me? After all the ups and downs of first-time motherhood, and all the anticipation of how much harder things would be with two kids instead of one, I just wasn’t prepared for this: the state of having absolutely nothing to complain about.

The combination of Angad being old enough to practically fend for himself while still being too young for the trials of school, and Nupur being such an easy baby, and us being “seasoned” parents is making for an almost picture-perfect experience of parenting these days.

Aisa bhi hota hai!

(PS: This is post #555! On Fruit Ninja this would get me a 50-point bonus. )