Repetition time!

This is the time to be extra careful with Sid. The other day.. he was incessantly irritating me on something, and i told him.. ‘poda.vennai..’ ..and he kept saying…vennai, vennai.. to my embarassment.
Another day, hubby tried to get something from his hand in vain, after some time in frustration he exclaimed,‘dei gunda’… and Sid repeated.. ‘gunda…gunda..’ obediently.
Its funny how he starts using a word without any effort and avers it as though he has been using the word his whole lifetime. His aunt made some paav bhaji, and I fed him some of it.. since then he has been saying..‘bhaji..bhaji..’ I realize I have stopped listing the words he is using now since over the past 2 months, he has been speaking so many new words that I have lost count of them. He tries to identify every object around him.. but does not speak a lot of sentences yet..
One of his very first sentences is.. ‘idha pathiya…?’ And he uses it with everything he loves spotting.. ‘pigeon pathiya..?’ everytime he watches them flutter over our balcony.
Another one is .. ‘Appa, CD podu’.. insisting appa to play rhymes for him, sure knows how to get a job done!!

 

Re-union!

yes finally we are together, reunited in a very filmi style with me singing our family song and Sid singing it back to me with plenty of emotion and lo! we were together again
Ok, well sadly it didn’t happen that way, Sid was happily asleep when I stepped in and when he woke up after an hour, he was so dazed from his sleep and was so shocked to see me, that he didn’t know how to react. He just had this really shocked – ‘Oh so here you are, where the hell were you, and how did you turn up one fine day’ look! Anyway that was for just a few minutes and then it was bonding time again! Ha, sometimes you just realize how much you missed someone, not when you’re away but when you get back I guess. I’ve been stashing the thought away in a not-easily-retrievable corner of my mind, that it was good to come to terms with it finally, and just felt so great spending time with Sid again!
Plenty of smaller changes in him in just 2 weeks – now he addresses everyone with a name a lot more than he did before. Called me amma like a zillion times and guess who is the happiest person in the world. Same with patti and thiya thi (dhivya chithi) and thatha. But what has been getting the most attention from him is the cow, yeah the black dirty one that stands near a huge street dustbin outside our house, and gets picked by flies throughout the day, but is under the incessant attention of my animal lover. I don’t think I can even begin counting the number of times he says cow in a single day, getting one of us to stand outside the gate or through the kitchen window to get him a view of that. Yes, its official that the cow has now replaced dhayee (dog) as his favorite.
The next big change I saw in him is that the huge house has heavily contributed to him not watching TV a lot. He is more happy to explore around the house, climb up the stairs to the terrace, look outside at cow (what else!) or interact with the heavy influx of people, rather than watching rhymes. I think he still enjoys them a lot, but doesn’t insist on them like he did before, confirming my theory that he watches them only because he gets bored and has nothing better to do! But I think when we get back to our apartment, he is going to get on with his old ways, unless we find some creative ways to entertain him! What I like about this new naughty Sid avatar is that he has visibly become more active and smiling. Maybe, we were just a bunch of boring guys not knowing how to engage him well.
And also, he seems to understand what we are communicating to him much better, which I don’t think is a matter of him staying in a new environment, but more a reflection of how he is growing up!
Net-net I think there were some positives from this whole trial – the most important being that I now know that if there was a dire need for it, he could stay away from us and manage, which in the long run I think is good.

 

Evidence :)

Incase you didnt believe me when I said that Sid was a couch-potato, here is some evidence.

 

Teeyeee!

Every evening amma picks up Sid from his grandparents’ place and as soon as he enters home, he grabs the remote and places it in her reluctant hands and says – “Teeyeee!”. Until amma switches the TV on and plays his favorite rhymes, he would continue crying in different volumes successfully attracting amma’s attention and also quelling her patience which anyway borders around less and even lesser. Gone are the days when Sid used to watch anything on TV with awe and unblinking eyes. Now, he needs his RHYMES and nothing else.

As much happy as I am that he has stopped watching regular television with sometimes very embarassing visuals, I’m clueless how to get him out of the TV habit. What makes it even tougher is that his habit is very convenient to me, he remains glued to the TV and I get a lot of my work done by then. I usually try to keep it to like 1 hr a day but he is uncontrollable when it comes to demanding and then it gets really tough for me when he yells with all his might. The paternal family history of wearing spectacles does not help me a lot with my concern as well!

The only tactic that works is distraction, so I try to distract him with toys or take him out of the house to the park in the basement. Appa has been better with enforcement, and managed to negotiate a certain watching distance, blackmailing Sid that the TV would be turned off if he does not sit in the farthest sofa from the device. Somehow Sid understands it, and whenever he hears “Siddharth, pinnadi vaa, illena TV switch off“, he just runs and sits on the sofa. It’s so hilarious to see him obedient like this!!

The irony is that both his parents are couch potatoes to some extent, we can give a fierce fight to each other when it comes to this and no wonder our offspring has managed to inherit this! And what’s worse is that we get very little TV time of our own now, since if the said machine is on, Sid would insist playing his favorites which really means no movies, music, news or sports. Huh! So I guess he has achieved what my parents could not inculcate in me for years!