My Son, Growing up...

Being in a small place has its own ups and downs. On the good side, if you want any advice on any kind of child trouble, you have enough of number of people with enough experience and you feel you are safe. But on the down side, these advices can be conflicting at times and also, people expect you to implement them without fail. We got a lot of advices almost everyday and we sifted through them, argued a lot and managed them. Similarly it is for every milestone of a kid. People ask every time they meet if the kid has started smiling yet, if he is rolling and if not, immediate reaction is disbelief and then the examples of children who've done it in record time would be narrated. After initial periods of worry, I learnt to take these comments in the right spirit. The kid took his own time to do everything and we waited patiently. He was choosy in the songs he wanted to hear to sleep, had a good appetite and the rare smiles he gave us were brilliant. He wasn't much into socializing and he is still not. He would never smile at strangers on our evening walk and would almost never go to any outsider's hands.

Another thing which have us quite a tough time was his sensitiveness to sound. He would wake up even at the smallest sound and outsiders would never understand why we would be talking in whispers and so would wake up the boy immediately. There were even some who would ask us to wake the boy up from his sound sleep just to have a look at him! Grrr....I wonder how people never remember the troubles they had to take to pacify a kid irritated after woken up like that.

So our days flew in my little place...

My Son....

Writing about myself is not going anywhere so I guess I'd better write about my son. He's been the centre of our existence for more than 5 years now and now that I'm going to be a mother again, sometimes I wonder what it's going to be like, my son taking a backseat.

I don't know where to begin really. There are a lot of images in front of my eyes, right from the time the doctor showed me the wailing thin long red kid that he was. Right from day one he had his fists open, contrary to my popular belief. Gazing into his large eyes that were the only prominent features of his tiny face, I used to feel that he knew me very well. He was a very temperamental guy right from those days, grunting when we didn't pick him up from the crib and howling when he was under-fed. I remember my mother and aunt laughing that at the rate he was feeding, I could retire only at the age of 70.

Then we came home from hospital and our relatives came to see him. Traditionalists were happy that it was a boy and though general opinion was that he was thin and dark, nobody converged on who he looked like. That was the time he first had colic troubles. Oh God, I'll never forget those evenings when he would cry himself blue and I would be scared that he may not be able to breathe again! The only advantage of this was that the tired soul slept very well after that, though he hardly troubled me in the nights as such.

My mother's constant worry was to make the thin baby put on some weight and going against the family traditions(there are horror stories on how new mothers were fed), I was fed very well. So by the time my husband returned from Malta, the boy was decently heavy and had become fairer too. His colic was subsiding but he had developed constipation. So the funny activity for the whole household once in every two days was to force him to excrete with the help of a piece of a tender slimy creeper! Those days!!