Tag Archives: two-year old

August 24, 2008 · 8:08 pm

I’ve lost my sleep.

I was one of those people who could sleep anywhere, have even slept on an x-ray machine once. But the past ten days have been terrible, and I just can’t sleep.

And there’s a reason. My daughter, on the day she turned two and a half, got burnt with hot tea. It happened in a flash, and it was horrible. Horrible, horrible.  I didn’t know how badly tea can burn, but now I do.

But, the good thing is that now she’s healed well, after many visits to the pediatrician and other doctors. She got it mostly on her chest, but could have been her face, eyes…anything.

The first few days I kept wondering why this happened, and the image replayed itself in my mind endlessley, like a bad film on repeat, and the more I’d try and get it out of my mind, the more it would persist.  Then, I looked at my daughter and realized that she was far braver than me, for she, even with her would, all wrapped up in bandage, was running around the house as before.

It was then that I told myself to snap out of it, and it was then that I stopped asking why this happened, and thanked God for what did not, because it could have been much much worse.

She’s a trooper I told her and she smiled. When I took her for her bandage changes, she cried, obviously, but not much, and kept telling me, all the while, what a good girl she was. “Mama, I am a good girl”, she’d say through her tears, trying hard to put up a brave front while the doc cut her bandage and cleaned her wound. I wanted to hold her and cry but I had to be brave for her, for she was looking to me for support. I clenched my teeth and didn’t let a tear fall out of my eye, not in front of her at least. She kept repeating how good she was some fifty times while the dressing was being done. It was heart wrenching to watch her do this, she was doing it for she was scared, and hoped that if she was good, she’d not get hurt. This from a two year old.

One underestimates one’s children. I didn’t know my daughter, my little delicate doll, who would cry if she spotted a life size Winnie the Poo at a birthday party, had such fortitude in her. She went with me to the doctors without as much as a peep out of her, and when there she complied better than any adult I know. She’d turn, sit, stand, lie, as the doc said. When I gave her medication she’d open her mouth and gulp it down without any resistance. She was unreal, and I salute her for it. I would have not been this good had it happened to me.

The worst is now over and she’s on the mend.

Now I need to find my sleep.

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June 25, 2008 · 11:39 am

She’s going through a clingy phase and I am losing it!

I am not going to deny it, I like my daughter to doing the “mommy” thing – you know wanting mommy to do this and that and no one else. Except, I like it to an extent, after which I start to lose it a little. I mean if going for a bath becomes an issue, then it’s not fun. These days I find myself constantly explaining to her why she needs to let the maid, who she does like, give her a bath, feed her etc, so that mommy can get things done.

But rationalizing with a two year old is, well, it’s not exactly a walk in the woods. I get a lot of No! accompanied, of course, with hysterionics like rolling on the floor, making throwing up sounds and faces, the usual. She didn’t do much of it earlier, so I thought I’d escaped it somehow. Right, wishful thinking.

Anyway, so ever since we returned from our wonderful vacation in Singapore, she’s been on this mommy -will-do-it-phase. So yesterday I decided to be brave and do something about it. I told the maid to give her a bath and I let her scream her way through. I stayed in the kitchen where I could hear her well, but I didn’t go in for the rescue, something she was trying hard to get me to do – the vomit sounds et all. But I stood my ground. I felt mean but I ignored that voice. I am not sure if it helped, but I was determined.

Did it help? Not sure. I am hoping it did, if in a tiny way.

One does what one can but it does not always work. To think that just because I let her cry one day she would now miraculously change her behaviour is, needless to say, expecting too much. But, still, at some level I think she understood that mommy meant business.

I’ll probably have to continue doing stuff like this, because in two weeks she starts school. I am not even thinking about how that will go. Boy oh boy, that’s going to be fun.

Time Machine anyone??

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April 28, 2008 · 9:19 am

The bottle needs to go..

It’s happened again. She’s got a runny stomach and the pediatrician is livid. She needs to get off the bottle!

I am trying but I can’t do it alone. My husband does not want to hold his ground, or let me hold mine, when my daughter throws a tantrum about the bottle. If one parent gives in, it’s not going to happen, because kids latch on to what suits them and in this case, she pleads to her father and gets away with it!

How do I deal with that? He does not like her to cry, it upsets him. Well, it upsets me too and I understand that it’s not easy to let a child cry, especially when you’ve had a long day at work. But, I have a long day too, so what if it’s not at work. I am at home and do everything hands on for my daughter, even though I have loads of help, so at the end of the day, after I’ve battled with all the things she does not like to do, but has to – brushing her teeth and combing her hair being tow of them – I am tired. There’s only so much you can sing and dance to make games out of things so that she complies happily!

And now she has a bad stomach, so there’ll be fighting over medicines that I have to give her through the day.

Sigh.

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April 18, 2008 · 11:30 am

What do you teach your kids?

I was in the park the other day with my two year old daughter and she was running around playing with her ball, kicking it with a lot of gusto, something that delighted my mother’s heart since I’d like her to be an outdoor girl and I hugely discourage playing with barbies or any such disturbing habits!

Anyway, it was a nice evening, till a little toddler came and snatched her ball and almost punched her in the face. She recoiled and gave up her prized possession and ran to me. I asked her why she had allowed someone so much younger to bully her. She looked up at me, blinked and said :” Mama I was sharing”

I was dumbfounded. It’s something I’d been teaching her – to share and be nice and all that “values” stuff we like to teach our children. But at that moment I wondered if I was making her too soft. Not that I want to teach her to bully, but by telling her that she should always be nice to people, esp to kids, had I made her an easy target for other kids?

I am not sure how I feel. I mean, I certainly do not want her to be scared of kids and run away from situations, but neither do I want her to be aggressive just because the world around her is. So, I told her that it’s nice to share, but when someone snatches or tries to hurt her, she should not allow it and push if need be. But I am not sure she understood.

It made me think. What should one teach one’s children? If I bring her up to be honest, upright and caring – the values my parents taught us – will that lead to her being disillusioned later in life? It’s possible that I may be making too much of one small incident, but it was something that led me to think about parenting issues and the warped, violent world that our children are going to grow up in.

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April 11, 2008 · 9:54 am

The right playschool..

It’s only playschool, for God’s sake, and I am deliberating over it like some would over grad school (so God help me when that happens, but, I may well be insane by then, so it won’t matter!) Anyway, back to the point and to the present, I have been scouting play schools for my two year old and I have not found one that I would jump at. It’s possible, I admit, that I may be looking for too much..

What I wanted was a place that was not like a “school” per say, with classrooms and the rest of it, but a warm environment that the kid would take to. They all have the regular wooden toys, bright walls, brain stimulating games and all that great stuff,  but I feel that they – and by they I mean the better ones where the staff can speak well, at least – all sort of merge into one another, doing everything by the book but lacking in imagination. It’s all good and fun etc etc, but it’s almost like they all went to the same how-to-run-a- playgroup school. And, let me add, that there’s nothing wrong with that. After all, different does not necessarily mean better.

But still, I would have liked to go a place that seemed not to care that much about how they would appear  and cared more about each child and how to interact with them. Putting a child in a room full of posters, paint and toys is fun, but not so much if they do it five days a week!

Also, most people today think nothing of making a one time payment of some 25,000 rupees ($600 odd) (and there are those that are well higher than this) – not counting transport, food, etc etc..and then quarterly payments as well, and all this for a two year old??

Am I insane to think this is a bit much, or has the world finally lost it?

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