Growing up with Yash

When it comes to the food department, I have been extremely lucky! I started Yash on solid food from his 6th month onward, with Ragi mixture and cerelac. By the time he was 8 months old, I used to give him mashed rice with vegetables and dal. By his first birthday, he was eating almost every variety of the South Indian breakfast consisting of Idlys, Dosas, Chapatis and so on. From then till now, when he is all of 5 yrs and 7 months, I have never had to cook for him separately.  I have seen mothers who've had to run behind their toddlers, cook up not just food but stories too, coax their little ones for hours on end, just to get a morsel of food in. Well, touch wood, I have had the great fortune bestowed upon me, I never had to do these things ;) Blessed, right? Me and my husband have always encouraged Yash to eat by himself. Even if that meant a fight with messiness, hours of him and his plate conjoined, and maybe a little less than usual nutrition. By two years, Yash was able

Recently, Yash had gone on a drive with his grandmother (my mom) and his grand aunt (my father's sis). As my mom stepped out of the car for a quick buy, the following conversation ensued between Yash and his grand aunt: Y: 'Avva, you can scrunch over to the other side because there is a lot of traffic and ammamma (grandmother) will not be able to get in from there. She can get in this side and later you can exchange places if you want.' (conversation happened in Tamil) As you can imagine my aunt was left speechless by a 5.5yr old giving her these instructions. The above was narrated to me when I met my aunt the following day. And yes, it brought the tears of joy :) What i found astounding was two things, he perceived that traffic was a problem for his grandmother to get into the car comfortably and two, he kept in mind the needs of all involved in the solution. He not just understood the problem but was able to find a solution for it too. This is an indication to me of

Reading is something very close to my heart. And as a natural progression, when Yash was just a few months old, I had started reading to him. I remember the first book that I read to him was 'Dora the Explorer, Bubba Bugga Baby'(Don't ask me why!!) I know the lines in that book better than the lines on the back of my hand, even today! Maybe it was the rhythm, or maybe just the feeling of being read to, whatever it was, Yash started showing a reaction to it. He would gurgle and 'hmmm' with each line, egging me to go on if I stopped. That was all the encouragement I needed. I went out and bought a host of other books. But for some reason, he wanted Dora. His affection was shared by another book by the time he was 6 months old. It was a bath-time squeeze and splash book. He enjoyed it for all the different ways he could handle it, exploring the sounds it made when we squeezed it, and definitely exploring it with his mouth :) This book became the bait many times,

From the moment a child is born, the million dollar question plays on everyone's mind..... What'll the baby grow up to be? Despite Aamir Khan's 3 Idiots, many parents still prefer the big two - Engineer or Doctor (Too bad Aamir, no social revolution here). With Yash, in his 5 years, the answer to the above question has changed multiple times.... At 2 years, Yash wanted to drive the car. So his dad, Vickram, showed him his licence and told him 'son, you can drive a car only when you have one of these. And to get this, you need to grow up'. After this, when asked the question, pat came the reply from Yash,'I want to be a car driver'. For some time, maybe a year or so this answer did not change. Nor did we force him to change it.  It did happen that after some of the visits to his pediatrician, Yash would express that 'I want to be a Doctor when I grow up.' He was still clear though, that he had to be a driver first and only after that, a doc

Yash is 5 years and three months old. We have just returned from a vacation, so memorable, that it has made me to consider beginning a blog :) With us, planning for a holiday never works. Over the years we've realized that we just have to do our holidays spontaneously. We do a little research, and thanks to all the review sites available today, there's no dearth of information. We had two things on the wishlist, the place had to be at driving distance and it had to give ample photo ops to my photographer husband, Vickram. We hadn't explored coastal Karnataka before and the backwaters at Kundapura seemed very interesting. We decided on Monday, and started our journey on Tuesday morning! It's all about preparing your child I guess, cos when we woke up Yash at 5 a.m., he readily woke up, with a smile. We set off from our home in JP Nagar, Bangalore at 6 a.m. We took the NICE corridor from Kanakapura Road to Tumkur Road. Our onward journey we took this route: Ba