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| My son with my father when he was six months old |
Each baby is unique. Kids have a way of endearing themselves
to us by virtue of their innocence and zest for all new things that appear
before them. New things amuse them and they want to experiment with all
possible items.
When my son was two months old, he would become excited when
I would make him wear new pampers. He had come to associate changing pampers to
going out for a walk or his sleeping time when he would get to swing in his
cradle. Both were happy times for him.
His favourite toy then was a plush ball, which had a bell
inside. Every time he moved it around, the bell would chime and he would laugh aloud.
Until he became six or seven months, that particular ball was his favourite.
By his first birthday, he had taken a liking to auto
rickshaw models and every trip to the market would add to his collection of
autos. We had autos of every shape and colour blocking our paths in the house,
and no, no body had the right to keep them away. One had to have special
permission from the owner.
Sometime after his
first birthday, I made him watch nursery rhymes on YouTube and he instantly
took a liking towards them. Every day he would demand to watch his favourite rhymes.
And there was a forbidden one among them, the Ba-Ba-Black sheep song which
began with a close up of a black sheep braying. Somehow, this particular sheep
scared him and if he saw the snippet of this rhyme anywhere on the screen, he
would run away. This rhyme became our stop button for his rhyme sessions on You
tube.
When he grew a little older, he fell in love with English alphabets
and numbers and very soon, they became his best friends. With pampers giving
him freedom from wetness, he would play on his toy laptop which would trace and
re-trace alphabets and numbers much to his happiness. He surprised us by
learning the Alphabets and numbers all by himself. We didn’t teach him to draw
even a single curve. He had become an expert in Alphabets by the time he was eighteen
months old. He could even read small words like cat, bat etc.
When we put him in playschool, every day when I went to pick
him up, he would be showing off his prowess in numbers and alphabets to his
teachers. He could even count backwards from twenty to one. And he could recite
alphabets in reverse order. His teachers labelled him little Einstein.
The only bad habit he had was that he refused to grow out of
diapers and insisted on wearing Diapers while most of the other kids were
slowing learning to use the potty. But what I couldn’t teach, his teachers and
perhaps other kids of his age taught him and slowly he was properly potty
trained.
My son has turned six now. Throughout all these years, what
has remained strong is his love for languages. He has learned Hindi, English, Malayalam,
Punjabi, Bengali, Thai, Greek and Japanese alphabets downloading the apps,
which help kids to learn these alphabets and he has created power point
presentations of all these alphabets. He tells me he wants to be an expert in
languages. He is still little Einstein to his teachers.
I am relieved to know that he no longer wants to be the auto
driver, which he had confessed, was his dream job when he was a year old.
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