Promoted to Dad

She’s on the high chair, eating mashed potatoes and she throws her toy from the chair for the hundredth time? How do you react? Do you scold her for dropping it? (She’ll stop eating). Do you take away the toy? (She’ll stop eating). Do you pick it up for her yet again? At least she’ll eat. Person 1: Does your baby sleep throughout the night? Me: Almost. She wakes up maybe a couple of times, but she’s back to sleep in no time Person 1: You know you could train her to sleep throughout. Person 2: Has she started going to pre-school yet? Me: Nope Person 2: She could, and then your wife can start working. You could hire help for the rest of the time. There’s also day care. Parenting is a constant tug of war in your own mind. How strict should I be? When should she go to school? How much time away from parents would be okay? How much can we pamper her without spoiling her? People who give advice don’t help much either. When there are no right or wrong answers, you tend...

I love being the one who throws my daughter up in the air and catches her. The one who spins her around. It’s a different laugh I get. It’s a mixture of fun, excitement and little fear. When I pause, she’s still looking at me with a smile. She’s also taking a breather and preparing for her next round of fun. If I don’t give her that time, the laughter turns to screaming. We all need little pauses to catch our breath. Even when we’re having fun, we need to step back and take it in. If you can’t pause when you want to, then it’s work, not fun.

As the alarm rang early today, I thought about how important it is to wake up and quickly connect with team members in a different time zone. I decided to not waste another second. I hit snooze and repeated, for another 20 minutes. A few minutes after I dragged myself out of bed, my daughter was up. This got me thinking about how much she hates to sleep. She fights sleep as if it’s the enemy, and only when she’s completely worn out, would she let sleep take over. In the morning, as soon as she’s up, you can rest assured that she’s not going back to sleep. The reason for this is that everything in the world is so exciting. The places, colours, sounds, lights, noises, and smells, are all things of wonder.   She doesn’t want to miss out even one moment of being awake. I wonder if I was ever so excited about everything, but at least for the last decade I’ve been dragging myself out of bed. I love my life, I love my job, but I just don’t want to wake up. Thank you s...

My daughter has a laugh that could make anyone laugh. But she has two other laughs. One is the laugh, which laughs when I crack a joke. She’s figured out that I often joke and as soon as my wife laughs or giggles, my little one joins in, as if to say, ‘I get it too’. The third type of the laugh is the fake laugh. It’s a loud shrill laugh. It could be for no reason. It could be to test your mood or reaction. It could also be an invitation to a game, urging you to pass a fake laugh back to her. I like to indulge her in the game, and the funniest thing is that it often turns into real laughter, at least for me. I am really surprised by this, because I’m a guy who hates the concept of ‘laughter therapy’ where people force themselves to laugh. Here’s my message for you little one. I would take a fake laugh any day, from a genuine person, over a genuine laugh, from a fake person.

Marriage is like a job. I am not belittling it. Love is the foundation, but lets face it, you can’t sleep on the foundation for long. You need to work hard to make the building of marriage, so it’s like a job. You need to understand, respect and take care of your partner. Your partner is your partner in this job. With marriage I knew to quite an extent what the job description is. I had analyzed married people. I came to know of this job opening on a website. (We met on a social network) The interview process lasted for a year; there was an internship and finally the job. My first job. However the job description of ‘Dad’ is not very well defined. It sounds like some additional responsibility, and I’ve always believed that’s great. I had been asked if I thought I would make a good dad. Why not? I can make funny sounds, funny faces. I can do funny dances. I can bounce. I know all the songs from the 80’s. I can balance three beers while I finish them one by one. What...

You know that every stranger who looks at her smiles. They can’t help it. The slightly more extrovert ones, are compelled to wave at her, make funny faces or talk to her. In the end, while waving bye-byes they invariably say something like, ‘She’s an angel’. Of course she is. She’s our angel. Our bundle of joy. She makes the world a brighter place. She’s the apple of our eyes. If she was a character of novel, however, the one thing you could not have said about her is that she’s a flat character. No.     At times our angel has a dark side. She throws tantrums. She shrieks. She throws food all over herself, the floor and us. She takes pleasure in doing what she knows we don’t want her to do. Pulling at a wire. Taking off her clip. Poking me in the eye. Of course we get all our excitement from our bundle of joy. We hate having a control over our emotions. Our emotions have become just as child-like as they can be. One minute wanting to tear our hair out. Th...

The digestive system of a child is a hard mystery to solve. At least that’s true for my daughter. If it was a software program, it’s one with a lot of bugs. Here’s what it should have been: 1.      Input food -> output poop 2.      Input garbage -> not allowed! Here’s what I observe: 1.      Input food -> output poop (expected result) 2.      Input food -> output puke (unexpected result) 3.      Input garbage (allowed) -> output poop (?) 4.      Input garbage (allowed) -> output puke (?) 5.      Input choking hazard -> software malfunction (needs to be checked manually by parents, keeping them constantly on edge) Parents get upset when the kid throws up, because we don’t want them to go through it, and we know it’s unpleasant. Parents get really upset when the kid throws up, because of all the love, sweat and hard work ...

As a parent you should have the ability to listen to all sorts of cries. There’s one particular cry, which my daughter specializes in. Its s short, loud and shrill cry. It lasts only for a second, but is repeated every three seconds. It’s her cry for attention.   Unattended, she can do this for hours. It requires nerves of some extremely tough alloy to withstand, without losing your cool. I am not sure exactly where I stand on the debate of how to deal with tantrums. I do preach to my wife that they need to be ignored; however I easily make and allow exceptions. The minute you give her attention, she’s her smiley self. What really impresses me is my daughter’s ability to penetrate my defenses. Just when I decide, ‘today is the day for discipline’ she will tilt her head and give me her best, dimpled smile. Game over. Daughter one. Father zero. She also manages to telepathically convince her mother to ask me to give up.   They know more about psychological war...

I sense that this blog may have left my wife with an unanswered question. The question being, that I love both of them, yet I chose to blog about my daughter. I owe her an answer. I could write about my relationship with my wife, but it would be mostly mushy which: 1.      I may not be too comfortable putting it on the web 2.      May not make for good reading, as I do expect to have followers This is mainly due to the fact that my relationship with her turned out to the way I imagined it to be. To make it sound less plain, she’s the woman of my dreams. There is no clash in that. Not the best stuff to write about. Man meets beautiful woman. Falls in love. She magically falls in love with said man. She’s perfect. They live happily. Done. Blog over. On the other hand, even though I love my daughter, it wasn’t the way I expected.   So while I enjoy every moment with her, it’s a lot less predictable. Sometimes it’s not that m...

I don’t remember when she started singing, but it feels like it was the day after she was born. It started with her mimicking one of us (parents) singing. Soon she learnt it was a ‘song’ and will now sing (if the mood is right) on demand, after hearing the magic word, ‘song’. The lyrics of her song are simple yet deeply moving, ‘ aaa aaaaaaa aaaa aaaaaaaa’. Sometimes she changes the order, just to change the tone of the song. When we gave her name, we knew it meant, ‘talent’, but we didn’t know that she’ll start preparing for whatever-country-we’re-in’s got talent from day one. Just like any other favorite song, most of the times I enjoy it, sometimes I don’t, and some times it’s all I want to hear. I wonder if she’d consider releasing a record anytime soon. I promise to add it to my playlist. You already have one fan sweetheart.

--> I quickly Googled a few sites on how many steps we take in a day. A conservative estimate says 3000. If we live 70 years, that’s 76.65 Million steps. Who cares? My daughter walked all the way from the lobby to the elevator. Kept standing in the elevator. Walked all the way from the elevator to house. (This after just a month of walking.) All the while, she was holding my finger.   I’d walk 76.65 Million steps to feel as proud as I did, again. Her motivation of course was to make the squeaky shoes squeak.

--> Peek-a-boo. I see you. I see numbers one and two. Fisher Price can get so annoying, so fast. She loves it. She can listen to it all day. But for you, it’s a necessary evil. It’s the toy that makes her eat her food. It’ll take a while before you get used to hearing yourself hum kiddy tunes on your way to work. Other interesting things for her: 1.      Plastic bags and wrappers (Makes you jump! Choking Hazard!) 2.      Cartons (Reminds you a certain credit card ad) 3.      Any particle of dirt, crumb of food, shoe accidently on the floor and in her reach (Makes you jump again!) 4.      Front loading washing machine in action (It helps when my wife sings ‘round and round’) 5.      Buttons (Jump if they’re not attached to something!) 6.      Hair clips (Boy, I’ve certainly become jumpy) 7.      In general I would say, i...

There was a time when I used to get excited making a burglar alarm out of an electronic set I bought. After marriage it was hooking the computer to the TV, to the high def. speakers. Now, it’s a cot from Ikea , a walker and the most recent one a high chair from Mother Care (Hmph! Father care’s as much). There you go sweetheart, this is what I’ve been preparing for. I am the guy who provides for you and builds things for you. I think men will always have the need to build and construct things. As long as who they are doing this for, evolves, there is no harm in gratifying the need.