Is this the terrible twos, a year early, or just the prelude ? Maya is already testing the perimeter of who she is and who we are, trying to make sense of the world. While she has always been quite clear in communicating her musical likes and dislikes. She’s now beginning to express her independent spirit in other areas.
Maya doesn’t usually put things into her mouth. But, this one rather large ball, she likes to lick. Living in an age where every toy seems just an FDA notice away from being declared toxic, Shanthala tries to dissuade her from licking it. Looking at Shanthala, Maya picks up the ball, and very deliberately sticks her tongue out as if to lick it, gauging Shanthala’s reaction. She also looks at me to see what my reaction is.
She holds court from her high chair while eating, dispensing of the toys we place on her tray, like some royalty might dispense justice. After playing with each toy for a while, she’d drop it on the floor. In the beginning, we’d pick the toy up, thinking she dropped it by accident, owing to her immature motor skills and put it back on the tray. But, she’d continue to drop it on the floor, again and again. When Shanthala gently admonished her to not drop it, telling her that she will not pick it up if she drops it, looking at Shanthala, Maya, again very deliberately drops the item on the floor. She doesn’t seem to mind if we don’t pick it up. Being told to not drop it seems reason enough to do it.
Maya has also stopped peeing on cue like she had been doing for the past eight months or so. When we take her to pee, she arches her back strongly, protesting loudly as if she has no pee. A minute or two later, she pees, either on us if we’re still holding her or into the diaper. A couple of times we have even had poop accidents, something that hasn’t happened since she was two months old. In elimination communication circles, this is called a potty pause. The beauty of definitions is that you know you’re not suffering alone. But, this feels more like a full stop than a pause. It’s been going on for over a month now. Yes, the literature says this can happen when a child is going through a growth spurt or a development stage, but does it add to the frustration of everything else that is going on with her. She also fights when we want to put on a diaper. I suspect all this has something to do with our interrupting whatever she’s doing to either get her to pee or change a wet diaper. Lying on your back or suspended midair over a toilet bowl are not as much fun as exploring the house.
Maya is a prolific crawler. She crawls everywhere, unafraid of our absence in a room. Every so often, she comes back to check on us and make sure we’re there. She doesn’t like being held in our arms much except in the morning when she wakes up. Her attitude seems to be, there is never enough time to do all the exploring. We have little in the house that can cause her grief and so we let her roam everywhere. Our babyproofing concluded when we closed the unused electical outlets and put away the CDs on the lowest racks and installed a gate at the top of the stairs.
Her tenth month has been the most difficult since the initial five or six weeks. She cries a little more, usually because we’re asking her to do something she doesn’t like or taking things away from her because they may not be safe. She has progressed from not noticing when we took an object away from her to actively looking for it to protesting vigorously when it’s taken. Developmental psychology literature says that along with this object permanence comes stranger anxiety. However, her stranger anxiety has morphed into being overly attached only to me, refusing to be held by anybody else if I’m around. She’s content to smile and high five anyone who’s pays her a little attention, but she won’t go to them. A few weeks back, a close friend who was visiting from India, stayed with us. It took him three days before she allowed him to hold her.
She and I play an elementary version of hide and seek. I hide someplace and call her name. She usually drops whatever it is that she’s doing and comes looking for me. However, she doesn’t yet know to look in multiple places. Using the sound as a guide, she goes to the one place in that direction where I typically hide. If she doesn’t find me there, she gets visibly upset and sits there, wondering what’s going on.
The nanny has said for a long time that Maya seems to understand the conversation, especially if it is about her. When I return home from work and ask Ginez how the day was, Maya watches her intently as she explains all the things Maya did. The other day, looking at a picture of Maya when she was six months old or so, Shanthala and I commented on how little hair she had. Looking at Maya, I laughed and said “Baldy”. Visibly agitated, she raised her babbling to a high pitch as if she was scolding or complaining. We pacified her that we were not making fun of her and she calmed down and went back to playing.
Hawaii affected her sleep schedule, we think. Even two or three weeks after returning, she continued to sleep much later at night, around 10 or 10:30 instead of the usual 8:30 or 9 PM. To this day, it’s almost 9:30 most nights before she’s asleep. On the plus side, her sleeping routine has become quite simple, at least with me. I sing three or four songs to her and she’s quite happy to fall asleep after that. I lie with her for about five or ten minutes, waiting for her to be completely asleep before I get up. I’m expanding my reportoire since she is tiring of the four or so songs that I used to sing till now. Mukesh’s “Kisi ki Muskurahaton” is probably her current favorite.
Maya has gone from a wonderful sleeper to a restless sleeper. She crawls all around the bed till she finds herself wedged against the wall and the pillow and falls asleep there. She doesn’t like having any blankets on her which worries us since it gets so cold at night now. She had excellent night time bladder control until she was eight months old. Now, she wakes up in the middle of the night wailing because her diaper is drenched. She falls asleep immediately after we put a fresh diaper, but unable to do the same always, we wake up exhausted. We sometimes mutter that four letter word “crib” and Maya together.
Her eating continues to be the only thing that’s unchanged. She stopped drinking formula about three or four weeks back, comfortably guzzling regular cow’s milk instead. She eats a lot more solids, chowing down just about everything. She even eats rice with whatever curry we’re eating, getting upset if we don’t let her taste a little of our meal. The only things she doesn’t seem to like are broccoli and beets. She continues to be Ms. Popeye when it comes to downing spinach.
And of course, the other thing that’s unchanged is that Maya still smiles so easily. Looking at her pictures all the way from her birth, I see a picture of her smiling even when she was just a few days old.
She’ll be a year old soon. I sometimes feel like it was only yesterday that she was born, only yesterday that Kitty was still with us. Kitty filled the void in her absence, and now Maya’s filling the void left by his absence.
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